And here is a series of essays famed SF author Spider Robinson wrote recently during an eight-month term as the first official writer-in-residence of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C. (warning: all are pdf files):
For some realistic, well-researched, tech-savvy near-future hard SF (i.e., featuring no fantasy elements and no inexplicable “black box” technologies such as FTL drives and transporter beams) about the early stages of human exploration and colonization of the Solar System, see the novels and short stories of Allen Steele and Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series.
A space elevator, OTOH, while it would not be practical for lifting even a significant fraction of the population into space, would cut the cost of climbing up the gravity well by orders of magnitude. And believe it or not, it’s already being developed by a corporation called the LiftPort Group. (If I had any money to invest . . .)
Don’t bet the farm. While it’s true that carbon nanotube structures exist with the requisite tensile strength to weight properties requried for a tether, nobody has or knows how to make them in usable lengths, and practical manufacture of these is at least a couple of decades into the future. There are many other significant problems as well. It’s not impossible that we’ll build a space elevator someday, but I wouldn’t bet on it being inside of a century.
Call me crazy, but given your output, I think you could say this in just about any thread, up to and including one about ancient Babylonian toenail-cutting rituals.
What makes you think that it’s possible to stop destroying our planet? The global population is expected to stabilize at around 9 billion people, and without significant advances in our technology, we’re going to wreak havoc on the planet when all of them (as they eventually will) achieve the same standard of living as a first world nation. Unless we manage to develop cheap fusion power and something similar to Star Trek-style replicators in the next fifty years or so, I don’t see us having a habitable planet past the dawn of the 22nd Century without cheap space travel.
From my perspective, asking what the tangible benefits of space exploration are is like asking what the tangible benefits of (fictional) literature are. There may well be some, by accident, but that’s not really why we do it. In terms of space exploration, I’d be all for it even if it didn’t make one whit of difference to our technological capabilities in any other area, even if it didn’t save anyone’s lives or make any processes here on Earth any more efficient. Not everything I find worth doing is worth doing solely as a means to such an end; for example, sometimes things are worth doing just because a lot of people would be happy to see them done, for whatever reason. It may be an odd position to take, but I am immensely glad that man walked on the moon (just to touch on the most prominent aspect of the short history of space exploration), even if it had no tangible benefits (according to a particular arbitrary scheme of what counts as a tangible benefit), simply because it was so fucking cool, and that in itself, to me, can be justification enough.
Of course, the OP never said otherwise; he could’ve just been curious as to whether there were any “tangible benefits”, without there being any judgement attached.
I saw a show on The Science Channel last night. Now, I tend to take such offerings from TSC, Discovery, The History Channel, et al., with a grain of salt. They tend to be a little lazy when it comes to details (repeating already de-bunked word origins, using footage of one thing when talking about another, misidentification of hardware, etc.), and their speculations can be pretty far out. So keeping that in mind this show talked about Helium-3, which is rare on Earth but thought to be plentiful on the Moon. One person said that if there was a mountain of gold bars sitting on the Moon we couldn’t afford to bring them back. But He-3 costs (he said) billions of dollers per [unit], and that it would be worth bringing it back. If we could bring it back, we might finally get fusion reactors online. Given the ‘educational’ channels’ penchant for hyperbole, this might just be pie-in-the-sky thinking. But if it actually came to pass it would be a tangible benefit.
Would mining the moon for He-3 be worth it? Aside from the transportation cost, there would still be the expense of extracting it (a manned mining camp?) out of millions of tons of lunar regolith. He-3 can be used for fusion, but wouldn’t terrestrial fusion reactors use tritium bred from lithium (which isn’t that rare)? Wouldn’t the fusion reactors themselves provide the neutrons to breed the tritium in the first place? Maybe if lunar He-3 offered a significant savings, say half the overall cost of using terrestrial fuel instead, it would be worth it, especially as economy of scale and maturing of technology lowered the transportation cost. But would it be that economical?
On the Space Shuttle, they manufacture polystyrene latex microspheres. These are tiny spheres made of polystyrene, floating in water with some surfactant, at a concentration like 0.3% to 3%. They are remarkably uniform in size, within a batch. They are used to calibrate things like microscopes and to challenge laboratory filter media to characterize them.
Microspheres have long been made for this purpose on earth, with sizes of maybe 20 nm to 50 um. However, in Earth’s gravity field, making larger microspheres doesn’t work. Making them on the Space Shuttle allows sizes as big as a few hundred um, IIRC.
I think this is probably a $10,000 a year industry, worldwide. Perhaps $100,000 or so. Not sure. If it is profitable enough, I could see it paying for 0.0001 space shuttle launches. I might have the numbers a little off, but I’m not joking.
>…asking what the tangible benefits of space exploration are is like asking what the tangible benefits of (fictional) literature are…
Wait, haven’t we heard that the tangible benefits more than pay for the space program?
I think the purpose of the manned space program is to create enthusiasm for the manned space program, and the purpose of the space shuttle is to serve the space station, and the purpose of the space station is to need the shuttle.
I also think the unmanned space program is enormously worthwhile because of the understanding it is helping us build about physics, earth science, geology, and astronomy. I think these things directly or indirectly make life better.
Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral in 1941. NASA popularly gets credit for it for no apparent reason.
I agree 100% with Brainwreck. There seems to be very little evidence that we wouldn’t have these techologies if there’d been no space program, because space was just the “location of their invention”, not a place of such unique conditions that they couldn’t have been created elsewhere. Samuel Morey invented an internal combustion engine in NH - but he could have created it anywhere, couldn’t he?
Are there people willing to claim that there are many things totted out by NASA that couldn’t have been created on earth? If not, we’re merely left with a far shorter list of things invented explicitly for the space program, like building materials for the shuttles.
Your argument seems to rest on the assumption that interplanetary colonization is more feasible than not destroying our own planet. We have nowhere near the lift potential it would take to move any meaningful amount of the population off-planet. We haven’t even proven we can manage earth’s ecosystem, much less one sealed in a bubble in deep space. Somehow this just seems like the suburban mentality of thinking we can avoid problems indefinitely by moving a little further away from them instead of trying to tackle them head-on.
Controlled nuclear fusion is still decades away from viability, and this is assuming the use of D-T fusion with it’s relatively modest triple product requirement. While D-[sup]3[/sup]He and [sup]3[/sup]He-[sup]3[/sup]He reactions are desirable owing to their aneutronic product (thus reducing radiation damage and making it easier to realize the yield) the Lawson criterion for these reactions is much higher, and unless someone comes through with a major breakthrough in plasma dynamics, it’ll be much longer before [sup]3[/sup]He-based fusion is a reality; even when it is, it’s probably easier to absorb it from the solar wind or manufacture it artificially from tritium decay. Mining [sup]3[/sup]He from the Moon is a pretty weak justification for a space program or lunar colony.
Managing the climate in a small bubble is a lot easier than trying to manage the climate on an entire planet (a lot fewer variables in the bubble). And who said anything about lifting a signifcant portion of the Earth’s population off the planet? Not me.
I also fail to see how people think that we can someday have magic technology that enables us to eliminate all pollution, or at least somehow develop technology that allows us to have a larger population at first world living standards while somehow producing significantly less pollution than we do now, without humans expanding into space.