I ran out of characters for the title haha.
Here we go again. The politicians who think we are still in the era of Mayflower, Lewis and Clark and Conestoga Wagons. Sure, launching things into space will have the side effect of advancing technology. But, while you are spending billions and billions of dollars, you might as well do something valuable. Manned expeditions to Mars, and back to the Moon are tremendously risky and expensive… and what is the value?
In the long run? The preservation of the human species after runaway climate change renders the Earth uninhabitable.
If a Trump administration is actually serious about interplanetary colonization, then I’m willing to support them on that.
The take from our own doper The Bad Astronomer:
The thing on his head wants to go home and has started taking greater control.
sigh
This ‘plan’ nothing to do with interplanetary colonization, and everything to do with playing bait-and-switch with defunding the very Earth surveillance programs that have given incontrovertible evidence over the last couple of decades that anthropomorphic climate change (e.g. global warming, or as it should more properly be described, radical alteration of global climate and ocean circulation systems) is real and significant. Climatologists are still debating the degree to which models can predict the future and how dramatic of a rise in global temperature could affect human civilization (covering the gamut of “hundreds of millions of people impacted” to “billions of people displaced and suffering from famine” to “extinction level event for 90% or more of all megafauna”). Trump has not only demonstrated his deliberate blindness to the issue by his own words but by assigning Myron Ebell to his EPA transition team and likely EPA Administrator. Ebell is a professional climate change denier despite the fact that he has no education or experience in climate science whatsoever, and in fact came to prominence lobbying for tobacco companies on the argument that the scientifically demonstrated harms of tobacco use was false. He’s basically a toady for the fossil fuel industry, and he looks like an actual toad. He’s basically who Steven Spielberg would cast as the henchman in an ill-advised Indiana Jones sequel in which Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. is uncovering archeological evidence about a Nazi-developed climate bomb.
As far evacuating even a tiny fraction of the population of the planet in the face of climate change, it is a ridiculous concept. So far, we’ve been able to keep up to a maximum of six people alive in a US$150B “tin can” orbiting within the Earth’s protective magnetosphere for up to a year and a fraction at a time with regular resupply at an amortized cost of millions of dollars per astronaut-day. We have zero experience in sending people even beyond Earth orbit, much less in any fashion that could be described as sustainable, and while Mars (and possibly Earth’s Moon) are the only solid bodies that an outpost could feasibly be established upon (the Galilean moons of Jupiter are bathed in lethal radiation, and Titan is frigidly cold), actually delivering large payloads to Mars surface is an unresolved challenge, notwithstanding the problem of growing food in the nitrate-poor, perchlorate-contaminated soil of the Martian regolith, or dealing with the physiological consequences of operating in a gravity field that is one third that of Earth.
If we’re going to support a significant population off of Earth, it would make far more sense to build large scale solar-orbiting habitats which could simulate Earth-like conditions using in-situ resource extraction from near Earth asteroids, and the timeframe for being able to do that is not consonant with avoiding global ecological collapse of the worst-case scenarios of climate change. And to do so, we would need exactly the kind of automation that is used to support uncrewed exploration of the Solar System. This is a shaggy dog story, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Stranger
There is no realistic amount of climate change that would make Mars more habitable than Earth. Mars is a total dump. The only appeal that it has is it is the least hideous, deadly extraterrestrial dump we are stuck with in this solar system.
Or, as I am fond of pointing out, if we need a place to send people if the rest of the world gets too warm, we do have an entire continent we’re not using, one substantially larger than the United States.
Antarctica isn’t great… but it’s a shitload better than Mars. It has oxygen, water, and gravity suitable to human beings, and is approximately one million times cheaper to get to.
Why people babble about going to Mars I have no idea. It’s insane.
Especially if you split the cab fare
Great, the people who screwed up the rest of the planet want to screw up Antarctica too.
Well, little kids don’t grow up dreaming about Antarctica, for one thing. Nevermind the international treaties protecting it.
The moon and Mars might be fun places to visit, but who wants to give birth to some mutant blob baby in 1/3 gravity?
Rotating orbiting colonies is the way to go.
Sending people around the inner solar system in tin cans does promote science, and even if you argue that it’s a waste of resources, at least it’s not a destructive waste of resources like the military is. If Trump were merely proposing that we do more of that, I would have no objection whatsoever.
The problem isn’t in what he’s pushing in; it’s in what he’s pulling out. Climate study also promotes science, and to a far greater degree than does manned exploration. There are very real, physical, tangible reasons why it’s important, measured in dollar signs followed by very large numbers. Any competent businessman would look at those numbers and conclude that climate science was a very high priority indeed. Unfortunately, we don’t have a competent businessman: We have Trump.
It’s almost the right idea except for swapping Trump and NASA in the sentence.
Could you elaborate on these “very real, physical, tangible reasons why it’s important” and their economic impact? I imagine there are many thousands of competent businessmen whose businesses aren’t going to be substantially affected by climate change in their tenures or even lifetimes.
We need to colonize other planets, so that after the Earth is rendered uninhabitable, we’ll have… another uninhabitable planet to live on? Even in the worst imaginable consequences of global warming - where we’ve so poisoned the atmosphere that it’s unlivable - how does it make more sense to go to airless Mars to make air-tight buildings to live in, versus building and living in them here on poisoned Earth?
The United States Department of Defense–no hotbed of bubblized liberal self-flagellation–maintains The Center for Climate and Security a a non-partisan security and foreign policy institute studying the foreign policy and security aspects relating to climate model predictions, and evaluting the continuing validation and accuracy of those climate models. Over a year ago it issued a report in response to Congressional request entitled “National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate” detailing the implications of even the moderate predictions of climate change models. It introduces the topic as quoted below:
DoD recognizes the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally. The National Security Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.1 These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.
While the focus of the paper is on military and humanitarian operations it is easy to see how the predictions will impact businesses as well, from the flooding or closure of shipping ports to legal and military battles over resources of which scarcity will be exacerbated by climate change. And climate change predictions are no longer something that will just affect the world somewhere down the road; even conservative estimates which assume curtailing CO[SUB]2[/SUB] emissions still give a 1℃ increase in average global temperature by 2040, and a 1.5℃ increase by 2060 assuming that there is no widespread effort at mitigation. This may sound like a trivial amount until you start looking at the actual climate impacts.
Now, you’re free to disclaim the results as bias and conspiracy by wacky liberal climatologists, and make noises about how all these scientists used to talk about “global cooling” (they didn’t), but frankly that position is not based on any kind of evidence or informed speculation. It is purely an ideologically based belief system that change is bad and scientists are just making it all up for their own ends.
Stranger
Conservatively, it is estimated that for every dollar spent on NASA, 7 dollars is added to the US economy. See cites below.
Doubticus - I’m not against NASA spending money, but how they spend it.
As well, a “moonshot” in cancer research or fusion energy can add to the economy and if they ever pull it off it’s a game changer. A moonshot by NASA will add nothing to science or real economic benefits.
10 billion spent every year for 10 years on fusion would go into materials, engineers and basic science.
10 billion spend every year for 10 years on space infrastructure would go into materials, engineers and basic science.
How are they different over the span of, say, 20 years?
The title of this thread is a little misleading, since Trump hasn’t said anything himself, and a lot of the efforts to stifle climate research or change NASA funding go back to 2015 and Ted Cruz.
Anyway, as to the debate… something as significant as climate change needs to be studied, no matter what side of the politics you’re on. Even if you believe it’s just a massive scientific conspiracy, it makes no sense to stop the research. You’re not going to uncover that conspiracy without evidence, are you?
As for going to Mars, I do think a lot of useful technology could come out of that, but I’m not convinced the expedition itself would be particularly useful. A team of real people could do science that today’s robots couldn’t, but I suspect that improvements in robotics will happen a lot faster than improvements in long-distance spaceflight. We have to solve all kinds of basic problems to get people there safely.
Now… all of those basic problems are important and useful questions. Better propulsion. Radiation shielding. Radiation treatments. Food storage, growing, recycling. All of these are useful projects. If it helps to think of them as serving a manned mission to Mars, that’s not a bad PR ploy, but the manned mission itself won’t be as useful as all the stuff that comes with it. Again, I think that we’ll have human-like robots on Mars long before we can feasibly/safely put actual humans on Mars.
It depends on the nature of the spending and what tangible benefits come from it. Although space advocates tout a long line of “spinoff” products from the US space program from miniaturized medical devices to more robust materials, the three biggest industries derived from space exploration are telecommunications satellites, earth surveillance systems, and the Global Positioning System, of which NASA only had the lead in the first, and GPS is a strictly Department of Defense program to which NASA is a customer. Most of the smaller materials and equipment actually developed by NASA rather than adopted from existing products has limited use in ground applications (though it has definitely fed into commercial space including small satellite systems which may become a vastly industry onto itself if it can continue to grow and achieve a critical mass of capability). The evidential value of investing in science and research is that it keeps a base of people with technical knowledge and ability employed who are able to apply that experience to critical defense or innovative commercial projects, and also provides employment in a firmly middle class salary range.
If it lead to a feasible path for commercial power production, investing in nuclear fusion research is definitely the better investment insofar as providing both a source of nearly unlimited energy and also a path to near zero carbon emissions, which is more pressing than the longer term goals of space exploration and exploitation. However, in terms of possible benefit and risk mitigation, both are important and necessary in the appropriate contexts. For space exploration, establishing an infrastructure which supports future exploration and advancing surveillance methods to predict hazards such as space weather and potentially hazardous objects will provide long term benefit. Rushing to send crewed missions to Mars and elsewhere just 'cause it sounds cool offers very little in long-term benefit, especially if those programs are done without the infrastructure and prerequisite development to ensure a good chance of success or recovery from failure.
Stranger
To put it in a less intelligent way, imagine how our lives would be different if we launched, say, 500 satellites of various kinds - a slew more GPS satellites, more spy satellites, more satellites to analyze scientific phenomena.
Now imagine if we had huge amounts of power that was produced in a very, very clean manner.
I don’t know about you, but I can immediately grasp the world-changing of the second proposition. The benefits of the second are very likely incremental, with some chance of a big breakthrough… though I’m not sure if it is fusion-level innovation.