Not enough individual humans, no, but enough humanity. Right now, we have all of our eggs in one basket. When the inevitable catastrophe occurs here on Earth we’ll lose everything, all of our lives, our history, our culture, our achievements. Unlike some people, I believe these things are worth preserving.
Remeber what the NASA copywriters said: “… one giant leap for Mankind.” Not any individual men, or women, or nation of men and women. Mankind as a species.
I suspect that the sort of politicians who say ‘let’s save the money by not going into space’ are thinking purely of their election fund.
How much money just got spent in the Iowa primary?
How long did it take to spend?
What benefit did it bring?
Exactly. If species and cultural survival isn’t a good enough reason, what is ?
That attitude amounts to a forbidding of space or any other kind of exploration for all time. Since there will never, ever be an end to problems.
That’s because they had something to expand into. All they had to do was kill other people to secure it. On Mars, you can’t just pick up from Alpha Base and move to the next big crater where farmland, forests, and an atmosphere await you. You can’t just massacre the Martians and take their land.
Speaking of which, nobody seems to be considering that wherever you take humans, you’re taking human nature. It’s bad enough on earth when jealousy, rage, incompetence, carelessness, and greed affect us. But on a hostile planet or inside a cramped spaceship to the stars, God only knows what will set people off. One suicidal person committing sabotage will end it all for everyone.
Oh, but they’ll all be given psychological tests and stuff! Well, even setting aside that psychology is a pseudoscience at best, people can and do change. Every day, they slip by psychological tests only to explode months or years later when life takes its toll. It is in this kind of scenario where the saying, “No matter where you go, there you are” applies.
If you want to change the fate of humanity, you must first change human nature.
Same thing happens when a random rock the size of a golf ball smashes into your space craft at more than 25 times the speed of a bullet.
I’ve heard of this new drug called G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate. It’s been showing promising results.
Which is why we should build stronger spacecraft, and lots of them. Spacecraft technology is now in its infancy - we’re trying to cross the Atlantic in outrigger canoes. We can do better, but to do that we have to work at it. Every time we put a person in space it should be in a better spacecraft, and every time a vessel crashes, we learn how to avoid the next mistake. I don’t care how many astronauts die in experimental spacecraft; We won’t lack new volunteers.
When you have your magical craft, one or more of the “new volunteers” might share your attitude about other astronauts. Good luck.
Allow me to correct myself - I *do * care, obviously. However, I don’t think that fear of losing lives should hold us back. If there were ever anything worth sacrifice, then space travel is it.
That’s why you build two. Or fifty, or a thousand.
I get really tired of the “It’s risky and people could get killed!” argument. Yes, space is a dangerous place, and people can get killed. But how many people died building the railroads? How many died when steamships were in their infancy, and had a nasty tendency to explode? How many test pilots died in plane-crashes to develop the aircraft we have now? Life is about risk! You don’t get progress without risk. Yes, of course, it hurts when brave men and women die. But if they knew the risk and were willing, who are we to say they shouldn’t have the opportunity? Honestly, if they’d put me on a ship to Mars tomorrow, and said “We know , statistically, you’ve only got a 10% chance of getting there alive,” I’d have my bags packed and be on the launchpad by noon today.
Why? Because there’s this human need to explore. It’s not about technological spinoffs, or “eggs in one basket” (although I completely agree with that one, Alessan ) so much as it is human nature. Ever since the first hominid in Africa decided to see what was on the other side of the hill, we’ve had a need to go further, just to see what’s there. And where would humanity be today, if that tribe of hominids had decided to just stay in their valley and never explore?
And, finally, about the money…
I just checked some figures from the US Government 2007 budget. NASA got $16.8 billion. That sounds like a lot of money! By comparison, the 2007 Farm Bill got $286 billion. The NASA allotment is a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Ad astra per aspera!!
You know if the proponents of the destiny of human kind to move beyond the cradle of the old home planet were a bit more up front about what that meant, it would be a more honest, but probably less popular issue. It might well be the destiny of human kind to send a small elite sample of its members beyond the cradle of the old home planet. But that is not the tone of the rhetoric we hear.
Robert Heinlein knew it well. For all his pseudo egalitarian cheer leading, Heinlein was an elitist, who fervently believed the bulk of humanity would be left behind, and little missed by the elite that traveled into his vast new frontier. I am not of that elite. So, I want to hear about the cost, and the benefit in honest terms, on a human lifetime scale.
I have no specific argument against a great vision of human destiny beyond the stars. Who sells the tickets? How much is steerage for a family of five? Countering my argument that it might cost too much, and benefit too few by pointing out that we don’t solve our problems here on earth now is . . . well, stupid. We could do either. We probably won’t do either. We won’t eliminate the diseases of poverty because we lack the will to do so. Same, same for the trip Mars, except as a political exercise having nothing to do with science, or destiny, or the future of the race of Man.
The difference is that we already know all the science, and medicine, and engineering we need to raise the intelligence of the race by five percent (at the bottom) and eliminate trillions in predictable health costs, and on and on. All we lack is the desire to do so. Heaven can wait. The hundred million who are going to die because we don’t feel like doing anything about it are not to blame for the hold on the countdown for the Mars Mission.
Tris
Fair enough. What, then, are you sacrificing for it? Your life?
With your handy replicators, I presume.
Volunteers, of course. What makes you think there’d be a shortage ?
No, these days we have things called “factories”. They build stuff.
What should we spend it on?
More jails?
More Drug War Command Posts?
BTW–kudos for those who recognize the source.
Those problems have continued to exist, & often grow, usually in irregular spurts.
But spaceflight offers new opportunities, forces us to develop new technologies.
Man only builds something new when the old is no longer adequate. And then does as little as possible. But the challenges of space are so demanding, that huge steps, not small ones, are required, just to survive there.
And huge tech steps are a very good thing indeed.
I cannot agree. You only have to look at the history of aeroplanes to see that while at the start, it was indeed only for the elites, these days flying is very common and being a pilot is within the grasp of many. And right now, those we send up there need to be our brightest and best, so that humanity can learn the most.
Some day, spaceflight will become routine. Some day, spaceflight will become cheap, but we’ve got to do the preparatory work first.
Do you think they’ll go away just because people locate themselves somewhere else? Do you honestly believe that jails and wars on drugs will no longer be necessary on Mars or wherever? I mean, talk about the problem of evil — what do you do about man’s?
This is also basically what I think. My belief has always been that part of the NASA budgetary purpose was to keep a vibrant aerospace industry – “corporate welfare” is the charged term but there were military/prestige/scientific reasons to preserve the capability. This provided jobs and a voting constituency in Congress to continue NASA funding.
(& I acknowledge that there are also those, like many of us on the board & in this thread, who would fund NASA because we believe in it ideologically but that can be a harder sell and not as much to the “Why not spend the money here” OP).
So, is NASA sucking up vital scientific dollars that would be spent elsewhere? Is the opportunity cost of funding NASA Manned Space flight not funding some other project. (Usually the example used is schools – sometimes it is the poor)
If (to PerditaX’s point) NASA’s $16B budget were halved (About 52% is spent on the Shuttle and ISS – roughly what the Moon-Mars Initiative is expected to eat) and the 42% left were to focus was on LEO earth observation and other weather satellites, Hubble, research, education and 2ish probes a decade to other planets – would the money “saved” be poured into hard science or be spent on preventing STDs or Teen baby mommas or moving folks out of poverty? Or (my cards on the table what I think) would the money not be spent at all and instead of a ~$314 billion dollar yearly deficit we’d have a ~$306 billion dollar one.
I think really what we have when this argument is raised can be best conceptualized as a choice of doing Moon-Mars-Manned or doing nothing with that money just because of the constituencies and politics involved in Congressional appropriations.
How will you imbue them with the saintly qualities necessary for people to get along and share without jealousy, anger, or avarice? Even if they’re all Quakers, there is bound to arise at least one Nixon.
Politics follows man everywhere he goes. It will follow him to Mars as well, where a whole new oppression will emerge. I can understand what you might think man needs to run from, but what you don’t seem to understand is what he is running toward. Same thing, different planet.
I won’t. Where they lead, the rest of us, with all our faults, will follow.
I am not sure you understood my post, as I think we would be in basic agreement.
I was saying politics on earth (in the U.S.) are really why we fund NASA and if you pull that funding the political powers and forces that be, that have specific reasons to spend that money, would not lobby to spend it elsewhere.
In other words Lockheed, the Planetary Society and the retired astronauts association would not say "Oh Well if you aren’t going to fund a trip to Mars then lets spend that money on fighting river sickness, AIDS in Africa and college scholarships". I think others political forces that WOULD like to use the money on this way would find it as elusive as the peace dividend …
I am not saying anything about Man escaping politics on Mars or elsewhere