Yeah, I know - my post (103) was totally incoherent.
But to make it simple:
Doing absolutely zip solves our population problem just as effectively as sinking a ton of money into space travel does. Only without spending a ton of money.
FWIW, I don’t feel that humanity should stay on earth forever. I just don’t see a lot of hurry in colonizing the planets, and many reasons to wait a few decades. It makes sense to me that by the latter part of this century, our technology will have improved to the point where it’ll be worth sending human beings to the moon and Mars. Even if all we have by 2057 or 2087 are fifty or eighty years of incremental improvements without any breakthroughs, it’ll still be comparatively a lot cheaper and easier to leave the planet then than now. Plus by then we’ll have sent generations of increasingly advanced unmanned probes to the moon, Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system, and will have a much better idea of what the potential mineral wealth of those worlds is.
Does ANYONE in this thread object to privately-financed space travel? Unless you can produce that person, this is a strawman.
AFAIAC, people can waste their own money however they please. It’s only when the manned-space-travel aficionados want my tax dollars to finance their expensive hobby-horse that I object.
Well, I didn’t get the analogy either…but then, I’m missing your point as well. Are there high paying jobs in space now? Well, I suppose astronauts make a decent wage, yeah. But not a lot of opportunity in space…yet. As for infrastructure, again, not much there…yet. But then, wasn’t much infrastructure in the new world when the Euro’s burst on the scene either. Yet they managed to muddle through with rather primitive technology. I imagine we will as well.
Um…ok. The Europeans wanted land and resources…that’s pretty much why they went to America in the first place. Oh, I suppose there was a religious element too…but really they just wanted land and resources.
Why exactly do you think the Europeans went to America? It certainly wasn’t to get rid of excess population if that’s what you are driving at. I guess I’m missing your point. Is it that we want to go to space for exploration, science and resources…or something?
I guess I’m not following all those folks who are just convinced we will never colonize other worlds (or space). I just don’t see how anyone can think that this will be the case 100, 200, a thousand years from now. I can certainly see the argument that we won’t be colonizing Mars tomorrow or next year…but ever? Unless our entire civilization collapses I think it’s just a matter of time. I also don’t see where people get the idea that everything in space is so expensive, so difficult…based simply on technology today (and in some cases really basing it on technology from decades ago). Today the US and other countries (like China but also the Europeans and Japanese among others) are all working on ways to get to space cheaper, to protect the crews from the various dangers of space, etc. The technology might not (or might) be ready for prime time…but it’s really only a matter of time before they are. There are vast resources in space…sometime, someone is going to figure out how to economically exploit them.
There is, well, a hell of a lot of space in space…and no environment to protect. Hell, CO2 emissions would be a GOOD thing on Mars, say. In orbital factories or manufacturing centers you don’t have to worry about green house gases…and you have a pretty much unlimited supply of resources out there to feed the factories. Shipping would be fairly easy…just drop it in the gravity well and figure out how to do so to get it right to the customers (it’s an engineering problem). Very little energy needed, as opposed to our massive logistics infrastructure today.
I disagree: it all depends upon the level of comfort required. An extra-solar colony is likely going to have to revert to a mid-second millenium standard of living, at least to start with. Simply through lack of people and resources.
It is also illuminating to examine the success of colonization in our own past. Take the UK-there was a major idea in the 1920’s for english people to colonize East Africa (the highlands of Kenya). Very few immigrated there, and fewer stayed. So despite the fact that England is densly populated, people like to live there. Or take Uganda-far from attracting colonists, it exports people. The moral-there are plent of good places to live on earth-its just shitty governments that make places bad. What would LA be like under Mexican rule? probably a dirtier, bigger version of Tiajuana. Would it be a desireable place to live? probably not.And anyone who thinks mining copper on Mars makes sense should look at the energy expended to ship copper to the earth. We’d be better off extracting it from seawater.
I don’t object to tax dollars spent on really cool stunts, but I think I’m entitled to evaluate the coolness/$ ratio, and object if the ratio isn’t right.
Levdrakon, you’re kind of all over the map. Are you proposing that NASA go into the business of ferrying space tourists into orbit and back for a profit? Or are you proposing that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a manned mission to Mars? Or tens of billions on a return to the Moon?
As for space tourism, I agree space tourism is cool, and if Richard Branson and Burt Rutan can make it work, I’ll spray my shorts. But we shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to send tourists to space, let the tourists pay for that themselves and more power to them.
Now, what should NASA be doing with our tax dollars? Research. Honestly, they should be doing research. Planetary science. Y’know, like Spirit and Opportunity, Cassini and Huyguens, the HST. Not stunts like sending a few more guys to the Moon for a day and a half. I WANT to go back to the Moon, but if the reason to go to the Moon is that it’s cool to go to the Moon, what do you do once you’ve gone? You’ve climbed Mt. Everest, now you climb back down and go on with your life. You’re not going to live up there, are you? Or maybe you are…so how are you planning to do that? You can’t handwave away the objections by mumbling about Columbus and penny-pinchers and the small-minded. I mean, if you want the rest of us to pay for it you can’t. If you have a plan on how to pay for it yourself, then our small-minded pettiness doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, you’ll do it anyway, and the rest of us will have to admit we were wrong.
Mexicans come to the US for practical economic reasons: because they are very likely to earn more money here than they do at home.
No impoverished Mexican farmer ever said, “Wow, it will cost me vast sums of money to move to the US and a huge expenditure of resources by my fellow Mexicans to keep me there, and it would just be a huge money-waster for the foreseeable future, but maybe some time in the distant future we’ll figure out some way that my being in the US would be economically profitable, and that’s reason enough for me! El Norte, here I come!”
That kind of far-fetched wishful thinking is not what we mean when we speak of having valid “economic reasons” to do something.
As other posters have patiently explained to you, there is no realistic way that living “vacuum-side” is ever going to be less expensive for human beings than living “dirt-side”. No matter what happens with terrestrial real-estate prices and environmental regulation, living on earth (which comes pre-supplied with all the stuff like air, water, dirt, biomass, etc., that we need to keep us alive) is not going to be as expensive as living in some hermetically sealed tin can in an environment that provides no air, water, dirt, biomass, etc.
As for the orbiting solar energy satellites, if it turns out that it would be advantageous for us to have them (and feasible for us to design and manufacture them on the scale we’d need), we could just put them up in orbit the way we now do with other kinds of satellites, and service them as needed with maintenance missions from earth. There would be no need for us to go to the massive extra expense and trouble of maintaining hermetically sealed tin cans full of colonists in orbit, just so we could beam down solar energy from satellites.
Not even. Just a poorly-reasoned fantasy.
Like I said, I’ve got no quarrel with anyone who wants to emigrate to space “because it’s there”, or because they think it would be fun or exciting. I’d even chip in the loose change from my sofa cushions as a contribution to support that person’s dream of offworld life, just because I like to see enthusiasm and enterprise and dreams coming true.
But if somebody wants to convince me that it would be actually advantageous in any practical sense for me or for my species to pursue extraterrestrial colonization—well, they’re going to have to come up with a lot better arguments than have been presented here if they want to be taken seriously. So far, the “pragmatic” pro-colonization arguments are strictly PALATR material.
A wise decision. Bye.
And not much else, barring some chunks of mineral here and there. That’s the problem.
Nobody here is saying that humans will never go to space, or even that we’ll never develop any colonies or business ventures off-earth. We’re just pointing out that it is never going to be more cost-effective to travel millions of miles to non-life-sustaining environments to fetch or process raw materials than to use the resources right here in the comfort of our own home planet, where we can, you know, breathe and stuff. Hell, you could sequester the CO2 output from thousands of terrestrial factories for what it would cost to run one manned manufacturing mission to Mars.
We’re not saying “Never gonna happen”. We’re saying “No practical reason to try to make it happen”. If you want to go just because you feel like it, or because you’re convinced that there are hitherto undreamed-of commercial opportunities out there, more power to you and bon voyage.
Exactly. Now, is there land and resources in space? Empty vacuum is not “land.” “Land” means place where we can live, grow crops, etc. As for other resources, is there any in space that is easier to harvest than on earth?
Heh. Funny thing, all that gold that Columbus and Cortez and Pizzaro sent back to Spain wasn’t dug up by the Conquistadores. The gold mining infrastructure was actually already in place. Set up by the people who already lived here.
And the Pilgrims would have starved to death if they hadn’t found a buried storehouse of maize, and if they hadn’t set up their village on the site of an abandoned Indian village, that had been depopulated by disease.
Now, eventually the Spanish took over the management of the gold mines, but they still worked them with slave labor from the Indians. And eventually the Europeans started mining gold and silver themselves. But the original method of extracting gold was to point your muskets at the Indians and order them to hand over the gold that was extracted by Indian labor and Indian capital and Indian infrastructure.
Well…they are doing all that stuff. How’s it working out so far?
Correct me if I’m wrong here but I thought NASA’s plans for the moon included research and development for a new transfer vehicle (filling your ‘research’ requirement) as well as plans for a permanent base on the moon…not for another flags and foot prints mission.
I seriously think there is a hell of a lot we can still learn from the moon…including how to create a permanent human habitat there. It is a great stepping stone for us…really a perfect one. I don’t get this attitude that we know all about it because we’ve been there a half a dozen odd times for a couple of days…or that there is nothing left to learn for us there. I think one of the few things Bush has done right in 7 years is his vision for the future of the US in space…starting with looking at going back to the moon as a first step. I can’t think of a better way for us to squander our money than on such a program…and I can think of a hell of a lot worse ways we ARE squandering a hell of a lot more money than we are putting into NASA’s coffers each year.
-XT
What are you talking about? I’ve NEVER said space colonies have to solve overpopulation or cure global warming. And the last three things you mention are all THE SAME POINT, which I’ve been making over and over again until I’m blue in the face:
There is no point in creating a space colony unless it is viable in the long term. Long term viability means that it’s either truely self-sufficient, or can pay for it’s existence through trade with Earth.
Go back and read what I’ve written in this thread. Here’s what I wrote yesterday afternoon:
And here’s what I wrote an hour ago:
It’s the exact same frickin’ point! Which you keep ignoring! :rolleyes:
Land is land. It depends on what you are planning to use it for. I doubt we will go to space to set up a landed aristocracy or have our peasants grow food. You know, we don’t even NEED ‘land’ to grow food these days, right? Not if we are talking about small populations (which is what I mean by ‘colonise other worlds’).
Ah…so what you are getting at is that if there are no hapless Indians for us to wipe out and exploit there is no reason to go there? Ok…what about the Vikings in Greenland? Afaik they had little or no interaction with the natives. Of course, eventually they died out…and perhaps that will happen to us as well. Though we probably won’t be going in wooden ships either…
Well, that’s an excellent point. We should definitely make sure our Euro buddies aren’t involved in the logistics for any of our planned extra-terrestrial colonies.
I think I read something about how logistics has come a long way since the days of European colonization though. It was in all the papers.
Well, again, you make a good point. As there are no hapless Indians or natives to slaughter in space the Spanish probably wouldn’t be interested in a joint venture with the US to go there. C’est la vie…I’m sure someone else will be interested.
Awesome? No seriously, Spirit/Opportunity, Voyager, Viking, HST, Cassini and such have been awesome. And as our computers and materials get better these missions have a greater and greater cool/$ ratio. These are great basic science missions, like, y’know, “What’s Mars like?” that colonists on Mars might like to know the answer to before they’re dumped there.
I’m so in favor of basic planetary science on the Moon and Mars. This is NASA’s mission, and I’m in favor of it 100%. Basic science, science just to find out what the hell our solar system is made of, what it’s like and why and how.
Let’s face facts. The first manned NASA missions were stunts. Of course, the real message of Sputnik was that the Soviet Union could now build ICBMs. A rocket that can reach orbit can drop a nuke anywhere on the globe. Manned space travel is a lot more expensive and a lot more dangerous than we were led to believe back in the 60s, and it hasn’t gotten any cheaper and only a bit safer since. The 50s vision of Moon colonies and nuclear rockets and food in pill form by 2001 wasn’t realistic. Yeah, we went from the Wright flyer to the Sopwith Camel to the B-17 to the 747 to the Apollo moon shot in 70 years. That doesn’t mean if we’d have kept pouring money into the manned space program that we’d have prosperous Moon colonies by now. That doesn’t mean that going from the Apollo moon shot to a Moon colony in 70 years is realistic.
Build me a space elevator and a commercial fusion reactor and keep a team of Bionauts sealed in a can for 5 years and then we can talk about a Moon base. Starting now when we don’t even have the basic building blocks of a Moon base is insanity. And the building blocks aren’t “send more people into space”. Sending more people into space today doesn’t help that Moon base happen, it retards it.
My point is, America was colonized because it already had an environment and resources that people could use to set up a self-sufficient colony. It had a temperature range just right for humans to tolerate. It had sufficiently dense atmosphere for liquid water to exist. The atmosphere already contained 20% oxygen. It had sunlight. It had gravity. It had pure liquid H2O just flowing on the surface. It even had topsoil with enough nutrients already in it to grow crops. Heck, it even had edible animals and plants.
But going to space for mineral mining or some similar purpose would be hardly more feasible than that, in practical terms.
Extraterrestrial destinations are so far away and so inhospitable to human life that we’d be trillions in the hole before we got fairly started. There just is no realistic scenario that has yet been proposed in which it makes more economic sense to get your minerals from Mars or the asteroids than to get them right here in your own backyard.
If all this content-free sarcasm was intended to disguise the fact that you don’t have persuasive rational arguments to offer against pragmatic critiques of extraterrestrial colonization schemes, I’m afraid it hasn’t succeeded.
Sure…I’m not in favor of rushing to Mars before we are ready either. Nor am I in favor of flags and foot prints missions. Nor am I opposed to robotic missions…I think they are not only great but essential. What I AM opposed too is the de-emphasis of manned missions or basic research into manned space flight. I think that’s a huge mistake. I think we could send hundreds of missions to Mars robotically and not get the data we would get from one real scientific mission to Mars by humans. We will learn a hell of a lot more about not only Mars by sending humans there but we will learn a lot about how to send humans there…and keep them alive and return them home.
I’m not sure where you are going with this. I was talking about what NASA is currently planning wrt the moon…not the way they did missions or their goals (or lack there of) when we went there in the 70’s. I was asking for you to correct me if I am wrong about what NASA is planning NOW…and if not, what specific problems you have with that agenda. It seems to me to be a very good agenda for the US to take (assuming the funding doesn’t get gutted by the next president to slouch into the White House).
I don’t think we need all that exotic stuff to do good and meaningful work in space. I disagree that sending more people to space with specific goals is retarding anything…I think that you learn by doing, by making mistakes and then correcting them, by solving difficult problems. I really think that a manned mission to the moon that isn’t a flags and foot prints BS publicity/propaganda mission would be an excellent step for the US too take. There is a hell of a lot to learn from the moon still…including how to have humans live in such a hostile environment and live to tell the tale.
Are you trying to say that exploiting resources or manufacturing in space has no practical purpose? Or that it has no better purpose than the Euro’s landed gentry coming to the new world to set up their own little kingdoms. I’m not following you here.
Last time I checked the moon was 3 days away (using 60/70’s technology), and Mars was something like 6 months away. That doesn’t seem so far compared to trying to set up a trade network from, say, England too China in the 17th century.
If there are no conceivable scenarios that are economically viable then I guess it will never happen. It’s funny though that there are a lot of people who have thought that about a lot of things throughout history. There is a term for some of those folks who made it work despite the nay-sayers…we call them ‘rich’.
The fact that you can’t conceive of any viable reason to extract and exploit resources in space or to manufacture products in space doesn’t mean that it won’t work…just like the fact that I can conceive of several ways that it could be done with reasonable increases in certain technologies and with certain economic conditions here on Earth (like the rising concern over green house gas emissions, or environmental concerns over stuff like strip mining)…well, because I can conceive of them doesn’t mean they will happen either. Economic will be the key factor…the market will decide in the end. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Really, this whole ‘debate’ boils down to those who think it will happen and those who think it won’t…without a hell of a lot of ‘facts’ one way or the other.
Well, if this were my only post in this tread then you might have a point. Oh…and I must have missed your pragmatic critique. Which post was that again? I’ll take a look.
What I’ve patiently tried to explain to you is people decide to live in Moscow or NYC or London and those places will never be cheaper than Hoover, South Dakota and “cheaper” has exactly what, to do with what?
NASA’s Constellation Program web site says they intend to build an “outpost” on the moon. I didn’t see the word “permanent” there.
I thought the ISS was supposed to do all this. It hasn’t, not as far as I can see. I don’t know of any plans to use it as a way station to anywhere, or as a construction platform. And I don’t think any of the Constellation Program hardware is based on ISS modules.
