Comments on: Moondoggle Returns

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:52:58 +0000

Wishful thinking, Eric. Our species has not been around since the beginning, it will not be around til the end. Cultivating a spare planet sounds like a great idea. If it were feasible, I would be all for it. I loved science fiction as a kid. But how do you get around the fact that there are no other habitable planets in our solar system? I tried to follow your Mars link but with no success. Seriously, if we can do nothing about excess CO2 in our atmosphere but wait millennia for it to be absorbed by the ocean and plant life, how are we supposed to create an atmosphere wholesale on Mars? Your reasoning seems to be that we have made great technological progress over the past two centuries, so all we have to do is wait long enough and we will see any barriers to realizing the products of our imagination melt away. Anyone who says otherwise is the equivalent of people who told Columbus the world was flat. Sorry, but unless you can at least explain how interstellar travel could possibly be feasible given our current understanding of physics, that’s mere romanticism. As for unleashing the power of capitalism, my question still stands. What could we find on other planets that could offset the immense cost of transportation (let alone the cost of sustaining human life in space, in a vacuum, with no atmosphere to protect from radiation)?

By: Erich Schwarz

Erich Schwarz — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:02:58 +0000

1. The reason we’re not “up to our eyebrows in aliens” is that the aliens were just like many of the good folk here in this comments section, and they saw no point to the “useless romanticism” of space travel. So they sat on their home planet, and sat, and sat … and then the next asteroid impact came along, and they all died like dinosaurs. But, their extinction was completely ecologically natural! So, it’s all good.

2. As for whether any “serious scientists” think manned space travel would be useful—yes, some do, specifically so that we could get critical scientific results from Mars in less than decades. For details, see:

http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/8/116

3. As for the Moondoggle: it’s not itself likely to be a useful way to promote manned space exploration, because NASA is a tax-supported government bureaucracy that has long since stopped being about developing destabilizing technologies. The details are painstakingly explicated here:

http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau112.html

If we’re serious about giving our species a long-term future, getting substantive and rapid biological research done on Mars (or Europa), or generally getting off of our rear ends, we need to encourage capitalism to develop the exploration of space for a profit—not keep wishing that NASA could work the way it did in the golden Great Society days of LBJ.

By: major tom

major tom — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:51:33 +0000

What we really need is a Galactic Hyperdrive.

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:13:23 +0000

All this talk of humanity needing a new frontier is useless romanticism and the talk of colonizing other planets is based on fiction, not science. What other planet in our solar system could we colonize? There are eight other planets in the solar system that, like ours, orbit the sun. The similarities end there. Atmosphere? Standing water? A temperature range that is above the freezing point of water but below its boiling point? Earth is it. Terraforming Mars or Venus? We would be hard pressed to deliberately change the climate of our own planet, let alone conjure up an atmosphere out of nothing on Mars. As for leaving our solar system to travel to another: not possible within the time frame of a human lifetime. The nearest star is four light years away, current propulsion systems, and even hypothetical future propulsion systems would not allow us to travel there at anything near the speed of light. If a craft were to accelerate to that speed at a rate that would not destroy any human body it had on board, and then deccelarate on the other end, even it it could reach 186,000 miles per second, it would take decades to reach Alpha Centuri. And what would we find once we arrived? A planet suitable for human life? Unlikely. Other stars are much further away. The colonization of the Americas was driven by profit. What could we possibly bring back from other planets that could offset the gargantuan costs of going there and coming back? If we could bring back $105 billion of gold from the moon to pay for the mission, the cost of gold on Earth would collapse.
I am all for scientifically justified missions into space. I am not for making immensely costly policy decisions based on romanticism fueled Star Trek re-runs. For $105 billion, we could build ten super-conducting super-coliders. A much better investment in terms of data yielded.

By: MBMc

MBMc — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:21:44 +0000

Laughing out loud.

By: sglover

sglover — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:20:51 +0000

I’d love to see NASA build a permanent base on the moon—via successive generations of robots, each generation incrementally more sophisticated than the last. It makes sense to build lunar infrastructure for an eventual sustained human space presence, and the robotics research would yield spin-offs that’d make Apollo look like an elaborate plumbing experiment. The dismaying thing about this CEV / Apollo Jr. proposal is its utter sterility and lack of imagination…

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 02:53:23 +0000

For all I know there is indeed some way to travel between the stars. But most of the folks who blandly talk about space travel dismiss the cosmic speed limit with a cheerful, “Details!”

If space travel is indeed feasible, you have to wonder why we aren’t up to our eyebrows in aliens. Of course Earth could be the only planet in the galaxy with intelligent life. I certainly don’t know that we aren’t unique. But if there are other intelligent species and space travel is feasible, the mathematics of exponential functions pretty much guarantees that the little green men would be everwhere by now.

People who believe in space travel are like folks who argue for intelligent design. Everything that tells against their notions gets dismissed because they are not arguing to a conclusion. They are arguing from a wish.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:00:40 +0000

Jim, the speed of light is indeed a physical law. Are you under the impression that, if you can’t get someplace in a hurry, you can’t get there at all?

By: McDuff

McDuff — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:30:08 +0000

Maybe it’s just me, but I think I prefer the militarization of space to the militarization of Earth.

Also, fusion. But I already said that.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 08:10:46 +0000

If our robots aren’t good enough for the exploration of nearby planets and planetesimals, we need to work on our robots. So far we haven’t seen fit to bring any of our Mars landers home. Until we think that enterprise worthwhile, we shouldn’t consider sending the sort of big, clumsy, needy creatures that God (or Nature) created.

Actually, we’re already better at designing space explorers than God (or History), since the bodies he (or it) gave us require access to a wet planet or a near simulacrum, while the explorers we’ve designed only need solar panels or batteries.

Perhaps we should work to our strengths, particularly if we’re serious about our desire to know these places better. And it just might be that better robots wouldbe handy to have around at this end of the gravity well, too.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 06:50:47 +0000

186,000 miles a second. It’s not only a good idea. It’s the law.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 01:03:42 +0000

“Leaving the solar system is almost certainly impossible; but if we ever figure out some loophole in the laws of physics that makes it feasible, it will be by doing science here in Earth, not by playing Commander Corey and the Space Partrol with resources badly needed here.”

Leaving the solar system requires no loopholes in the laws of physics. Voyager will do it soon enough, in fact by some standards (Crossing the Heliopause) has done it already.

Now, humans leaving the solar system DOES require some advances in technology, and probably a rather larger economic base than we have now. But that’s not the same thing as repealing the laws of physics.

I’m conflicted. I think the colonization of space is essential to the long term survival of our species, and will give us something we desperately need: A frontier. On the other hand, our government has hideously bungled the job.

Ideally they’d just get out of the way. In another generation technology will have advanced enough that space colonization will be affordable without threatening to shoot people who won’t ante up.

By: Bruce Baugh

Bruce Baugh — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 23:49:48 +0000

Out of curiosity, Mike, are you actually seeing any of the “we can’t do a manned space program until we’ve fixed all the problems on Earth” rhetoric of the sort one used to encounter in the ‘70s, or did you just trot out that response because it was lying around ready to go? It doesn’t seem to have much relevance either to the question of military activity in space by an administration that’s proven itself both war-minded and incompetent, or to the issue of an institutional culture for NASA that can’t deliver safety or innovation. But it looks to me like a lot of folks here would rather have a good manned presence in space that started ten or twenty years ago.

By: mike shupp

mike shupp — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:47:22 +0000

So y’all MIGHT be willing to accept a stepped up manned space program …. if, say, it didn’t start until around 8000 AD? Or would that be too soon for most of you?

By: contradictory ben

contradictory ben — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:41:19 +0000

Oops.
aj writes:

abb1, you are correct, mea culpa. Apparently the math is too tough for me…

No, aj, it’s my fault for making the error in the first place. Thanks for pointing it out abb1. That makes the programme a hundred-fold worse deal.