If you're like me (and I know many of you are), you grew up reading the science fiction of the 1940's and 1950's, promising a quick and rapid expansion into the solar system, and not too long thereafter, the galaxy. Your young mind tried, and failed, to fathom the vastness of the empty gulfs between the stars. But there was one thing you knew: you wanted to go. During the incomprehensibly lengthy interval between you and adulthood, man would surely prepare itself to go to Mars and beyond, and you were going to be among the pioneers.
Four years before I was born, man walked on the moon for the first time, the most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed. Now we don't even do that. What happened to the dream? Government mismanagement, yes, but something more than that, too, some failure of imagination and will.
I hope that by the fiftieth anniversary some people, somewhere, will have regained the momentum that pushed mankind into our first tenative baby step towards the stars.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
How much do we spend per year on NASA? The obvious argument against rebuilding our space program, focusing on getting to Mars, building space colonies, etc, is that we have enough problems on earth to deal with. Gotta reform Medicare and Medicaid, gotta get to universal health care, gotta win the war on terrorism, gotta rebuild infrastructure, etc.
However, if we only spend, say, $20 billion per year on NASA, then we probably get a lot of bang for our buck by doubling the size of the program, but maybe without sucking so much money from other programs so as to face lots of resistence. On the other hand, if we already spend $60 billion per year on NASA, there's probably no way we're going to double the expenditures when that gets us more than half way to covering the House health care plan ($600 billion over ten years).
About $17.2 B.
The biggest problem NASA has had over the past 40 years is the Space Shuttle. The space shuttle is the automotive equivalent of a 1960's Dodge Valiant with sophisticated electronics. It costs 450 million to launch the beast and it can't even leave low earth orbit.
A lot of high profile economic conservatives seem infatuated with space travel. See Charles Krauthammer: (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moon_we_forgot_97498.html) and Penn and Teller for a couple examples.
I don't get it, myself, but it is nice to see normally stoic personalities brought to a place of wonder by the subject.
Still, though, it is a waste of taxpayer money. If someone is going to do it let it be private industry, with their own money, with some serious government oversight.
For Libertarians, I think that there's a strong Heinlein factor. I've met very few Libertarians who haven't ingested large quantities of the Heinlein opus and who haven't, likewise, taken it to heart.
I fully understand the appeal that Heinlein has, but it's always a good idea to remember that science fiction isn't prophecy and that technological optimism is always trumped by reality, whether that reality is economic, social, or physical.
I think that it's understandable why someone in Heinlein's era could imagine that transport would continue to grow cheaper, more efficient and faster until we reached a point where transporting mass amounts of humans through space would be safe, cheap and viable. But it's never a safe assumption to assume that a given technology will continue to improve exponentially indefinitely (which is one problem that I have with people who get overly enthusiastic about the possibility of a technological singularity in the very near future).
In the real world, exponential trends invariably reach a plateau. Rocketry is one such technology. Rocket science is a mature science. There aren't any looming breakthroughs that make it significantly cheaper to get into orbit (never mind into interplanetary space), nor is there any apparent way to get from point A to point B significantly faster than we already can, which means transit times measures in months and years just to get fairly small payloads to the other planets in our own solar system.
Janice,
2009 NASA bugget is $17.2 billion.
As for Meghan's question - it's a business/economic failure. If there was a way to make space pay - we would be there. We are there in the sense that there are 100s of communication/weather/GPS satilites in orbit. They are there because they provide value - either to the Gov't (weather/gps) or private industry (DirectTV).
If someone had perfected Helium3 fusion to the degree that we needed to mine it on the moon - we would be there. Until we can make it pay - either by reducing the cost of getting into orbit or by finding something out there or great value, it's not going to happen.
What about the economic gains from research? Plastics, communications, etc., many products we use benefitted from 'space' research. A quick google turned up this list.
That this justifies the space program is a fallacy. Obviously we could have done the research that led to these technologies outside of the context of the space program, and it would have been much cheaper because we wouldn't have had to pay for the space-specific stuff.
Sure, it's nice that the space program hasn't been a total waste, but it's still been a hugely inefficient way to develop the technologies you mention.
Janice, your first guess was pretty close: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA lists NASA's most recent funding at $17.6 billion.
I think our biggest hurdle is that manned exploration is very expensive. The space shuttle runs a few hundred million per launch, and that doesn't include the cost of the equipment (which is properly expensive in its own right: when the cost of transportation is so high, what NASA sends into space has to work right. This is why most electrical wiring is gold, not copper), or designing and building the Shuttle. And for that price tag, we only get into low earth orbit (LEO). The International Space Station has been very expensive, and it's not always obvious to politicians or the public what value's come from it. To me, space is something that we, as humanity, have to do.
The new Orion craft that they're working on is basically a 21st century Saturn V. Which goes to show you how little our space technology has advanced in the last 40 years. We can still go back to the Moon, and probably will before 2020. And with Orion, spending another $10-20B a year would make a huge difference in our ability to get at least some of our eggs out of this basket, to paraphrase Heinlein. Moreover, if we found a way to get away from chemical propulsion, either in getting into LEO or once we're there, then actually sending manned missions to Mars or having more permanent settlement beyond the 7 or so ISS residents becomes much more feasible.
Bingo! To state the obvious, giant liquid fueled rockets are incredibly dangerous & expensive. Spending billions to send somebody to pick up a few rocks, when every 20th or so mission ends in a BOOM!, is just crazy. Why am I not surprised to see Megan pushing it?
That we're using the same basic technologies for transport we did 50 years ago - piston engines, jets, diesel & electric trains - while constantly expecting a miracle that will get us through the decline in oil production, is reason to move on to the much better written SF of the 1960s & 1970s. Or even learn High School Chemistry & Physics (GED level won't cause bleeding)
Bingo! To state the obvious, giant liquid fueled rockets are incredibly dangerous & expensive. Spending billions to send somebody to pick up a few rocks, when every 20th or so mission ends in a BOOM!, is just crazy. Why am I not surprised to see Megan pushing it?
Classic observer bias.
In fact, I don't see even one thing in your summary that was "pushed" in the lede.
True, if you assume that humans could fly to Mars on moonbeams & fairy dust. Otherwise, Megan's last 2 paragraphs are utter twaddle. Thermodynamics is notoriously unresponsive to imagination & will.
(The first paragraph is just crappy writing, no matter what you assume.)
The Wolfe piece she ripped off was pretty bad, too. According to Wolfe, we need to get off the Earth because the Sun will burn out in 5 billion years. And ZOMG! We've wasted 40 of them!
Good grief, are you the master mold from which all derogatory stereotypes of engineers were cast?
There's a difference between someone demanding that "something must be done, now, and to [insert preferred unpleasant destination] with the cost", and then expecting everyone else to pony up instantly, versus dreaming in abstracts about things that could come to pass, someday. The latter may not be your own preferred use of time, nor do I use a lot of my own time that way, but it can be done without requiring a complete set of design drawings and procurement lists to already be laid out on the table.
Also, it does not merit or require a swift and summary character assassination in response. All that ever does is get you invited to fewer parties, without changing anyone else's mind about the topic. But a guy as smart as you wouldn't do something as dumb as that...right?
I will bet you $1000 current dollars (that is to say, the winnings will be inflation adjusted) that mankind does not return to the moon before 2020.
It was the discovery of DNA that ended the age of manned exploration. Sure, the sky's interesting and all, but we're a fundamentally narcissistic species, and the just-started task of understanding ourselves will be theme of the next epoch of scientific advancement, just as the exploration and mastery of the world around us has been the hallmark of our endeavors since the Renaissance or before.
The moon shots, far from heralding a beginning, were the capstone events on a long age of outward-looking exploration. I suspect we'll return to this eventually, but not before we've spent a good long time unraveling the intricacies of our own biology.
Dear TW Andrews,
Sorry, but your timeline is off. DNA was known about by the early to mid 20th century, and the structure of it was worked out by Watson & Crick in 1953--which was well before manned space flight really even got going.
In any case--I think you're right that biology is a hell of a lot more interesting than space flight for the human race right now--mainly because the applications of it are so much more obvious and direct. Cure for Cancer? Probably a lot more likely through genetics research than by lobbing metal and some bits of organic glop outside of our atmosphere.
The dream is not dead. And imagination and will are as they have been. It is a misguided view of scientific and tehnological progess that would condemn us for not following the neatly laid out path of the writer's of our past.
We have computers that in many ways go beyond those conceived by the sci-fi comunity even as late as the sixties. We have communication technology right out of Star Trek.
Moreover, we may not have spent the trillion or so dollars required to get people to Mars, but we have been there. Those distant stars you wax lyrical about have had much of their physics studied, measured, decribed and understood. And we've gone further. We've gazed back to practically the dawn of time (at least in so far as time had reasonably well-defined meaning in our little corner of the universe), and we are beginning to understand it.
Man has not reached the stars, but we have built such amazing machines to study the distant skies, and conceived such incredible theories to describe the universe around us. There is no failure in imagination, only, perhaps, a failure to understand what has been done.
It's not about the money. It was never a money issue. The US spends more on their pets than the space program. It was the baby boomer generation. The most self centered egoists on the planet. The boomers were interested in celebrating themselves and having it all here and now. Almost all strategic long term programs were put on hold when this group began its ascent to political and economic power. On one hand you had hedonist impulses to live today and on the other you had the rise of religious fundamentalists who insist you have to follow god's plan. It was easier to imagine the future from the comfort of home with a little fur ball giving you unconditional love then to do the hard work of making a future.
Your financial comparison is lacking context and scope. "The US [that] spends more on their pets" is approximately 72 million households comprising an estimated 179 million persons. I'm sure those same households also spend a significant outlay on toilet paper and MP3 downloads, but that doesn't say much about the space program, merely what a common preference for millions of people adds up to in aggregate. A preference which, I might add, from which each individual derives significant personal benefit.
Besides, why would any sensible person want to invest heavily in unobtanium futures, and then spend the rest of their days hoping someone obtains it? And then, to top that, wreck their own mind resenting everyone else for living in the here and now? Science can tell you just how habitable every practical destination outside of LEO happens to be, so if you want to get to heaven, I suggest doing it the old fashioned way and talking to one of those religious fundamentalists. (Some of them may be nothing more than dogmatic legalists, but you might find one or two with some interesting ideas.)
The US spends more on their pets than the space program.
That may be the worst example you could have come up with. Of course we spend more on our pets. If you don't see why that is so, then maybe you have been a bit ego-centric yourself by not observing how much people love their pets.
I'm a huge fan of the space program, but I'm certainly not alone when I say my pet is worth way more to me than the allure of space exploration.
Clearly someone was bitten by a dog as a child...
I too was born four years after the Apollo XI and shared the same sense of youthful amazement concerning space exploration. I think that we (or more specifically, the U.S. government and NASA) have failed to move beyond the moon or to even return to the moon because most of our governmental institutions, including NASA, no longer attract individuals who have the imagination and intelligence necessary to achieve such goals. Indeed, I think that humans will return to the moon and travel beyond in the coming years, but the new explorers will be private astronauts employed by companies such as Scaled Composites and its partner Virgin Galatic or SpaceX.
I will echo jmo's comment- we will expand into space when it is economically profitable to do so. Otherwise, short of coercion, scarce resources will be demanded and used in other activities on planet Earth.
This is as good a place as any to see the main reasons why you're not going to see easy travel to other planets any time soon.
The usual arguments start by explaining why space travel is expensive, and why, barring some unforeseeable technological breakthrough, this will most likely be the case for the near- to middle-future: it's just the economics of launch costs and the demand curves associated with them.
What happened was that sometime before the moon landing Western Civilization reached the apex of its constitutional fortitude, if you will. We basically ran out of steam as a civilization and have largely ceased doing great things. You can see it in every avenue of achievement. There is no longer the sense, once pervasive across Western Civ., that anything is possible; that we are destined to grow and reach and become ever greater. Instead, our focus seems to be more on managing our decline. Trying to keep the good times rolling as our civilization fades away.
The moon landing was basically the last great gasp of the last thriving outpost of Western Civilization. Europe had already peaked and burnt itself out in the fires of the two world wars. America was the last standard bearer of the most productive civilization that humanity had ever created. The moon shot was our high-water mark. Beginning probably before then and continuing with only occassional mitigation ever since has been only decline.
Western Civilization accomplished many great and wonderful things but now, perhaps out of existential boredom at so many centuries of success or perhaps out of a morbid fear of being unable to live up to past accomplishments, we are turning our back on it. Instead of continuing its tradition of accomplishment and achievement, Western Civ's current generation refuses to do any hard work, even to the point of reproducing adequately to merely maintain their numbers. We occupy ourselves with frivolous pursuit of leisure, argument over long past failures and lament about inequality rather than engaging in the hard work of creating new greatness.
I'd say we're at about the year 300 AD or so in comparison to the Roman Empire. Or, if you're a Sinophile, AD 1600 or so.
In short, our best efforts are well behind us. There will be occassional sparks of the old greatness driven mostly by intertia as we slowly collapse and fade out.
Living, as we are, right after the apex, the signs of fading are perhaps hard to see. But already those who have benefited the most from our achievements spend the most effort repudiating them. Look at the anti-vaccine movement. These are not ignorant backwoods folk wary of outsiders' ways; no, these are the richest, most successful people who have ever lived. And they are unwilling to expose themselves to even tiny dangers in the name of continuing the greatest irradication of disease in human history. Anything that might interfere with their life's work of pursuing immediate material comfort is forsaken.
The next world-level civilization -- if there is to be one -- will most likely arise from the fastest growing and most vivacious civilizations currently extant: Islam or India.
My bet would be on Islam, my hope would be for India. In neither case will a world dominated by that civilization be nearly as nice as the one dominated by Western Civ. has been.
sounds like the plot for a sci-fi novel.
Don't it just.
The Foundation books were among my favorites growing up.
Doesn't mean I'm not right, of course...
For the opposing perspective, try Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels.
@zic -
Thanks for the recommendation, they look interesting, I'll take a look.
Briefly perusing the wikipedia article, the plot sounds somewhat similar to The Golden Age novels by John C. Wright. I wonder if you've happened to have read those?
Also, on the topic of Banks, as I've recently been returning to sci-fi after a long absence, I've been thinking of delving into his work, do you think these 'Culture' novels might be a good start or is there something else of his you'd recommend above them?
Banks is worth reading, but it assumes away all the hard/interesting technical problems. (The Culture routinely intervenes in barbaric civilizations of various stripes, most of which are at least a few centuries more advanced than ours is.)
Blighter, I did respond, but the comment was held for too many links (all to wikipedia on specific books.) I won't repeat, in hopes Megan will post it, other than to say read "The Algebraist," though it isn't a Culture novel.
And albatross's comment is on spot.
Thanks zic & albatros.
I'm excited to read some Banks now!
it was. Read Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold.
I doubt it will be Islam unless Islam goes through a reformation. Money is probably on India. "Manifest Destiny" does a lot for a civilization.
I don't see why Islam would need a reformation to become dominant in the wake of Western decline. They might need a reformation to rekindle an acceptance of scientific and cultural advance but I don't see them needing that to take power any more than the Visigoths, Huns and Vandals needed to take up engineering before destroying the Western Roman Empire.
While I agree that "Manifest Destiny" does a lot for a civilization (in fact, it's a good term for what I was calling "constitutional fortitude" -- that je ne sais quoi that represents the 'spark' driving the successful & ambitious that is absent from the spent & lazy), I do not see how whatever form India has would be superior to Islam's firm belief codified in their most sacred text that the entire world must submit to Islam or face perpetual war.
It might not be what I would like driving a dominant civilization but you can't argue that it has a bit of the old "Destiny" to it and as the civilization spreads, the "Manifest" part will be self-evident.
Point taken on Islam taking power...but as India already outnumbers Muslims (ignoring the numbers of Indian Muslims...hard to tell if they are Indians first or Muslims first), and given India embraces science, the Islamic world would simply go from beating its head on the wall of Western civ to beating its head on the wall of Indian civ.
There is no longer the sense, once pervasive across Western Civ., that anything is possible; that we are destined to grow and reach and become ever greater. Instead, our focus seems to be more on managing our decline. Trying to keep the good times rolling as our civilization fades away.
Well, sure, if you're going to have that attitude about it.
The Internet is the newest "greatest achievement" human kind has ever made. It's amazing that anyone can just ignore it when talking about the progress of civilization.
Particularly while using it to publish his point, right?
I agree, the Internet is a wonderful creation. It is, indeed, great. But it is an achievement in keeping with a time of decline. It is an achievement that allows for the instant satisfaction of intellectual itches, one that allows endless argument over inconsequential minutiae among anonymous strangers, one that leaves nothing of permanence being endless changeable.
Should the lights go out on mankind in a literal sense (ie. no electricity) this latest and perhaps greatest of Western Civ's achievements will be a fitting finale having occupied lifetimes of time and energy in pursuit of momentary distraction that ultimately completely evaporates leaving no discoverable trace of its existence.
What if the Library of Alexandria had been the Internet instead? Would we have more or less manuscripts surviving from antiquity? I'd submit we'd have far fewer than the already paltry amount we do have. In their place we'd have the useless wrecks of routers and servers, the use of which we wouldn't even begin to guess at.
Massive, universal access to information will make a lot of other technical progress happen *much* faster. That's an outcome of the existence of the internet that is going to have an enormous impact.
At any given time, we're both in a massive decline and in a massive increase in abilities. In the last 40 years, we've seen our space technology stagnate, but we've had absolutely breathtaking advances in computing and biology and medicine. If we ever decide to go back into space in a big way (I hope so!), those enormous improvements in technology will make it far easier to do.
@albatross --
"Massive, universal access to information will make a lot of other technical progress happen *much* faster."
I would tend to agree but at the same time wonder if the increase in technological progress we would posit from effortless access to information will outweigh the slowing effect caused by massive, universal access to appealing timesinks and pronography...
To your point about current advances in computing, biology and medicine greatly facilitating any eventual return to space, I couldn't agree more.
I just despair of those breakthroughs surviving the final death of the civilization that spawned them. I don't always feel that way, mind, just in my weaker moments.
We don't have a whole lot to show for the Library of Alexandria today, and it was on paper and everything. And if you want manuscripts, I'd wager that the average city of today has many single buildings with more printed material in them than some civilizations had 2000 years ago. A really common book from the classical era might have a couple hundred copies that survived. A really common book today will have tens of millions of extant copies - our current printing techniques don't lend themselves to preservation as well as the classical methods, but sheer weight of numbers should help us at least a little. There are works in print where there's more copies today than there were subjects of the Emperor at the peak of Rome. I don't think we're in too much risk of that going away, even if we do go through another Dark Age.
In their place we'd have the useless wrecks of routers and servers, the use of which we wouldn't even begin to guess at. Exactly. Nobody has even managed to get one of the pyramids to power up, let alone accessed the data.
If you're like me (and I know many of you are), you grew up reading the science fiction of the 1940's and 1950's, promising a quick and rapid expansion into the solar system... There is a reason why sci-fi was and is the most popular and profitable genre. But when we look deeper - we find that is was never the galaxy per se that was of interest to us but "new life".
When I was young - I was a cornucopian. I thought human intelligence comes above all, that we can do anything if we really wanted to, that the drop can be bigger than the ocean and the part smarter than the whole, the simulation better than the simulated. Is there something even more intelligent than us out there? From our sci-fi literature and movies - we know already that there isn't. Humans - even in the future - are at the end the really good and smart ones.
How could be any other way. If we could really imagine somebody smarter than us (we usually call it God) - he or she would have the right to think of us as we think of chickens or cows. This would be unbearable for the religious or the cornucopian mind? We would have no right whatsoever to protest in case the smarter beings started enslaving, hunting and eating us. We could only fight and would have the same chance as a chicken fighting the human gods.
After having grown up with 0 and 1, economics, engineering and psychics and politics and art - I soon discovered that I have obviously missed the woods for all the trees. There is no 0 and 1, no engineering and no politics and art except for what goes on in our mammal brains. We are foremost animal emotions when we deal with these issues and not machines. We are life and that is what we seek in space - life. We are not looking for more rocks or deserts?
If it is life that sci-fi is all about - why not spend a few minutes trying to understand it? E O Wilson has always made me more humble. Here he explains that we know less than 10% of life on earth and that we have no clue how soil works. Take a hand of soil and most life-forms inside - thousands or even millions - are unknown to us as we speak.
If we can't understand how the soil works that we standing on - what good would it be to explore space. We could not reengineer earth like that. We could not understand new life like that. Right now we prove that we do not even care about life on earth.
Quite an explorer we humans are. We barely take a first bite from a meal and already order the next? Of course we flee from nature. No other science is so complex and would remind us constantly that we do not know and that we are only a small part - equal to millions of others. That we are no gods and that all our engineered technology is not much different from a bird using a leaf to fish for some termites.
By now I fear most sci-fi movies. The idea that the whole audience feels with the human race while we fight more powerful aliens - but then we leave the cinema and order a factory farmed hot dog? Or - the idea that somehow small, artificially lightened spaces with ugly carpets - space ships - would be a fun place to live... no, the average cubicle at any Fortune 500 is more exiting I fear. And nothing could come close to walking through the woods, sitting at the ocean or a lake or climbing a mountain. But we would destroy all this for the hypocritical cubicle?
NASA is great. Not because they help us explore new planets but because they have recently helped us save life on earth. It was via NASA in ca 1985 that the theory of the ozone hole has been confirmed. This alone saved more money than the cumulative NASA budgets as it saved millions of lives
Most astronauts at NASA have dreamed, like the rest of us, to explore the universe. Until they've reached space that is - then they see our blue planet for the first time. Nature is like your own face - it is is close to you that you cannot see it yourself without some effort. Most astronauts do not come back home and say - more exploration of Mars. They become environmentalists. They don't want to exchange the certain pigeon in our hand for the uncertain sparrow.
E O Wilson should get the last word as he does so naturally anyway:
I have been able to drop my faith in God myself. But it was thanks to economics that I realized how strangely those who use the word rational rationalize. E O Wilson has helped me to drop my faith the Human God as well. Now the reality that I can observe makes much more sense to me. Maybe this is not for everybody. I have nothing against space exploration per se - but I would appreciate if somebody could at least articulate a good reason for it.
Personally, I am with Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov and Gene Rodenberry - who all at one point argued that a vegetarian diet is the best thing that could happen to humans and not he exploration of the universe.
From our sci-fi literature and movies - we know already that there isn't.
How exactly are literature and movies proof of anything?
We would have no right whatsoever to protest in case the smarter beings started enslaving, hunting and eating us.
I'd do so anyway. What right does any god have to tell me what I can and can't think?
We could only fight and would have the same chance as a chicken fighting the human gods.
Rats do pretty well en masse.
We are life and that is what we seek in space - life.
Speak for yourself, buster! I have wider goals.
If we can't understand how the soil works that we standing on - what good would it be to explore space. We could not reengineer earth like that. We could not understand new life like that.
We can never know what good new knowledge will do before we discover it - because we can't know what new knowledge is.
I submit however that workable cold fusion would be greatly beneficial even if we didn't learn a single thing about life from it, or how to reengineer the earth, or how soil works.
Right now we prove that we do not even care about life on earth.
Right now we spend billions on health care. By revealed preferences we care about at least some forms of life on earth. Apparently you don't care about checking your statements against reality.
Quite an explorer we humans are. We barely take a first bite from a meal and already order the next?
I have never seen anyone take a first bite from a meal and then order the next. (I have seen people take one bite from a meal and send it back, but that's different).
Of course we flee from nature. No other science is so complex and would remind us constantly that we do not know and that we are only a small part - equal to millions of others.
What science is not part of nature? Physics - all about nature - what is matter, how did the universe begin? Psychology - all about nature - as people are part of nature.
That we are no gods and that all our engineered technology is not much different from a bird using a leaf to fish for some termites.
I deduce from this statement you know bugger all about engineering, if you think that say mustering thousands to build a hydro electric power station is not much different from a bird using a leaf to fish for some termites.
But we would destroy all this for the hypocritical cubicle?
Nice development of the strawman there.
Humanity might even consider becoming someday what the astrobiologists call a type II civilization and harness all the power of the sun to support human life on Earth and on colonies on and around the other solar planets. Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to explore in order simply to continue our reproductive folly.
Actually this frontier sounds pretty good to me. Adds in a bit of a safety margin against asteroid hits and massive volanic eruptions.
Now the reality that I can observe makes much more sense to me. Maybe this is not for everybody.
Well yeah, because there appears to be some massive problem in how you observe reality. You keep making assertions about what humans do and what they value which doesn't match how actual humans act.
Meh. NASA got stuck as a great big bureaucracy, and no one has found a good way around it yet. Jerry Pournelle (jerrypournelle.com) (chairman of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy) has been working on this for a long time.
If you really want to stimulate space exploration, offer X-prizes. A billion dollars to the first American company that can put a spacecraft into orbit, bring it back, and do it again with the same spacecraft within three days. A billion dollars to the first American company that can support a colony of twenty people on the moon for a full year. Or ten billion, if you think it's hard. It won't cost you a dime unless someone succeeds.
As for the economic benefits, see the Club of Rome predictions. Fast or slow, we are using up our resources on this planet. They may last longer than we think, but not much longer than that, and then civilization must follow. Conservation isn't going to solve that problem, just slow it down very slightly. And there are enormous resources available in space. Solar power that really works all the time, cubic miles of metal, oceans of hydrocarbons. That article you linked didn't seem to deal with that; it was focussed on colonization. The main bottleneck is the cost of getting to orbit. Make that cheap, and a lot of things become economical.
Leave off the Sense of Wonder stuff - this is an essential step for mankind's long-term survival.
I don't think that orbit exploration can become as economical or fun or profitable as World of Warcraft, $10/month, any time soon? I don't play it because I have recently discovered an unmapped new universe in reality which is more complex and fun than anything else I have hard off so far. And it's free of charge to play. As Dawkins likes to point out - everyone who is currently alive is a winner already.
We also need to remember that the main motivation behind JFK's, LBJ's, and Nixon's support for the space program was national security. Our military-industrial complex realized that the same technological breakthroughs that enabled Khruscheve and Brezhnev to send cosmonauts into orbit around Earth could be adapted by the Soviets into nuclear weapons technology. Therefore, it was imperative for the US to beat the Soviet Union to the moon, in order to ensure that the Soviets did not gain an advantage over the US in nuclear weapons technology.
If Iran or North Korea or even Al Qaeda began sending people into space, we would immediately see Barack Obaama calling for the US to send a manned mission to Mars by 2019.
Hadn't seen Hugo's comment when I posted mine, but that's just what I'm talking about. You gotta step outside the box; this planet is the box.
Three points that I didn't see mentioned in a quick perusal of the previous comments:
a.) NASA (like any other big government agency) is nothing but a huge pork barrel. They have no real incentive to actually achieve results even if they could. The longer they can drag out the process, the more money they can suck out of the taxpayers.
b.) Risk aversion. Even assuming for the sake of the argument that it is theoretically possible somehow to establish self-sustaining human colonies on the moon or Mars or wherever, thousands of people will have to die in the attempts before anybody is really successful. And we just don't have the stomach for that level of risk anymore. As a previous commenter pointed out, Western civilization -- including America -- has simply lost its 'cojones' (pardon my Spanish). .... As a rhetorical question, when the ancestors of the present-day Polynesians were colonizing the South Pacific, I wonder what percentage of the explorers actually survived their voyages into the unknown? I'd bet it was a darn small number.
c.) When I was growing up (in the 1950's) even reputable scientists -- not just fiction writers -- were wildly underestimating the level of difficulty involved. It was still rational to believe that parts of Mars and Venus might be amenable to human colonization "as-is' without excessive terra-forming. And it was also rational to believe that cheap, inexhaustible thermonuclear fusion energy was 'right around the corner.' Today we know better.
j.
Unfortunately, demand for payload space is relatively inelastic; drop launch costs by a factor of two and demand goes up by something less than 10%. Also, launch costs scale roughly as the cube the payload. There's other stuff wrong with your post, but this is the hard part of space travel.
"Demand for payload space is relatively inelastic". That's an interesting claim; can you support it? I would myself have imagined that it might be inelastic locally, but very different on a large scale.
You might have said the same thing about computing power in 1970. How many more businesses will buy computers if you up the storage from 10kB to 20kB and the speed from 50kHz to 100kHz? A few. Now, how many more businesses will buy if it goes up to 100GB and 3GHz? All of them, apparently. Industries on industries develop based on computers; the whole paradigm changes.
"Launch costs scale roughly as the cube the payload." Same comment. That's if you try to build a bigger Shuttle. If you learn how to do it properly, that's entirely different. In terms of the energy involved, it costs about the same to orbit as it does to fly to Australia. Currently, by far the main cost of the Shuttle is paying a lot of people (thousands) to rebuild it after every mission. The cost isn't the energy; it's a number of engineering issues that haven't been solved yet.
The fact that a centrally planned government project hasn't found a good way to do things isn't a proof that there isn't one, or fifty. Offer X-prizes, and let free enterprise give it a try. Again, what do you have to lose?
And again, several commentators don't seem to understand that the point is resources, not habitation. Make it dirt-cheap to get to orbit, and an enormous number of resources suddenly become affordable as well. Getting into orbit is just about as expensive in energy as getting from there to the asteroids.
The analogy between space exploration and exploration of remote areas of the world during the 'age of discovery' is a false one -- or at least breaks down quickly. Space travel is an inherently dangerous, enormously expensive, enormously energy-intensive activity, and within the solar system (the only place its feasible to send humans), there's just no there there. The 'age of discovery' turned up all kinds of unknown places that were fit for human habitation (though, of course, in most cases they were already inhabited by humans -- just not by Europeans). But within the solar system, we already have learned enough to know that there are no such places other than Earth. What's the point of vast billions to send people to Mars to wander around a dead, frozen desert? Unmanned probes do the job admirably at a fraction of the cost (and with no possibility of repeating the Challenger or Columbia disasters).
Tell it to the crews of all the sailing ships that never came back. Exploration in the age of sail was very dangerous.
Yes, well, life in general was dangerous and short in the 16th century. But even then, outfitting a ship capable of crossing oceans did not require anything like a NASA scale project. Very quickly, trade routes opened up, and long-distance sailing trips became ordinary and profitable (albeit still hazardous). There is just no prospect at all for space travel -- even 'only' to the moon or Mars becoming ordinary (or profitable). Just as there's no prospect for journeys to the deepest ocean trenches becoming ordinary and profitable. Sorry, but going to Mars is just nothing at all like Magellan setting out to find a westward route to the spice islands.
They said similar things about the colonies in New England. There's no gold. It's a howling wilderness.
I agree a NASA program would be much too expensive. I don't want one. It doesn't have to be as expensive as you think. A crash government program is the most expensive way to do anything.
Maybe, a few chartered companies with a credible promise to back their property rights...
Space is much more hospitable than the bottom of the ocean. There's plenty of power. The pressures are easier to deal with. Movement is much cheaper (once you reach orbit). Only fruitcakes will worry about messing up the moon's ecology. Mars might be a different question. We need to know.
I had this conversation from the other side a few weeks ago, talking about high speed rail in Texas. I don't propose taxing you or your neighbors to fund my dreams.
Well now, that depends. Columbus never got to India for the spice wealth, but what he found was pretty good, all told. If we find something out in space worth hauling back, it'll get worthwhile pretty quickly, I'd wager.
The analogy between space exploration and exploration of remote areas of the world during the 'age of discovery' is a false one -- or at least breaks down quickly.
The general rule is to compare the Apollo project to Columbus or the Wright brothers.
Instead of Columbus, use Eric the Red. The Vikings made it to the Americas, and found a frozen wilderness about as useful as Mars. They pulled back, and it was centuries later, using new technologies and a new approach, that America became economic.
Likewise, instead of the first Aeroplane in 1903, look at the first hot air balloons in 1790s. Once again, it took a whole new approach, a century later, for it to finally start being useful.
If you're going to rehash Tom Wolfe, shouldn't you link to him?
NASA can't even run a network of thermometers competently.
there's just no there there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Mission
Kepler is already in orbit and sending back data. The question becomes - when the eventual Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is launched and we confirm the existance of hapitable extrasolar plantets - how will that change things?
I'd have to think that knowing there's another Earth out there just waiting to be explored will trigger an isatiable desire to move forward with the technology to get us there.
You must have missed Slocum's other point that space travel outside of the solar system is not feasible for humans.
Not feasible right now, but that doesn't mean it won't ever be possible. I guess it all hinges on how much we still don't know about the universe. Are we aware of 95% of what is possible in the universe in terms of physics or 0.001%.
You can't eliminate the possibility of transformative revolutions, entirely, because the nature of the unkown is that it is, of course, unknown, but I think that we have cause for pessimism.
The current Standard Model holds up very well for all experiments that we can currently perform. What gaps there are in the model are found at ridiculously high energies. The reason that we may never know whether or not string theory (or loop quantum gravity, or any of the other contenders for a Theory of Everything) is a good theory is because the sort of experiments that we would need to perform would literally require galactic levels of energy to explore them.
Right now we're pushing the envelope of what we can even look at with the LHC, and that's just in the hopes of finding the Higgs Boson which would do nothing other than solidify the standard model a bit.
That's not to say that there's still not a lot of room for progress. Even if you know the laws of physics, it doesn't follow that you've worked through all the possible permutations and figured out all the tricks and angles. Chemistry is very much a "solved" science in terms that we absolutely understand the fundamental laws of chemical interaction, but we are far from exhausting chemistry as a practical endeavor.
Never the less, the sorts of constraints on interstellar travel tend to be about fundamental physical limitations. It seems fantastically unlikely that relatively is going to be wrong enough to allow us to have FTL travel. It also seems that anti-matter reactions represent the theoretical limits of energy efficiency, and even if we could mass produce anti-matter (which is definitely beyond our tech horizon), relativistic interstellar travel is still expensive, grueling, and subject to the same power laws that require tremendous quantities of fuel to transport relatively small payloads in anything approaching a practical amount of time.
My own gut feeling is that if interstellar travel ever does become a reality, it will be something achieved by (possibly post-human) inorganic intelligences that are capable of enduring millennia long transits.
I concur with the general lament about our risk-averse, narcissistic culture. Boris Johnson, the affable buffoon, has recently written an excellent article about it in the Telegraph.
But, I don't think going to Mars is the right answer.
1. Mars is not just the "next step" from the moon. Mars is a lot farther. The difficulty of going to Mars is ~100 times greater. It's like asking a toddler who has just made a little truck out of Legos to start building a full-size semi. You could probably do it, but Legos aren't really meant for this sort of thing, and you wouldn't get a very good truck out of it.
2. Our space technology really hasn't advanced, and not for lack of ingenuity. Technological advancement is bounded by physical law. We've coaxed every possible efficiency from liquid-fueled chemical rockets. The curvature of the rocket nozzle, the "bell", is heavily optimized for maximum efficiency at a certain altitude. Each F-1 main engine used 1000 liters of fuel per second. These engines were literally one-of-a-kind, and there just isn't the volume of production than makes the incremental, learning-curve-style improvement found in car engines possible. Most of these engineers are retired. This is a lost art. (And if you think that's bad...the defense industry is about to retire every engineer who worked in the 80's defense boom...soon we won't know how to make radars properly.)
3. Say, by some miracle, we get to Mars. Then what? We stopped going to the Moon. Why? Because we ran out of things we could do. The Saturn V can only lift so much - as it turns out, it was just enough to take a closet-sized living space to the surface of the moon and back. To set up any kind of permanent or semi-permanent base on the moon would require a production-and-launch rate greater than even the 1960's NASA could manage. And that's just for a moon base, never mind Mars.
4. The current NASA can't even keep the ISS running. This is partly because the ISS is basically held hostage by Russia, but that's another topic.
So what's the right way to go to space? We need to make low-earth orbit cheap. The Saturn V is not just a rocket, it's a flying cruiser. One space shuttle flight costs as much as building a destroyer. What we need is mass-produced orbital delivery system. It might be a conventional rocket, but one built for mass-manufacture, with a unit cost equal to a 737. It might a hybrid system, like SpaceShipOne. It might be a space elevator. The space shuttle's name gives hint to its original goal. Let's try again.
I'm not saying you could stroll around outside in shorts, but Mars has abundant quantities of the critical elements of organic chemistry (N, C, O). We don't know how bad low gravity is on people, but 0.38g is surely better than 0.16g. An atmosphere supplies some protection from radiation and meteorites and regulates temperatures.
The big question is the six-month trip in space. I'm not sure America has the guts to put some astronauts into a spinning hab in space for six months to see what happens. China definitely does.
It seems that when you boil it down, the primary reason people want to see space colonies is that it would be cool.
To put space colonization is context, it would be orders of magnitude easier, and more useful, to colonize the antarctic and the bottom of the ocean, both of which are easier to get to, substantially less hostile, and technologically easier challenges, but no one gets upset that the great sub-oceanic conquest isn't keeping pace with our science fiction.
The simple fact is that if you subtract out the coolness of having some sort of permanent space colony, there's just not any good way to justify the expense and the effort.
Our scientific curiosity can be satisfied much more efficiently and effectively by robot probes, and there is, bluntly, no compelling economic reason to put humans in space, especially on a permanent rotation.
The great space race of the 60's was fueled entirely by political considerations. We were fighting a propaganda war with the Soviets and a moon mission represented a gigantic PR victory over the Russians, proving to the world that we had the economic strength and the technical sophistication to beat them to the moon. Once we reached the moon, funding a program that ate up, at the time, about 5% of the GDP no longer made any sense.
There was never a compelling reason to continue spending vast sums of money on a program that had already achieved its purpose. The moon program was foredoomed by its own success.
I fully understand how much the space program stirs people. It's a very compelling dream and I am confident that, eventually, humanity will expand out into the solar system (as I expect that, eventually, we will tame the antarctic and the ocean), but short of a much better reason to do so than that it would make us feel good about ourselves, it will not, and should not, happen any time soon.
Andrew,
The space program in the 1960s was more than just a part of a propaganda war between Cold War adversaries. It was also defacto military spending on the part of both the Soviet Union and the US. The technology that was developed to send satellites and manned vehicles into orbit around the Earth had potential military applications as well, and if the Soviets gained control over the space just outside of the Earth's orbit and over the moon, it would have given the USSR a potentially lethal military advantage over the United States.
The July 1969 moon landing by the Apollo 11 crew showed the Soviets that they had lost whatever opportunity they once had to gain military control over space, and the USSR lost interest in sending manned missions to the moon. Instead, the Soviets focused their military efforts on building up their stockpiles of nuclear-armed ICBMs and submarines, and turned their civilian space program towards sending up orbiting manned space stations instead.
While it's true that the space program has definite military objectives, I question that the manned program ever did. At best, some gullible politicians may have been persuaded that getting humans into space could represent a high frontier from which to stage military operations, but the cold fact of the matter is that you didn't need to put humans into orbit in order to achieve that goal.
The moon program was especially hard to justify in this context. The most significant threat from space isn't even an orbital threat. ICBMs are sub-orbital. LEO is, of course, important to the military (for spy satellites, GPS, etc), precisely because it's easy to see and react to terrestrial events.
The moon, though? Transit times are measured in days. Even if the Soviets had gotten to the moon and, implausibly, managed to set up some sort of permanent base there, what could they have done with it? Short of using it as a staging area for a last-last-strike, it just doesn't have much in the way of strategic value (and submarines serve that function much more effectively).
Andrew,
It's not that the manned program in of itself had military objectives; it's that the technological breakthroughs related to the manned program had potential military applications, and control over the moon could have given the Soviets an unforseen decisive military advantage over the US, even if the chance of that advantage was remote. So national security considerations were the decisive factor in prompting JFK, LBJ, and Nixon to push Congress to fund the manned program to the moon.
I agree with you that both the Soviets and the US overestimated the relative military importance of gaining control over the moon (compared to gaining decisive advantages in ICBMs, nuclear armred submarines, and space-based early warning systems), but such paranoid misassesments were very common in nationsl security doctrines of the day. Don't forget that while we were engaging in a race to the moon with the Soviets, we were also fighting a proxy war with them in Vietnam. The national security doctrines of that day claimed that if we didn't send troops to protect South Vietnam from being taken over by the Communists, the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would cause the rest of Southeast Asia to fall to the Godless Reds like dominos, and once Southeast Asia fell, it was inevitable that Western Europe and even the US would fall. A national security establishment that believed in that scenario was certainly going to believe that if the Moon went Red, the Earth and the rest of the solar system would follow.
Although it's doubtlessly true that there were military applications to the technologies that were developed for the manned program, it's also true that if that were the primary goal, it would have been far more efficient to eliminate the astronauts from the equation. You don't need to spend all the time and resources for putting together a life support system for some primates in a can if all you want to do is deliver a nuke halfway around the planet.
The military technology that came out of Apollo was frosting on the cake and was not a central component of the military's own rocketry program. If anything, I think that NASA got more technology from the military than it gave to them (although I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
Your point about paranoia, however, is well taken. I can believe that many politicians, perhaps up to the President, honestly believed that Apollo was a strategically important program beyond its propaganda value. To the extent that this was true, however, they were mistaken, and I remain convinced that the reason that Apollo died is that once it's political value was exhausted, it quickly because apparent that there was no actual value in continuing to seek a human presence on the moon beyond the vague feeling that it's our "destiny".
If there was any lingering hope of reviving Apollo, I think that it died with the Mariner probes to Mars. Until that point, we could at least believe that the moon could be a staging area to reach Mars, assuming that Mars was worth reaching. Once it was inequivocably determined that Mars is just a gigantic desert that's literally full of rust, even that faint justification evaporated and, with it, so did any real motivation for going back.
The entire manned program, these days, is a solution desperately in search of a problem. It's telling that the best reason we seem to have left if that it helps us to study the effects of low gravity on the human body, which means that the justification for going to space is that it allows us to prepare for going to space. The recursiveness of that logic hurts my head a bit.
The great space race of the 60's was fueled entirely by political considerations. We were fighting a propaganda war with the Soviets and a moon mission represented a gigantic PR victory over the Russians, proving to the world that we had the economic strength and the technical sophistication to beat them to the moon. Once we reached the moon, funding a program that ate up, at the time, about 5% of the GDP no longer made any sense.
This needs way more emphasis than what it has been given so far in the thread. In the 1960s, the US population was living under the general pall of a multifaceted existential threat: American social, political, cultural, and religious structures, plus life itself in a worst case nuclear holocaust, were considered to be under threat from a strong and powerful competitor that held sway over part of Europe and SE Asia, and had designs and influence on Latin America.
The idea that the space race represented some Golden Age of can-do optimism, an unvarnished reaching forward to greater things, belies the fear that was driving things from behind, made more real by the fact that roughly a half-million Americans had been sacrificed in foreign theater within recent memory in order to stop a small-scale version of existential threat.
To put it into context, in the 1960's about 5% GDP per year was spent on the space program. Are we really going to spend $700B+ per year on the space program? Especially since the space program has the side benefits of teaching us proper rocket design which was extremely important for the military. This benefit was known before they even started the program, so what foreseeable benefits do we have coming out of a mission to Mars? It's not like in 1960 the idea of delivering bombs by rockets was some unheard of idea at the time.
I think you are mistaken.
Some time ago I added up the NASA budgets in the '60s. They totalled $93 billion. In the '60s the annual US GDP went from just under $600 billion to close to $1 trillion. $93 billion would have been 10% of one year of 1969's GDP. It would have been about 2% of the total GDP from 1962 to 1969.
We don't have to spend 2% of GDP. We didn't spend 2% of GDP on aircraft, or steamships, or railroads. We didn't spend 2% of GDP on X projects in the '50s.
A crash government project is the most expensive way to do anything. We don't need one. The emergency is past.
Make it simple to license suborbital flights from LA to Sidney, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul. Virgin Galactic could build bigger ships for regular passenger service.
Build rockets. Fly rockets. Build and fly some more. We'll get there.
blighter,
It is, indeed, great. But it is an achievement in keeping with a time of decline. It is an achievement that allows for the instant satisfaction of intellectual itches
Imagine you're a smart kid living in suburban Ohio in 1974 - even if you could ride your bike to the library there is going to be a limit to the amount of information you could gather about anything in particular. Now, imagine that same nerdy kid in 2009 - 10 years old with access to the internet - the amount of knowlege, and the ease of accessing tha knowlege, is orders of magnatiude greater.
You've got to take decline of civilization claims with a huge grain of salt. Every generation, throughout history, has had people claiming that this generation is a time of decadence and decline and that Golden Age (whichever golden age that might be) is receding into the past.
It's a view that's born out of a simplistic view of history, much contaminated by the tinted lens of nostalgia.
Very salient point.
And, as we all know from history, no culture or civilization has ever actually declined so every single one of those people was just whistling dixie.
The history of humanity has been one of unbroken progress from the earliest days right up to the present. Anybody at any point in history who ever said otherwise was just a simpleton contaminated by tired nostalgia.
I knew that response was coming.
Yes, civilizations have periodically declined, but that doesn't alter the fact that prophecies of doom are a hell of a lot more common than actual examples of doom. Hence the "grain of salt". The fact that one in a thousand chicken littles manages to scream that the sky is falling just before it actually does is not a reason to be especially concerned every time someone claims that the heavens are unstable.
I would also note that I can't think of any examples of civilizations that have collapsed because of some sort of cultural malaise that just made them give up trying. Actual collapses are usually the result of either external factors such as hostile neighbors or internal factors such as economic or environmental collapse. Civilizations usually collapse in spite of the best efforts of those civilizations to preserve themselves, not because they've grown "decadent".
Can you think of any historical examples where a civilization died solely because it lost the will to live?
Can I think of an example where a civilization collapsed because it lost the will to live and there were no other, more vibrant civilizations or cultures standing nearby to swoop in and pick up the pieces? Of course not.
Your entire thesis is akin to saying "I don't know anyone who ever died of an illness. Everybody who ever died, died because they suddenly stopped breathing. Can you think of anyone who died from just an illness without stopping breathing? I didn't think so. In fact, lots of people have claimed to have illnesses and lived a long time. So take any talk of 'terminal illness' with a grain of salt."
Vibrant cultures progress and move forward. When faced with external or internal threats to their continued existence,they have the energy to meet and defeat them.
Cultures suffering from terminal malaise like the late Western Roman Empire or, still later, the late Eastern Roman Empire, when faced with external threats equivocate and attempt to buy them off, anything but muster the will and focus to assert the primacy of their culture over the external one.
This can work for a while and the citizens of the declining civilization can console themselves that they are living at the pinnacle of their civilization. The fact that they can no longer fight a war to maintain themselves might almost be a sign of strength: "Look at us! Our ancestors used to spend countless denari and many Roman lives in useless wars against the Germanic tribes. But we are so much more civilized! We invite the barbarian hordes in and pay them to fight for us! We get all the benefits without any of the pain and cost of actually fighting for our civilization's survival! Truly this is a golden age!"
And, of course, the misguided nostalgic down on the corner ranting about how those Germanic tribes would one day utterly destroy the Empire was just a fool. The Empire had been around for a thousand years and had its ups and downs and there had always been people talking about threats and decline and it was still there. Nothing to worry about.
And because they lacked the cultural self-confidence and energy necessary to assert themselves over the threat, they ended up being defeated by it and then you get to say, "See? It wasn't the lack of will-to-live, it was just that this rag-tag band of barbarians was much more powerful than the Roman Empire. The Empire hadn't declined or become decadent, it's just that barely organized hordes happened to be much more powerful in this particular case. Can't chalk it up to decline at all."
Another example might be, as I indicated above, the Chinese Empire which hit its heyday with the Song and then limped through a couple more ever less impressive dynasties before finally being overrun by foreigners.
Here's the thing: we live on a planet full of people. If one culture gets tired of defending their right to a share of the world, another one will stand ready to take it over. This doesn't mean that the decline of the first culture was immaterial to their destruction at the hands of others.
Even with your effort to move the goalposts, I don't think that you can provide a credible example of a culture that "lost the will to live" and which was then absorbed by its neighbors.
I am not at all surprised that you raise the specter of the Roman empire, however, since that's the favorite analogy of doom-sayers who are all convinced that we're little more than Rome 2.0.
The idea that Rome collapsed because it had grown decadent or that it has "lost the will to live" is hideously simplistic reading of history that seems to be the product of a bad reading of Gibbons more than any actual history. The last I checked, there were some 200 competing theories for the root cause of the collapse with the general consensus being that it was complex and the result of a huge number of contingencies played out over the course of centuries (with some potential causes extending back to the roots of the original Republic).
The idea that Rome suffered from a "lack of vitality" and that this is was ended it borders on the mystical.
Beyond this, though, why are all of these comparisons invariably to Rome? What sort of valid mapping can one draw between our civilizations and Roman civilization that would be sufficient to not only draw contemporary parallels but to make predictions about the future (even to the point where you feel you can pinpoint which century we're recapitulating)?
Our culture is not Roman. Our politics are not Roman. Our religion is not Roman (even if you include the Christian epoch). Our values are not Roman. Our geopolitical situation is not analogous.
So why Rome? Why not compare us to the British Empire? Surely we have much more in common with Britain than with Rome but in terms of culture as well as shared history. Perhaps that doesn't suffice because the collapse of the British empire was insufficiently apocalyptic given that Britain remains a world power with significant (albeit diminished) political and economic influence even though it's colonial empire is long gone.
How about Egypt? Of course, Egypt lasted for thousands of years and never had a well defined moment of final collapse, so maybe that doesn't suffice for rhetorical purposes.
Of course you can draw analogies between Rome and our civilization, but you can draw analogies between any two civilizations, but it's much harder to find an analogy that actually illuminates the situation.
Looking over your posts, I have the distinct impression that you've decided that Western Civilization has passed its Apex and that collapse is imminent, but short of weak analogies to an empire that only has a superficial resemblance to our own, I haven't seen you offer any particular reason to believe that your cry of doom is any different from the endless sequence of people who have been predicting the End of Days ever since the beginning of days.
If the best you can offer is the observation that every once is a great blue moon, a cry of doom actual proceeds a collapse, you'll have to excuse me if I don't share in your sense of foreboding.
I certainly don't think that the fact that we've given up on the blatant white elephant that was the Apollo program says anything more than the fact that you really can't expect a nation to keep throwing 5% of it's GDP into a gigantic pissing contest forever.
I'm not sure you know what "moving the goal posts" means. You had moved the goal posts by insisting I find an example of a civilization that just up and went to sleep without any kind of final attack from outside or inside.
Now you're moving the goalposts by apparently suggesting that b/c we're not an exact map of Rome, the Roman example holds nothing for us. And besides, Rome's decline was much more complicated than mere lack of vitality.
You'll get no argument from me there. The roots of and influences on the decline of once thriving civilizations are every bit as complicated as the civilizations themselves, which is to say unknowably complicated.
I didn't mean to suggest that I feel some evil demon stole Rome's mojo late one night and that the same imp has identified early 21st c. America as so like Rome that its mojo must also be stolen.
The causes of our own decline are prob. even more complex than Rome's, given that our Civilization's story has been more complex.
I believe I've also hinted at parrellels to the decline of the Chinese from thier world-leading heights in the Song Dynasty to their sad-sack, backwater status in the later Ming and Qing dynasties before what was undoubtedly a cataclysmic-seeming event for the Chinese of the last emperor being forced out by foreign barbarians.
That said, pointing out that the British Empire has more or less successfully managed their decline does not actually refute me, to my way of thinking. You see, unlike the Roman Civlization, which was very nearly completely governed in one political entity, Western Civ. has several. The decline of the great European powers was the start of the slide. Their decline was offset (and facilitated) to a great degree by the simultaneous rise the U.S., the last and greatest power of Western Civilization. So the fact that Western Civ. did not disappear when England declined does not argue against a decline in the overall civilization. (This could be considered some of that vaunted 'complexity' I'm always leaving out in quick comments on blog posts.)
As to violent collapse, I don't know that the future of Western Civ. will hold some sudden apocalypse. Just as likely, I could see the long, slow decline with bits and pieces spiraling off into other civilizations' spheres of inlufence and every step of the way folk like yourself objecting to anyone characterizing any of these intermediate steps as 'decline' all the way until so much time has passed that everyone can agree that there is no such thing as Western Civ. anymore but no one can name a specific date when 'the end' came.
This would be the pattern that Egypt followed. Indisputably, Egypt's civilization is lost. Equally indisputable is the fact that much practical knowledge -- not to mention culturally specific knowledge like myths, stories, plays & music -- was lost with them. Much like China's history to date, there were numerous foreign governments interspersed with native rule. The Egyptian civilization seemed to persevere admirably through all of these, maintaining its distinctive culture, government & language. Until eventually it didn't.
Was it over when the Ptolemies ruled? They were Greek but established themselves firmly in the pharoanic line, though much of the ancient Egyptians' engineering skill was already forever lost. Certainly by the time the Arabs began to rise under Islam and assert themselves in Egypt, what one might think of as "Ancient Egyptian Civilization" was gone.
At any rate, I couldn't give two toots on a tin whistle whether you agree with me that Western Civ. has crested its apex or not.
I didn't say that it would end in fire and misery, merely that it is in decline and there's no reason to think that the decline won't continue until it's gone. Perhaps there will be a sudden, violent collapse. Probably not. Either way, our current apparently unstoppable technological progression will in all liklihood not long continue as the decline steepens.
But I have no worries that there will be plenty of folk like yourself standing by to assure me that as we turn away from new discoveries, as we flinch from confrontation in protection of our interests, as the machinery that powers our daily life wears out and we find other things to focus on than its repair or replacement, that none of this in any way means we have declined. That we are still a world-straddling behometh.
Were I an immortal, I'm equally sure that in some far future time in a very different civilization, I could get in the same discussion with someone like you and raise Western Civ. as an example and have it pooh-poohed away as completely irrelevant. Everyone would know -- then -- that the causes of western decline were complex and manifold and the entire example is in no way relevant to anything else.
Very well, Blighter, you're convinced that we're in decline.
I'm skeptical of your ability to make such a confident claim. I'm particularly skeptical of the claim that we're any such a technological decline given that we've just lived through an unprecedented revolution in information processing and management that has no analog to anything since the invention of the printing press (and which puts that invention to shame in terms of improving accessibility to knowledge).
But whatever. As I've said repeatedly, people have been predicting that the end is neigh for a damned long time and the fact that every so often one of them is right doesn't much impress me, but that's neither here nor there.
If this is what you think, then this is what you think. My own feeling is that history is a highly nonlinear system, so much so that any analogy you attempt to draw between civilizations is not only going to be imprecise, but actively misleading. History is not a science (as the Soviets eventually learned) and I don't believe that it's subject to prediction before the fact and I think that the dismal record of futurism and prognostication bears me out.
Be that as it may, you are welcome to your own beliefs on this matter.
Absolutely true.
Or he might end up becoming the world's foremost expert on the intricacies of World of Warcraft metaphysics. Or he might lose himself in the tidal wave of celebrity vapor. Or he might become a basement-dwelling pornography addict.
The very act of having to go interface with actual human beings at the library would give him something perhaps equally as valuable as raw information: some guidance in what is worthwhile to pursue and what is a pure waste of time.
I submit that the great liberation of information represented by the Internet allows infinitely more narcisstic wastefulness than it does unbridled genius roaming free across the highlands of human knowledge.
One can make that argument for pretty much every technological advancement in human history. Yet the general record of achievement is that it gets used both ways, and in the end, humans have merely found another way to be human.
A widespread condition of ease and comfort may well predicate a general decline, as people allocate more time to self-indulgence and less time to basic survival schemes, but that strikes me as a different level of argument. Most tools are not, in and of themselves, evil; and tools designed for good uses can be put to evil uses and vice versa.
This is true and I do sincerely hope that humanity as a whole can maintain its forward momentum with respect to science and technology even as Western Civ. slips into the ash heap of history. The tools we are even now, in the beginning throes of collapse, still creating would be powerful indeed in the hands of a confident, young civilization intent on pursuing a purpose. It's only in the tired hands of Western Civ. that such wonders are turned to decadent ends.
My worry, though, is that when prime civilizations have faded to collpase in the past, much of their accumulated knowledge, even practical knowledge that should not necessarily have been tied to one particular culture, was lost. And obv. Western Civ. has been a good deal more 'prime' than any preceding civilization. My fear is that the loss of knowledge accompanying its collpase might likewise be the largest in history.
On the one hand, we create more copies of... well, just about everything than any civ. in history before us. Meaning there would have to be a lot more destruction to lose much of our accumulated knowledge. On the other hand, as we fully transition to the digital age we simultaneously make copies easier to create and permanently destroy.
At any rate. I do hope that humanity bucks history and manages no more than a hiccup in the wake of Western Civ. rather than the dark ages that followed Rome in Europe or led to centuries of stagnation in the wake of the most vibrant Chinese Dynasties.
Either way, I think large-scale space travel (including a second moon shot) is exceedingly unlikely until Western Civ. has been fully replaced by some new, go-go, up-and-comer civilization with the confidence to start expressing itself in more frivolous ways like that. Which is just a long way of saying that if you're interested in space travel more meaningful than the useless space hotel we've got going now (the ISS, which seems to exist to give us a destination for the shuttles and the like, which themselves seem to exist only to get us to the ISS...) then I'm sorry to have to let you know that you'll likely only live to see us slowly grow too incompetent to even continue the current charade of a space program and you will certainly not live to see a resurgent human presence in space.
blighter,
How old are you?
Older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze...
How old do you think I am?
blighter,
How old do you think I am?
I'm thinking 53.
An interesting guess.
I've always felt I had an old soul, I suppose I now have proof.
The very act of having to go interface with actual human beings at the library would give him something perhaps equally as valuable as raw information: some guidance in what is worthwhile to pursue and what is a pure waste of time.
Or, he could sneek into the back corner of the library and read Portnoy's Complaint over and over again. Porno addicts have long existed before the internet.
As have conspiracy theorists and folk who lose themselves in games or other useless diversion, no doubt.
I do feel that there's something of an amplifying effect with the internet, however.
First, there's the ease of access.
Second, there's the sense of community between people who would otherwise perhaps give up b/c nobody they know cares as much about proving that the President is a manchurian candidate who was not born in Hawaii as they do. But online they discover that they are part of a movement.
Third, and related to the second point, there's the endless escalation that's possible. Yes, there were pornography addicts, but the kid obsessively reading Portnoy's Complaint is probably better off than the kid who is rapidly descending through the various fetishes catered to in extreme detail online.
Another example might be gambling. There have always been gambling addicts, but it was less likely, perhaps, that some kid would go to college and end up spending 16 hours a day playing poker simply because it would have been difficult for most kids to find a round-the-clock poker game willing to let them sit in that long.
The very act of having to go interface with actual human beings at the library would give him something perhaps equally as valuable as raw information: some guidance in what is worthwhile to pursue and what is a pure waste of time.
I remember going to libraries before the Internet as we know it existed. They weren't the bastions of human interface you make them out to be. There were signs telling you to be quiet.
You're right about the actual human beings part though... no one on the Internet is a real human except you.
It seems fantastically unlikely that relatively is going to be wrong enough to allow us to have FTL travel.
As I understand it...while nothing can travel through space faster than light - there are no limits on how fast space itself can travel.
You've been reading too much sci-fi. I don't think that phrase is even meaningful, let alone a usable guide to engineering a FTL craft.
Alsadius,
I think it all comes down to how much we don't know.
Oh, hey, something might be waiting in the weeds that lets us take lunch in the Andromeda. Until that happens though, I'd rather leave phrases like "how fast space itself can travel" to the Star Trek writers.
I disagree that getting to orbit is inherently too expensive.
It costs about the same in energy to reach orbit as to fly from LA to Sidney. The biggest cost difference is that we don't push a 747 into the ocean after each trip to Sidney.
We also have an army of technicians involved in each trip. Even hideously expensive military aircraft like the SR71 didn't do that.
Apollo was an important campaign in the cold war. It convinced the Soviets not to go head-to-head with the West in any technological contest. The TU144 Concordsky only reinforced that lesson.
Nevertheless Apollo was a detour. Technology, like economics, behaves much like an ecology. Any technology requires an ecosystem of supporting technologies.
Aircraft required not only a thorough and systematic study of aerodynamics but also lightweight, powerful engines. People like Otto Lilienthal experimented for decades before the Wright brothers put all the pieces together.
Railroading needed cheap steel for rails and high pressure steam engines. Cheap steel required cheap iron ore and coal. Those required low pressure steam engines to pump out the mines. High pressure steam engines needed high quality steel. People experimented with horse drawn trucks on wooden rails, but railroads weren't practical until all the pieces came together.
Apollo, and the Shuttle after it are kludges. Magnificent, glorious, kludges.
The Air Force X projects might have ended up flying into space. The X15 program awarded astronaut wings. Congress cancelled Dyna Soar. Perhaps the Air Force named it badly?
Still, projects like Blue Origin carry on the work of DC-X. We may yet ascend and descend on a tail of fire, "As God and Heinlein intended."
There are also beanstalks. The superstrength materials may in fact be in reach. If not, there are always workarounds.
Even if none of those things pan out, I take comfort in the fact that we developed H bomb technology to the point that we can build Orion (not the new NASA program, but the original) if we really need to. It's hard on the launch site, but if we ever absolutely, positively have to lift heavy things to orbit, we can.
Though the environmental impact of Orion launches might be just a little problematic.
I for one don't want to fill out the environmental impact statement.
That's why it's not the first choice.
Biggest reason for a moon base, really. Nobody cares if you irradiate a lifeless ball of rock. Only applies if you have a really long way to go, of course, but still.
i guess i would ask the economist between us (and thus mean you) how will we be paying for it?
How did we pay to develop steam engines, or the internal combustion engine, or aircraft? Sure, a few wars hurried them along, but there were not crash government projects. That's the last thing we need.
We need to get NASA out of the space access business. Shuttle has been the cuckoo in the spaceflight nest.
While I would very much like to see a manned mission to Mars I doubt I ever will. Mars ain't the moon and as some have noted our technology has not advanced much beyond the Apollo era in terms of space travel.
We were lucky with the moon landings as well and it wasn't a one off affair. If Apollo 11 had failed the resources were available to try again. Mars is going to be a lot different affair in terms of getting humans there ( and back). It won't be a one week journey into space it will be at least 18 months or longer. Everything necessary to sustain life for that time will have to be carried on board. This will require building something not unlike the current space station to begin the mission as well as carry with it a habitat for the crew to live on Mars as you can't just land there spend a few days or hours and return.
The planets have to be aligned properly and this would require any Martian landing team to spend several weeks at a minimum there.
So we are talking about an enterprise far larger in cost and scale
than Apollo and with a much lower chance of success given the complexity and duration of the mission.
Space travel is going great. Look at the Mars rovers, which are a spectacular success.
Manned space travel, however, is a disaster and always has been. We don't have the technology. The entire Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were a perfect example of compensating for insufficient technology with massive amounts of money, and it's still the case.
The primary driver of cost for a space program is getting the payload off of Earth. It's fiendishly expensive. If you have to choose between:
A living person + life support (air, food, water, sanitary and safety systems) - I don't know what the total mass is, but let's say 200 kilos per person.
AND
A 10 kilo computer system
Which do you pick?
NASA says, the living person! No bloody wonder the aren't getting anything done.
The real answer, Megan, is that we have to dispense with manned spaceflight until we can find a less than extremely expensive way of getting mass into orbit. Until then, we can do wonders - if we can take the money out the Space Shuttle and other useless programs and put it into remote probes.
Robotic missions are fine but, even here, we are going to need heavy lift rockets of the sort NASA wants to develop to even continue robotic
exploration of space.
Let's take Mars. We've had a number of robotic missions and the data they have returned is tantalizing. The little rovers traveled about and
found evidence of long standing liquid water. The larger Phoenix probe
found water ice just under the polar surface. Methane gas has been detected by orbiting spacecraft. So life could have begun on Mars and it may still exist under the surface but to find out we are going to need much larger more capable robotic probes on the Martian surface. Landers that are mobile, capable of drilling not just scratching the surface and carry a suite of instruments that can analyze the samples collected. This is going to require something not much different in size and mass than what the Saturn V put on the moon. So, even to conduct future robotic missions we will need a launch vehicle of the size and power to also conduct manned missions.
At some point you'll need a really versatile, self programming robot on site. The finest kind we know of takes nine months unskilled labor plus 3 decades or so to program...
I don't want NASA to own spaceflight any more. Look what they've done with it. Where's D. D. Harriman when we need him!
Oh, that's right. His name is really Jeff Bezos, or maybe Richard Branson, or maybe Paul Allen, or John Carmack...
Or Elon Musk, or ...
In our universe, D.D. Harriman was
incarnated as Andrew Beal, and he
was defeated by NASA's subsidized
launch costs:
http://www.bealaerospace.com/
The SF authors of the Golden Age were well aware
that the Rocket Equation required something better
than chemical fuels for practical spacecraft,
particularly Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO).
Their error was assuming that the US would go for it.
By the time the Eagle landed, they knew better:
NASA chose NERVA over DUMBO, used nuclear power for
scientific deep-space probes, not commercial SSTO.
Instead of the future they wrote about, We got the
Crazy Years, and a False Dawn for space flight.
Now, with the Mother of all economic necessities
stimulating our inventiveness, we have one last
chance to bring launch costs down, and make a ton
of money in orbit, and beyond. :)
Repetition, for emphasis, to the tune from "Cabaret"
Money makes the world go around
of this we're really sure
Pfht! on being poor.
P.S.
For any Venture Capitalists who may be reading:
Check it out; The Tech is there; The Imagination,
and the Nerve, not so much. Would you rather lose
money on a good bet, or to taxation and inflation ?
P.P.S
Dr. Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor has a variant
for deep-space propulsion - if you can pry it loose
from the Navy, and the Feds.
I'd like to build a nuclear reactor some day. Don't think my HOA would approve though :(
The good folks of Galena, Alaska,
are doing just that, if the Feds
will let them.
Really? Why? We've had guided robots going into such hostile environments as active lava flows. Are you saying that at some point there will be a 'need' for a human to on site in that environment?
You don't have an hour of round-trip signal lag from the controller's base to the lava floe.
We are not the people who are going to colonize the planets. Whatever it takes to do that, we don't have in our culture. We don't want to have it in our culture.
Maybe the Chinese, in 50 years. Maybe the Indians in another century. Maybe some unguessed descendent culture in another millenium. THEY'LL have the right (or necessary) stuff. They'll seed the heavens with people who have the instincts and traditions to fill the solar system and expand to the stars. They won't be 21st Century Americans; they won't think much of our society, and we probably wouldn't find much to admire about theirs. But they'll do the job we couldn't, and no one is going to miss us anyhow. Fleeing into the ratholes of history was our choice.
mike shupp we are not worthy
Cheer up; As an early Boomer, 1946 model,
I would sign up in a Texas time tick;
More to the point, the HS students my
wife teaches would too; Not all, not most,
but enough; Gideon's Band;
Let all the other people go.
A new Age of Exploration, and, more importantly, Colonization, will likely require a theology commensurable with the one that drove the last one. Those who landed at Plymouth Rock were not known as Pilgrims for their affinity to John Wayne.
Should life make it off this planet, and given the record of life on this planet, that looks a good bet, the one event of our time that will be remembered for ages unimagined will be Apollo - the opening of the seed of life to put forth its first shoot.
If Christianity too survives, a prospect that looks less doubtful now than it did at the time of Apollo, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the coming of Christ will come to be conflated with Apollo, given the relatively short timespan between the two events and the remarkable progression of new learning (logos) in that interval - a progress not unrelated to that coming, for those with eyes to see it.
Likewise, there are parallels to be found between the opening of Genesis and the baptism of Christ in Mark's gospel, which could suggest to those inclined to find such an interpretation that the Earth is to the Universe as Christ to Man - baptised with the gift of life; inspired to share it.
"Four years before I was born ..."
That's a significant point. I'd bet that about half the US population was born after July 1969. For them, it's old history - if not ancient. All of the astronauts are now geybeards, grandfathers, way past the normal retirement age.
For those of us that were there, it's disappointing and disheartening that it's been 40 years since we made that trip.
A few voices are saying that we should leave the return - if there is any - to private ventures, that the NASA program was a great boondoggle.
But the thing is, there was a Part II to JFK's vision: " ... and bring him safely back to Earth". Thousands of subcontractors, thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians worked round the clock for years to make sure that Part II came about.
Nowadays, private enterprise could probably do it - and that's only because those thousands of bright people - them too, all greybeards and grandfathers - laid the groundwork. The Russians did it because we did it first and proved that it could be done.
blighter: "I will bet you $1000 current dollars (that is to say, the winnings will be inflation adjusted) that mankind does not return to the moon before 2020."
The way Obama's leading us, it's safe to say that by 2020 we'll be traveling in stagecoaches and moving produce by horse-drawn trucks.
...
As far as getting outside the solar system goes, forget it - at least until we evolve into the next level of civilization. A few months of zero gravity, and all your bones turn to mush. I suppose you could use spin to create artificial gravity, but the Coriolis force would drive the travelers batty.
And a 2 - or 3 - or more - year trip in a vehicle the size of a greyhound bus (that's the inhabitable part) will drive them a lot further than batty.
There may well be Moon bases, but for anything further out, we're going to have to figure out how to work things out down here.
As far as all that information out on the Web (often confused with the Internet) goes, if you take really good notes, you'll find that there's about an equal amount of disinformation.
And since critical thinking seems to be the last thing anybody wants to teach in school, there's not a lot of hope for the next generation of learners.
But at least, we'll have produced a generation of really talented MRPG players.
"And since critical thinking seems to be the last thing anybody wants to teach in school, there's not a lot of hope for the next generation of learners.
But at least, we'll have produced a generation of really talented MRPG players."
In other words, self-taught critical thinkers. There are plenty of people who want to teach critical thinking in schools, it's just that the antiquated organizational structures perpetuated by reactionary teachers unions and their enablers make the path of least resistance something else.
Bust that trust.
All you naysayers are gonna feel pretty stupid when we find the first abandoned Hechee hive full of abandoned Heechee prayer fans.
The entire Apollo program cost about 100 billion dollars in 2009 dollars.
NASA wants 80 billion (to start) to go back.
Apollo landed on the moon 6 times plus a number of other missions. NASA is talking 80 billion for 1 visit.
Anybody who thinks government can do something efficiently should think about that. Despite all the advances in computers, materials, etc in the last 40 years, its more than 5 times more expensive in real dollars to fly in space.
I can think of cheaper ways to send people to play golf and drive dune buggies. Why retread old ground? Thats money we could spend researching something like fusion or space elevators that will _at worst_ provide the human race with important insights into new materials and the respective science, even in failure. At best they change the world forever and make a jaunt to the moon as simply and cheap as flying to Tokyo.
So then you'd be okay with manned orbiters then, right? No need to actually set foot on Mars as long as the time lag is small.
If it costs half as much to put someone into Mars orbit as it does to put them on the ground, yes. In practice, I expect it's pretty much a matter of "Well, if we're going that far, might as well finish the job".
Some comments:
1. Getting to the asteroid belt or Mars is about as difficult as getting into orbit, it just takes longer. A single, common asteroid could easily contain millions of tons of useful elements. And mining them won't pollute the Earth. Imagine an orbial refinery that could purify the materials in zero g then either send pure ingots of material down to Earth or ship them over to a zero g manufacturing facility that makes products and then drops them down to Earth.
2. We are hardly at the peak of rocket capability. NASA has alternate designs that are potentially more efficient. Space planes can help launch rockets. Heck, we could launch satellites and other components using giant mass drivers. Ultimately, a space elevator would be the most efficient way into orbit.
3. Read Robert Zubrin's A Case for Mars. He shows that it would be just as easy to go sraight to Mars as it would be to stage in orbit or on the Moon. And once at Mars, accessing asteroids is that much easier.
4. From a national security standpoint, a kinetic energy weapon based in high orbit or on the moon could deliver nuclear weapon levels of kinetic energy anywhere on Earth. Imagine a mass driver on the moon. It could launch solid slugs made from lunar material and obliterate targets on Earth. It wouldn't be quick but cities are notoriously slow to move out of the way.
5. X-prizes are the way to go for government research. They fund results, not effort. If no one takes an X-prize, then up the amount or offer a one-time grant to jump start entrants. You obviously can't offer a space elevator X-prize but you can offer one for materials that are strong enough to build one out of.
6. The bottom of the ocean is incredibly hostile. If you were to build a habitate in 10,000 feet of water (average ocean depbth is about 12,000 feet), you would first have to make sure it was strong enough to withstand 4,500 psi of external pressure. That's over 300 times atmospheric pressure. If your habitat were to spring a leak, the jet of water would cut you in half. Not to mention that the entire structure might just collapse the instant a crack formed. I've seen a video of an ROV cutting an empty pipe on the bottom of the ocean (containing 1 atm). A crab wandered over to the saw just as the cut broke through. The crab was sucked through a tiny hole by the pressure. On screen, the crab vanished. Metal in salt water acts like a battery, so you have to worry about corrosion even with stainless steels and other non-rusting materials.
We experienced a failure of imagination and will. The best suggestion I've heard is to go the route of X-prizes. That way the government only pays when the objective is acheived and minimizes bureacrats.
We could be alot farther along. Sea Dragon is but an example.
From 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
Or project Orion. Get the book, it is a good read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Or if you can find it, "The third idustrial Revolution" G. Harry Stine. This covers environmental and economic beneifits.
I also recommend Jerry Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out"
His website is here.
www.jerrypournelle.com
I'm going to teach you a game;
It is played with a pea and
three walnut shells. :)
In this case, the pea stands
for ROI, in 4-8 years, from
a Venture Capital start-up
business in LEO: Solar Power,
Vacuum Nanoelectronics, mass
produced Graphene, whatever.
Everything else in this thread,
however well-intentioned, is a
dangerously distracting shell.
"Getting to the asteroid belt or Mars is about as difficult as getting into orbit, it just takes longer."
True- but that simply disguises the key fact that it is HUGELY expensive to get things into orbit, dwarfing most everything else you may want to do, and increasing geometrically with the weight required.
"A single, common asteroid could easily contain millions of tons of useful elements."
Sure, but everything you would need to send up to mine that asteroid ends up costing far more than anything you could get. It would undoubtedly be far cheaper to dig deep into the earth to get those elements.
"Heck, we could launch satellites and other components using giant mass drivers. Ultimately, a space elevator would be the most efficient way into orbit."
Absolutely, and things like that will ultimate making going to the moon or mars or the asteroids as simple and cheap if you like. So why in gods name don't we spend the money we would spend on the Moon and Mars NOW and invest in those technologies, thereby not only making the space travel insanely cheaper, but also changing the fate of the entire human race by solving our energy problems with orbital solar fields?
This decision is kinda like spending 100 billion dollars to research a cure for cancer, or spending 100 billion dollars on a cancer research museum. Why not invest in the one that is DOING science instead of reminiscing about it?
Wow, an admission that "the most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed" came from a government agency.
I'll have to remember that the next time a Libertarian tells me that government can't do anything good.
NASA got Apollo to the moon by pushing it there with a (giant) firehose of money. It was an emergency. We were in a competition with the Soviet Union for political power in the world. The Space Race was a campaign for prestige.
Government is a tool for solving certain kinds of problems. Some are collective action problems. Other kinds include problems that have to be solved now, whatever the cost, such as being invaded.
Government is not to proper tool to get humanity to the stars.