h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So the shuttle Endeavour has lifted off from its launch pad again. (once more with a lady teacher on board).

I watched all the moon shots, getting up at ungodly hours to watch speckly black and white TV footage for the Apollo 11 mission.

But with all the problems we face here on earth now, can anyone justify the cost and continuation of the space programme, and particularly the International Space Station?.

Is there some value in that orbiting laboratory which is helping us to predict or reverse climate change, or is it an attempt to emulate some sci fi authors, and get some of us off the planet before it is to late?

Is the learned science of value in helping Earth solve it's problems, or is it just a exercise in "we can do it"?

What do other posters feel about the whole NASA enterprise?

Novo

The dinosaurs didn't have a space programme.

As for the specific question re: NASA, would you rather the human race's sole manned representation in space be Communist China? Because those guys WILL be on the moon within 20 years. And they won't mess about planting flags and playing golf. They'll build a base. And good for them.

All our species eggs are in one planetary basket. That is simply not sustainable. We have the technological infrastructure now to start building a spacegoing civilisation. If we don't start now, we could well p**s away the fossil fuels we have left doing pointless stuff on the surface. We get one go at this. We have to do it.

SoRB

Morning SoRB

Interesting reply.....

<< All our species eggs are in one planetary basket >>, so it is an attempt to get us off the planet ( or some of us )before we become extinct then?

And no, if that is the true objective I would rather 'we' were in the game.

Interested to hear what fuel source you expect a spacegoing civilisation to use, not that of the USS Enterprise I presume.

"But with all the problems we face here on earth now, can anyone justify the cost and continuation of the space programme, and particularly the International Space Station?."

Yeah, let's scrap it. Don't need it. Don't need tennis either, let's scrap that. Or h2g2, so why are we posting? Should be out saving the world dontcha know!

I agree fully with SoRB on this, we all know what problems we're facing down here. Out there, we can't have the first inklings of what solutions, or indeed further problems, we might find.

(As an aside, I watched that shuttle launch last night and remember turning to my brother and saying "Bet someone's sat there clicking their tongue and muttering "Carbon Footprint" over and over to themselves.)

"Interesting reply....."

Thank you.

"so it is an attempt to get us off the planet ( or some of us )before we become extinct then?"

I don't think the space programme right now is actually geared towards that specific goal, any more than the Wright brothers were envisaging EasyJet. The point is, to get to EasyJet, you have to do the Wright brothers bit.

And the *only* long term future any species has is in space. A single planet is simply too vulnerable and volatile an environment.

"And no, if that is the true objective I would rather 'we' were in the game."

"we" are in the game, long term. Humans, that is. Short term, I'd just, I think, prefer it if at least one democracy had representation in space.

"Interested to hear what fuel source you expect a spacegoing civilisation to use"

The point about fossil fuels was this: they're a finite resource. There've been predictions of "peak oil" for years, and dire warnings about what will happen after it. Forget that, and take a longer view. Think in centuries instead of decades.

We've been extracting and refining fossil fuels and metal ores *on an industrial scale* for what? Two centuries? We have, realistically, perhaps two more where that is possible. After that, there simply isn't any easily extractable energy or metal down here to allow the sort of infrastructure that allows luxury products like spacecraft.

However, if during that window of opportunity you develop space travel properly, it opens up other sources of fuel and metals, on the moon, in the asteroids etc. BUT if you miss that window of opportunity, you don't get another go. If we get two hundred years or so down the line and we aren't mining asteroids, we never will. Which is why we should support every faltering step towards that.

Personally, I think civilian space tourism is a distraction from this aim, but if it finances it, fair enough. I'd give anything to go into space, but I'd hate to think I did so simply to go there and gawk. I'd want to achieve something.

As for what fuel a spacegoing civilisation would use, the universe is teeming with energy. Solar power if you're close enough - in space a solar panel could reasonably be miles across and tissue thin.

Human civilisation will progress in steps, I hope. Right now we exist in a tiny volume, a thin skin on and slightly above the surface of this one planet.

In a hundred years, there may be a sustainable colony on the Moon, and the beginnings of one on Mars.

A hundred years after that, those colonies may even approach self-sufficiency. At the same time, habitats in orbit round Earth, the Moon or Mars could start getting going. When there are self-sufficient colonies, humanity becomes immune to asteroid-impact extinction. That's where we need to be.

Sooner or later, ships will be built which could realistically house a community of generations. At that point, which may not be for a thousand years, those ships stop needing to be near a star, so the fact that they're sub-FTL is irrelevant. They just set off in some direction and keep going. They don't even need a destination, necessarily. At that point, humanity becomes immune to stellar event extinction. Enough of those ships tooling about the galaxy, and humanity is immortal.

Is there a higher purpose than that?

SoRB

For a short-term argument,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis

7½ times the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza; 1/9th the size of the one that landed in Mexico and saw off ¾ of all life on Earth. Probably not going to hit us, but since the possibility exists that it, or any one of tens of thousands like it could, it's got to be worth investing 1/9th the cost of the 2012 Olympics, or 10 Jerry Bruckheimer movies, to pay for NASA to at least FIND it, never mind the fraction of the world's nuclear brinkmanship that would pay for NASA to learn how to protect us from it if necessary.

*generally agrees with SoRB*

Speaking of the wright brothers: If the gawking space tourism thang goes towards funding more enterprising people like Burt Rutan and the SpaceShipOne team then quite frankly, go gawkers go gawkers go...

Hi SoRB

Another fascinating return post...., but this time with a touch of Arthur C Clarke or Robert Heinlein thrown in.

Given that you are right, and that space explorationand ultimately space travel is our only hope ( as a race ) we need one or two answers.

1 How do you propose to drive the craft you postulate without Di-Lithium Crystals. Solar wings generating electricity would be increasingly useless as one left the solar system.

2 Who do you think would be 'chosen' to go, and by whom, or do you feel a two by two method like Noah's would work?

3 On a pointless journey, with no defined end, is it not possible that all on board a spacecraft would become 'loopy', and if held in cryogenic suspension , what is the point of going along?

4 Worse still, in a way, would be a vessel big enough to contains several thousand 'passengers'. They would have to be Governed presumably, so Thank our Lucky Stars TB or George W won't be along .

I admit that your theories are stimulating but I reckon there are many many problems to overcome. OK, I was there with the Lunar programme,i can see the viability of a modest Lunar Base, and I am a little up to speed on a Mars programme, but whilst we are still using the old shuttle I would be concerned that NASA simply keeps asking for funding to stay in business.

Novo

"1 How do you propose to drive the craft you postulate without Di-Lithium Crystals."

Dilithium crystals are an invention of sf to give the Enterprise something rare and hard to find to run out of for dramatic effect. What they actually do is "moderate" the reaction of matter and anti-matter in the warp core. They do this because they are porous to antimatter.

All of which is of course nonsense because M/A reactions can't be moderated, and no form of matter is "porous" to antimatter. So leaving treknology aside...

"Solar wings generating electricity would be increasingly useless as one left the solar system."

Yes, of course. Fusion is the obvious choice. We will at some point build successful fusion reactors. When that happens, fuel is literally lying around pretty much everywhere you look. Barring some bizarre zero-point energy-from-a-vacuum type thing, fusion is the power of all the future.

"2 Who do you think would be 'chosen' to go, and by whom, or do you feel a two by two method like Noah's would work?"

Go where? The Moon? Mars? The Belt? Deep space?

At first, the military and scientists, chosen by governments. Later, colonists, chosen by governments and corporations (if those are separable by the time this happens). Eventually, anyone, chosen by themselves if they can scrape together the cash.

You might similarly ask who got to go to the New World. At first, a combination of governments sponsored military missions, privateers and then colonists. There's a higher barrier to entry to space right now, but it won't last forever.

"3 On a pointless journey, with no defined end, is it not possible that all on board a spacecraft would become 'loopy',"

How would such a journey differ significantly from life on a planet? There's six and a half billion of us just going round and round and round and round and round the same star, year in, year out. How pointless is that?

"and if held in cryogenic suspension , what is the point of going along?"

Never mentioned cryonic suspension 'cos I don't believe it'll ever work on humans.

Consider: until relatively recently it was possible for members of rural communities to be born, grow up, live, breed and die without ever travelling more than 20 miles from their place of birth. Such existences continued for thousands of years. You'd not need to build a particularly huge spaceship - something maybe two or three times the size of Babylon 5, say - to make a pleasant rural life possible basically forever, assuming you stepped hard on anyone who exhibited wanderlust.

"4 Worse still, in a way, would be a vessel big enough to contains several thousand 'passengers'. They would have to be Governed presumably, so Thank our Lucky Stars TB or George W won't be along."

Sf inventions fall into a number of categories:
1. Impossible. In this category are things like teleport devices.
2. Indistinguishable from magic, i.e. we have no idea whether it's even possible, let alone how we'd do it. FTL travel, Ringworlds, gravity generators, inertial dampers.
3. Incredibly advanced but recognisable. Casual use of fusion power, seamless integration of biology and technology.
4. Advanced but achievable potentially this century.

In this latter category I'd put strong artificial intelligence. As soon as you have a recognisably intelligent machine as smart as a human, set it to work designing something smarter. And when you get that, ditto. And so on. Before long you have something capable of governing perfectly, maximising the happiness, wealth and benefits to everyone. I would hate to think we'd advanced to the point where we could build generation starships and we'd still allow mere humans to govern us.

"I admit that your theories are stimulating but I reckon there are many many problems to overcome."

With respect - duh. That's why we should be doing it. That was the question in the first place, right?

"OK, I was there with the Lunar programme,i can see the viability of a modest Lunar Base, and I am a little up to speed on a Mars programme, but whilst we are still using the old shuttle I would be concerned that NASA simply keeps asking for funding to stay in business."

The shuttle is near the end of its life. Reusable spacecraft are a dead end, it seems, for now. What we should really be investing in is a space elevator...

Hm, interesting points all round, methinks.

WRT to the "generation ship" thing, I think SoRB's answer to question 3 was a better answer to question 4 as well: why is governing a community of space-fairing travellers any different from governing a small community of non-space-fairing ones? No doubt we'll still be struggling to find the right balance between anarchy/mobocracy/freedom and centralism/totalitarianism/wisdom; no doubt there will be lots of suggestions. Most likely, there will be lots of ships, and each one will develop its own ideas, just like the countries of the world...

I particularly strongly disagree with the idea that strong AI is in any way a predictably achievable goal - intelligence isn't a matter of degree, so the fact that we have computerised chess players and self-driving cars in no way means we're getting "near" to the kind of AI that could solve the age-old conundrum of human governance.

Actually, my Dad and I were talking the other day about a philosophical argument as to why we not only couldn't explicitly design something equivalent to our brain/mind/intelligence in complexity, but couldn't recognise it if we did - but that's probably topic-drifting a bit...



Oh, and on the subject of "democracy", I'm not sure I'm all that bothered whether it's Communist China or Corporatist America that takes the lead in space - neither society will stay the same forever, and if we're talking about the benefits to humankind on a scale of centuries, it will make very little odds. To use a neat analogy mentionned earlier, EasyJet would likely still exist if the Wright Brothers had been Chinese. But I guess if it's a good thing for anybody to be doing it, it's good thing for more than one organisation to be doing it - to spur on by competition, and hopefully to share their advances, too...



Oh, and for the whole "destiny in space" thing, read 'Parable of the Sower' and 'Parable of the Talents' by Octavia Butler - mostly because they're really good books!


[IMSoP]

*EasyJet would likely still exist if the Wright Brothers had been Chinese* Yes, but they would pronounce their names differently...

I knew I had arrived at the real-life version of Heinlein's universe when I walked down the street and saw a poster for this:

http://www.hitcharidetoouterspace.ca/

(I'm not the only one with that revelation):

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1137

The money is going to be spent, the places are going to be reached, it's merely a question of by who (whom?) and when. The sooner the better I say.

Scrap all the manned space missions - it's a complete waste. It gains no scientific knowledge that couldn't be obtained more easily and cheaply using remote. If we really want manned missions someday, or a fabulous moon base, let's use remote probes now to figure out how we can make it sustainable and feasible.

The real science of astronomy is slowly being strangled under the budgetary constraints imposed by the manned missions.

I think the China Vs USA point explains exactly why this is being approached in the wrong way.

By far the greatest danger to man is man himself. By making it an American mission, or a race against Russia, or get there before the Chinese you guarantee there will be losers - and losers have been known to be irrational.

It has to be a whole planet project - or stop it now - before the war starts.

It was precisely the race between the Russians and the Americans that got us to the moon in 1969. Maybe there is a risk in seeing this as a competition but the rewards are high - to everyone, not just the eventual "winners".

A million years or so ago when humanity began to spread out from Africa should we have abandoned the quest just in case there was some conflict between the new territories that were colonised? "Oh I don't think we should venture north of the Zambezi because in a million years there could be a big fight between lots of countries that don't exist yet".

Either way it WILL be a whole planet project - either we venture out into the universe or we stay until we are annihilated by some catastrophe.

F

I recognise that competition drives man - however if we seriously want to spread beyond our current ball of water, then I'd suggest that we need to develop the values of co-operation.

We all know man is the nastiest killer on the planet, but he is also capable of the most selfless acts of sacrifice.

There has to be more than one driving force - SoRB said it - the Chinese will do it - because they don't care about the humanitarian aspects of life - and who will they send into space ? Do you think it'll be doctors or soldiers ?

My gut reaction to the initial question of this thread -- with all the problems here on earth, etc. (right after I thought "didn't this get laid to rest in the '60s and '70s when the same question was asked ad nauseum") -- was

With all the horribly expensive and/or horrible problems here on earth -- military spending, hunger, extinction, global warming, etc. -- why is anyone even noticing the piddling expense of the world's space programmes, particularly considering the wondrous scientific discoveries that are steadily flowing from these programmes?


I will, however, admit that the ISS is sort of pointless and the shuttle has been, to put it mildly, a huge disappointment.

I can't "Fathom" what the reward was from "US" reaching the moon actually was. Can anyone explain?

How about the we learn how to deal effectively with foot-and-mouth disease before making fancy moon bases? I'm sure there would be some practical application for that, no?

It's a no-brainer (even for me). There are always going to be terrestrial torments that put pressure on mankind's resources, and provoke antagonism towards the expense spent on space research. Fancy moon bases might be a luxury but no amount of funding for virus research, carbon reduction, flood defences or the war on terror will matter a jot if a big rock pops in, kicks up enough dust to blot out the sun for years afterwards, and we haven't made provision to understand and establish expertise to prevent it. Sorry to be a stuck record about it.

PS Mankind probably emerged from the Rift Valley, a fair stride north of the Zambezi. It's *south* you need to avoid, just ask the local wildlife.

but what's more likely, that asteroid collision, or any of the most far-fetched terrestial concerns?

The likelihood is that it has happened, and it will happen again - in fact we are long overdue statistically.