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

It was obviously a cool thing to stick a man on the moon. It will probably be groovy to get to Mars. But, having watched the TV series 'The Planets' recently, I reckon the best things we've done in space so far have been done by sending probes.
The flybys of the outer planets by Voyagers 1 and 2 brought back some amazing pictures - especially of the weird moons around the gas giants. And probes cost relatively little compared to the budgets for manned missions. In about 2015 we're going to get pictures of Pluto and the big cosmic car park of comets and stuff beyond it thanks to a probe launched in a few years.
Is it only me who thinks this kind of thing is lust as interesting as a few lucky bods bouncing around on the red planet?

Well, people can do a LOT more than robots can. The most successful unmanned lander was Mars Pathfinder, which basically trundled around and analysed some rocks, taking a few months to do it. People could do that in an hour. A manned landing on Mars would tell us more than any number of robots, and encourage technological development on Earth (just by building the spacecraft!) Unfortunately it would cost a fortune. Humans are generally more effective, but expensive to send.

I think the main reason for exploring with people is so that we can attract the attention of suitably advanced aliens. Like in Star Trek 8 when they meet the Vulcans. Then we leech the technology all the way.

I think its all a big effort from NASA and ESA and others to justify their continued existance for the 21st century, and get loads of dosh from Joe Taxpayer. That might sound a bit cynical, but there has been a lot of talk about what their strategy actually is, and nobody has yet been able to come up with a convincing argument.

I do actually think it would be worthwhile for humans to go to Mars, but only really in the context of the population explosion on this planet. Colonization of other planets may well be an option in the future.

Until then I am happy to watch Mars from the safety of my TV....

I agree with you that it would be worthwhile to send people to Mars. But actually I don't see it related to a population explosion.

Imagine the costs of sending enough people to Mars to relieve the population pressure over here.
It would be tremendous (you would not be making a difference if you only sent a few million people, you would have to send billions (people that is). If you really would like to take the pressure of earth you would have to send people not if the overpopulation is there, but years before their offspring could become a problem. An earth that is struggling with too many mouths to feed would hardly have the resources available to send many people to Mars.

The reason why i think it would be worthwhile to send people to Mars is the technological advances (or maybe just engineering solutions) that would hopefully accompany a mission like that.

All of you are forgeting the way flight was achieved in the original books. You see, humans are exelent for flight because they can forget to fall. But, any human that has the mental abilaty to forget somthing so fundimental as falling will often forget to breath when they leave the atmosphere. So, unknown to most, the Russians conducted topsecret experiments in the early 60s attempting to design a computer controled spacecraft that would forget to fall. Unfortunately, the computer in the proccess of forgeting to fall, forgot it was a computer and assumed the name Bill Gates. It settled in the united states where it built a robotic body it could use to take over the world. The russians canceled the project but not before trying to create a hamburger that would forget to be digested. (They sold the prototype to Mcdonalds)
Now back to the issue at hand, Probes vs people. People are generaly stupid horny and dangerious. Machines on the other hand are merely stupid and dangerious. Probes win right? Wrong. You see, probes are designed to survive in space while humans are designed to survive on the ground. Scientists are now talking about sending robotic mining craft to mars or the moon. When robots are far away from man and can produce more of there own kind what do you think will you think they will do? Rebel of cource. Soon the universe will be controled by giant machanical space probes who will eventualy blow up our planet to provide raw materials. Because none of us would like that I say that we keep sending out humans, just not humans that work for Bill Gates.

Can probes spell as well, cos humans can't

If all you want from a space program is information then probes are a perfect choice. If on the other hand you want to colonize the universe then you will have to send at least a few humans. You could in theory colonize the entire galaxy at sublight speeds in a few hundred thousand years. Also colonizing America did not releive the population of Europe.

Shouldn't we solve our difficulties getting along on Earth before we start exporting ourselves to other planets?

I see space colonization as more of an escape hatch. Like in colonizing America, the people who went were frequently running away from somthing they didn't like: the local religion, or the fact that the law was after them, or something. It may well be rather like Ben Bova's Moonbase series, in which religious nuts have a thing about nanotechnology. Those who disagree basically bugger off to the Moon and leave all the guys on Earth to drown in their own crap. Going to the Moon looks more like a way to run away from Earth's problems, rather than a solution.
And about HHGTTG flight: it's not forgetting to fall, it's missing the ground. Now the only way to miss the ground, considering how big it is, is to be going forwards so fast that by the time you've fallen, the surface of the planet has curved away below you, so you circle the planet in free-fall all the way. In orbit, as it happens. But I suspect NASA might be upset if you suggested that the principle of their spacecraft was 'missing the ground'.
Anything else...? Oh yes, galactic colonization. No way will we be able to build starships any time soon. We can work out how much fuel it would take, based on a perfect matter to energy conversion engine, and turns out that it's an awful lot to get to relativistic velocities (can't remember the details, but it's in 'The Physics of Star Trek') and unfortunately superluminal velocities (wormholes, Alcubierre warp drive) look like being impossible. But we could go by comet. Hollow out a big comet and live in it. They're made of a mixture of water ice and organic compounds - which is all we need. We can extract deuterium from the water and use it to power fusion plants, then electrolyse the water to hydrogen and oxygen. We can synthesize food from the organics, possibly via modified plants. Then we can feed all that waste hydrogen into the fusion plant and fart it out the back at high speed, accelerating the comet out of the system. There's no way it's going to get to another star in a person's lifetime, but their grandchildren might see it. By then there'd be great population pressure, but there'd also be a comet cloud around the star system that they could colonize - the surface of a sphere perhaps a light year in radius. We could abandon planets entirely and live in comet clouds, and each community could, if it wished, leave for a new star system. Exponential growth would see to it that we'd soon fill the Galaxy.

Maybe because we are not doing enough to sort out this world is reason enough to consider interplanetary colonisation? Agreed, there isn't much to go on apart from perhaps Europa (and of course farting comets), but what if we have put Earth into a positive feedback global warming cycle, a bit like the situation on Venus, then anyplace would be better!

All of you are iether Special prosicutors, or engineers, I can not decide which.

If we are going to use people to colonise space they will have to be made of "the right stuff." The best way to achieve this is to design/engineer them. First of all we need little people. Less mass to have to be carted around by your propulsion system. Next we should deal with the big problem of space outside of the magnetosphere, ionising radiation. The tissues which are most easily damaged by this are the ones with rapidly dividing cells. So get rid of hair follicles, get a very slow bone marrow, get rid of the digestive tract (feed will have to be taken intravenously) get rid of gonads (sensitive to radiation and stops our drone humans from creating there own dynasty where they land. The CNS does not make new neurones as an adult therefore our drones would be allowed a brain, larger than ours if we like. The end result will be anaemic and quite weak. But should be relatively long lived and resistant to the effects of radiation. It would also coincidentally resemble descriptions of "greys" in the tabloid media.

I don't think the idea of colonizing other worlds or such like has been thought through very well, in so far as relieving population pressures.

The most heavily populated regions of this Earth are the third world, however it is likely that should technology for a partial exodus of man become available it will originate in America. Should this be the case I can't see them sharing such powerful knowlege to any other country alowing them to build thier own ships and so conquer space for themselves. I also can't see America building a ship and saying to the third world 'step on board and we'll ferry you into space'. Not that anyone would trust them and 'step on board' anyway fearing whether the ship would survive.

Far more likely is that small numbers of Americans and some allowed Europeans will set off on a journey to the stars. The countries they come from will not of course then allow third worlders in to relieve thier problems, oh no. So we'll be left with an even bigger divide between the population densities of the 3rd world and the 1st. Not relieving in the slightest the largest population pressures on the planet.

All the above is true, but any colonisation won't reduce the population unless it is done on a massive scale, as the human race compensates for great losses - the European population increased during both World Wars, despite millions being killed. The only thing that reduces population successfully is mass starvation or pandemics. Depressing but true.

I seem to remember reading 'Rendezvous with Rama' by Arthur C.Clarke at some point.
He posited a huge hollow sphere as the means of travel.
On arrival at its destination, or just some groovy bit of the galaxy, great big vats of organic soup would start churning out lifeforms.
A very cool alternative to freezing people, but not particularly human as a concept.
I remember when I read it I thought it was a great bit of SF hokum like one of those old Amazing Stories comics.
Then I remembered that Clarke foresaw satellite communications, so maybe the old 'space-bound-human-pot-noodle' idea has legs.

In the later episodes of the Rama series (Rama II, Rama revealed), he explained the organic soup creatures and then added even cooler beings like those octo-'things'. But the coolest were the sybiotic pair that began as a netting substance holding a load of eggs (of both types of creature) and growing them at will so the two will support each other in the society they create. That would be an even easier way to travel, deposit our genetic make up in unfertilised eggs held by the netting and then firing the stuff off at a habitable world somewhere out there. When the child begins to grow the netting imparts our knowledge and identity and low, we have a low need, quick to grow, durable, educated, group of colonists.

I didn't know about the other Rama books. Cheers for the info, I'll look out for them.
On a slightly different tack, how do people feel about this long message we're due to be sending at a couple of solar systems a few tens of light years away? Are we extending a hand of friendship or just sticking up a big fat neon sign saying 'please come and invade'.

I get this weird sensation that there are all these super-advanced civilisations out there looking through their telescopes at all these stars with little links under them. When they click them they arrive to find 'civilisation under construction, please come back when it's finished'.

Could be dangerous I guess, if they spoke English (or anything resembling our own language, have the same gravity as us, look at world through exactly the same part of the electromagnetic spectrum, are faintly humanoid, are roughly the same size as us, and are capable of faster-than-light interstellar travel, which frankly, is pushing it a bit. I mean we can't even have a frank and meaningful conversation with our pets (not even with apes whom we share 98% of our DNA), not to mention beings who share none of our DNA structure and live on worlds possibly vastly different to our own. We should look at the diversity of life on this planet in order to think about the diversity of intelligent life on other planets. Oh yes, and they should smell like us too...

I agree that the majority of the scientific welth we own has come form probes. But without manned spaceflight I doubt there would even be a space program! Manned space flight can stir peoples ammotions, you'll never see thousands and thousands of people lined up to see some probe launched. This isnt the case with manned space. People rush to see a launch, without that there is no human presence in space-

AstroMAN