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"No scientific value", eh? If you contemplate the implications of that statement for the briefest of moments you will be staggered by how wrong you are. Explor

"No scientific value", eh? If you contemplate the implications of that statement for the briefest of moments you will be staggered by how wrong you are. Exploration leads to discovery. Medical discoveries of the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew, previously unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice, and unknown unknowns that we can't yet imagine. Necessity is the mother of invention. Men in space necessitate certain things: filtration systems, radiation protection, extracting water from Mars and the Moon economically, advanced materials, robotics. Terraforming Mars is one of the end-goals of human space exploration. Humans in space are an incentive to do so. Earth has finite resources, and an expanding population. This is science that we ought to contribute to. Manned space exploration also causes people to be interested in space, to pursue degrees in science, and to contribute to research here on Earth. That being said, you must surely admit that contributions to science can be indirect as well as direct, and that manned exploration of space provides both. I am not in any way an expert on space exploration, but there are a great number of highly knowledgeable people who would love to elucidate the situation for you. ##astronomy on freenode has a bunch of bright people in it. Talk to them, or maybe #space, or take a trip to your local planetarium, museum, or university; get an opinion from someone who has some specific knowledge so that you can engage in debate from an informed perspective, rather than, say, rigidly adhering to things you thought up on the toilet while listening to political talk radio.

andrewcooke 17y ago
If you throw money at any hard problem you will get technological advances. They are a by-product of doing something hard. But if you choose the actual task to be one that is useful, you also get the results of the task. So yes, throwing money at space exploration will get you some advances as by-products. But so would throwing money at, say, fusion research, or extremely high speed ground transport, or nanotech, or, heck, I dunno, synthetic (biological) life... and you'd have the chance of getting something useful as a direct product. I worked in astronomy, which is also pretty pointless from a practical point of view (and also has close links with space research). A lot of effort is put into making things look pretty and exciting exactly because people believing - for no sound logical reason - that it's a wonderful thing is what keeps the money rolling in.
vrode 17y ago
I agree with you on the point about inspiration for the interested people (and I am one of them, so I can feel that). But I doubt that some of these people realize clearly what happens to the American economy. How long do you think it will take for a space program to pay off for your commitment? How long will it take for it to start reducing American debt? What scientific breakthroughs have manned missions brought? And I mean examples, when more advanced robotic technology couldn't do the same? What do you learn about propulsion by sending a human into space? The scientific gain is marginally limited to the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew. Your prospects like "unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice" I believe are 'thought up' by definition. And what I mean is all that can be done by robotics. There are only a few areas where human perception can be a reference instrument. That might be in fields of interaction with otherworldly life. But we haven't encountered it yet. So I think that by talking about space exploration, you actually refer to space tourism. And this is not a matter of science, this is a job for the commercial industry.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
Manned space exploration also causes people... to pursue degrees in science There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and every other former postdoc. Like the Moon landing itself, the shortage of trained scientists is a problem from 1958 which has long since been solved. What there's a shortage of is research funding that would put our existing pool of trained scientists to work in science. To fix that -- if, indeed, fixing that is a high priority -- we need money for science, not nostalgia trips or cargo cults. I went to school with astronomers. They did their work with the usual tools: Telescopes, computers, pencils, paper, and coffee. Commuter trips to low-Earth orbit, let alone the Moon, were not required. Even the planetary scientists are very successful as telecommuters: Robot probes worked pretty well in the Voyager missions of the 1970s and they work even better now. And I'm always entertained by the claims that manned missions to the Moon or Mars are some sort of important step toward "terraforming Mars" or "mining the asteroids for their precious, precious metal" or, god help us, "the stars". If going somewhere were a meaningful step toward terraforming it, I'd buy a ticket to Antarctica and plant some pineapples. And to say that Mars (0.00024 light years away, on average) is meaningfully closer to the stars (4 light years away or more) is literally like saying that one side of my house in Massachusetts is meaningfully closer to London, England than the other. If you want to carry out a plan to, say, terraform Mars, shouldn't you work on that? Maybe you could start with a cheap but useful theoretical model of terraforming? Then convince someone with money that the model is practical? Then build a pilot system that can, say, grow palm trees in Siberia without a greenhouse? [1] And only then bother to spend billions of dollars to actually take such a system to Mars? In the same vein, even if human travel to the stars were possible [2], the secret to interstellar travel isn't going to be discovered in space. It's going to be discovered by someone doodling on a napkin in Pasadena or Oxford or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then it's going to be prototyped on Earth, and then it's going to be tested with robots. --- [1] Not that this isn't several orders of magnitude easier to do. [2] Which it is not, for any reasonable definition of "human" and "travel": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

andrewcooke 17y ago

If you throw money at any hard problem you will get technological advances. They are a by-product of doing something hard. But if you choose the actual task to be one that is useful, you also get the results of the task. So yes, throwing money at space exploration will get you some advances as by-products. But so would throwing money at, say, fusion research, or extremely high speed ground transport, or nanotech, or, heck, I dunno, synthetic (biological) life... and you'd have the chance of getting something useful as a direct product. I worked in astronomy, which is also pretty pointless from a practical point of view (and also has close links with space research). A lot of effort is put into making things look pretty and exciting exactly because people believing - for no sound logical reason - that it's a wonderful thing is what keeps the money rolling in.

vrode 17y ago

I agree with you on the point about inspiration for the interested people (and I am one of them, so I can feel that). But I doubt that some of these people realize clearly what happens to the American economy. How long do you think it will take for a space program to pay off for your commitment? How long will it take for it to start reducing American debt? What scientific breakthroughs have manned missions brought? And I mean examples, when more advanced robotic technology couldn't do the same? What do you learn about propulsion by sending a human into space? The scientific gain is marginally limited to the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew. Your prospects like "unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice" I believe are 'thought up' by definition. And what I mean is all that can be done by robotics. There are only a few areas where human perception can be a reference instrument. That might be in fields of interaction with otherworldly life. But we haven't encountered it yet. So I think that by talking about space exploration, you actually refer to space tourism. And this is not a matter of science, this is a job for the commercial industry.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Manned space exploration also causes people... to pursue degrees in science There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and every other former postdoc. Like the Moon landing itself, the shortage of trained scientists is a problem from 1958 which has long since been solved. What there's a shortage of is research funding that would put our existing pool of trained scientists to work in science. To fix that -- if, indeed, fixing that is a high priority -- we need money for science, not nostalgia trips or cargo cults. I went to school with astronomers. They did their work with the usual tools: Telescopes, computers, pencils, paper, and coffee. Commuter trips to low-Earth orbit, let alone the Moon, were not required. Even the planetary scientists are very successful as telecommuters: Robot probes worked pretty well in the Voyager missions of the 1970s and they work even better now. And I'm always entertained by the claims that manned missions to the Moon or Mars are some sort of important step toward "terraforming Mars" or "mining the asteroids for their precious, precious metal" or, god help us, "the stars". If going somewhere were a meaningful step toward terraforming it, I'd buy a ticket to Antarctica and plant some pineapples. And to say that Mars (0.00024 light years away, on average) is meaningfully closer to the stars (4 light years away or more) is literally like saying that one side of my house in Massachusetts is meaningfully closer to London, England than the other. If you want to carry out a plan to, say, terraform Mars, shouldn't you work on that? Maybe you could start with a cheap but useful theoretical model of terraforming? Then convince someone with money that the model is practical? Then build a pilot system that can, say, grow palm trees in Siberia without a greenhouse? [1] And only then bother to spend billions of dollars to actually take such a system to Mars? In the same vein, even if human travel to the stars were possible [2], the secret to interstellar travel isn't going to be discovered in space. It's going to be discovered by someone doodling on a napkin in Pasadena or Oxford or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then it's going to be prototyped on Earth, and then it's going to be tested with robots. --- [1] Not that this isn't several orders of magnitude easier to do. [2] Which it is not, for any reasonable definition of "human" and "travel": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...