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> sustainability and care about the environment The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, n

> sustainability and care about the environment The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, not because someone cared about the environment. The first solar cells were invented in the 1880s, and were so inefficient -- less than .5%! -- they were little more than a scientific novelty. They stayed this way for 70 long years, until Bell Labs began researching them as a source of power for satellites in the 1950s. Space is an extremely demanding environment, and it's precisely those demands that actually drive the development of technologies that enable us to radically reduce our environment impact on the Earth. Human beings living on the Moon or on Mars will need to reuse and recycle everything imaginable, for instance, creating closed-loop systems where there is little to no waste. They will have to grow food in ways that recycle nutrients instead of destroying topsoil. They will have to be able to make extremely reliable products, and they'll have to be able to reuse and repair these items in ways we will never have the incentive to do in a disposable consumer economy. It's simply not economically efficient to develop those kind of technologies terrestrially. It's cheaper to dump obsolete electronics and ship them to some impoverished part of the world, like rural China, where they contaminate the ground water and poison the air and the residents.( http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste ) The planet is big and human labor and human life is cheap here. Recycling is optional here. Up there, it's not. It's only the extreme demands of manned space that will drive these sorts of advances. It ain't just about shootin' rockets up into the sky.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Completely agree on the point that putting hard constraints like living in space is a good driver for reusability and sustainability - tech that can be put in use on Earth later. But let's look a little deeper why pollution is happening in the first place. Don't you think that people's greed and desires of having more and more things contributes to this at least a little? Overconsumption? Short-term profits? But what if we can fix _that_ at least a bit? Now that's a question I'm much more interested, since I believe it can have real effect and stop the runaway consumption culture.
- cftm 9y ago
  Of course peoples greed contributes to this problem. Each and every one of us have some suspect ancestors in our gene pool. It's how evolution works, so saying "But we're greedy and we need to fix that first" seems silly to me - you're fighting millions of years of evolution. That doesn't mean that I want to see unfettered capitalism, but these problems won't go away by sitting around a camp fire and singing Kum Bye Ya My Lord. Our consumer consumption culture won't change until it has to, whether that means folks going into space and living in an incredibly demanding environment or it becomes untenable on this planet. Wish it were different, but that's just how this stuff works.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  There is money to be made in space (such as mining asteroids), but I don't think that's the biggest driver of going into space. If it was, you'd see much more emphasis placed on unmanned space travel. What we have instead is people motivated by exploration. When people first travelled to the North Pole, South Pole, top of Everest, etc... they didn't do so out of greed, I'd suggest they did it 'because it was there', for the challenge and wonder of experiencing somewhere new. Colonies on Mars is kind of a grey area, only because Mars isn't the final destination, there's plenty more in this solar system/galaxy/universe to explore. There are some people who probably see it as just another place for humans to take over, but I'd suggest those aren't the pioneers, they tend to be the ones that come in later once the risks are reduced.
scriptkiddy 9y ago
It's kind of sad how people fail to realize how much of the modern technology they take for granted may not have ever been invented if it weren't for various space programs around the world. Beyond that, I personally believe that NASA and the Soviet Space Program already saved the world once by allowing the US and the USSR to have a public competition in the midst of extreme nationalism. Without the space race, who knows if we would have been launching ICBMs instead of Apollos?
alexandersingh 9y ago
Your point and the OPs are not mutually exclusive. It's sad to think that we may soon have the capacity to colonize other planets, yet remain incapable of calming the handful of petty & destructive emotions that plague us.

wavesandwind 9y ago

Completely agree on the point that putting hard constraints like living in space is a good driver for reusability and sustainability - tech that can be put in use on Earth later. But let's look a little deeper why pollution is happening in the first place. Don't you think that people's greed and desires of having more and more things contributes to this at least a little? Overconsumption? Short-term profits? But what if we can fix _that_ at least a bit? Now that's a question I'm much more interested, since I believe it can have real effect and stop the runaway consumption culture.

cftm 9y ago
Of course peoples greed contributes to this problem. Each and every one of us have some suspect ancestors in our gene pool. It's how evolution works, so saying "But we're greedy and we need to fix that first" seems silly to me - you're fighting millions of years of evolution. That doesn't mean that I want to see unfettered capitalism, but these problems won't go away by sitting around a camp fire and singing Kum Bye Ya My Lord. Our consumer consumption culture won't change until it has to, whether that means folks going into space and living in an incredibly demanding environment or it becomes untenable on this planet. Wish it were different, but that's just how this stuff works.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
There is money to be made in space (such as mining asteroids), but I don't think that's the biggest driver of going into space. If it was, you'd see much more emphasis placed on unmanned space travel. What we have instead is people motivated by exploration. When people first travelled to the North Pole, South Pole, top of Everest, etc... they didn't do so out of greed, I'd suggest they did it 'because it was there', for the challenge and wonder of experiencing somewhere new. Colonies on Mars is kind of a grey area, only because Mars isn't the final destination, there's plenty more in this solar system/galaxy/universe to explore. There are some people who probably see it as just another place for humans to take over, but I'd suggest those aren't the pioneers, they tend to be the ones that come in later once the risks are reduced.

scriptkiddy 9y ago

It's kind of sad how people fail to realize how much of the modern technology they take for granted may not have ever been invented if it weren't for various space programs around the world. Beyond that, I personally believe that NASA and the Soviet Space Program already saved the world once by allowing the US and the USSR to have a public competition in the midst of extreme nationalism. Without the space race, who knows if we would have been launching ICBMs instead of Apollos?

alexandersingh 9y ago

Your point and the OPs are not mutually exclusive. It's sad to think that we may soon have the capacity to colonize other planets, yet remain incapable of calming the handful of petty & destructive emotions that plague us.