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I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spen

I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spend the money more wisely, for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming. Why do we need to make the exception for space and get drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration, when the rest of science is usually about sobriety and utility. Where is the sober calculation that space exploration is more effective than other ways of spending research funds?

Quarrelsome 9y ago
because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.
- zatkin 9y ago
  We can't even cope with the environmental issues that we have on our own planet, so we avoid that and instead look to plaguing the rest of the solar system and beyond? Good grief.
  - HarkMamilton 9y ago
    Environmentalism isn't an excuse to give up on every other aspiration humanity might hold.
    - justinator 9y ago
      I personally would vote in favor of putting space exploration on hold until we get a handle on the quickly accelerating environmental disaster we humans have set up that seems that it may just wipe ourselves out. Personally. One needs beauty in the world, yes, but one also needs to breathe.
      - HarkMamilton 9y ago
        Environmentalists will never be satisfied. There is always something to improve. If humanity dies or goes pre-industrial because someone engineered a supervirus and we refused to put effort into space travel, all our conservation efforts won't really matter much.
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        This doesn't make any sense though, as there's no reason they should be exclusive priorities. I, personally, would vote in favor of putting many things on hold until we increase humanity's resilience to catastrophic events by settling on other planets, but I recognize that priorities aren't mutually exclusive. Anyway, what's the point of focusing all efforts on Earth if human civilization is going to die out here anyway? That's the path we're currently on, and stopping space exploration isn't going to magically fix that. Wanting other baskets for the egg of human civilization is just pragmatism.
  - marvin 9y ago
    You could have said the same thing about literally any exploratory initiative since humans first started using tools 50 000 years ago. Spending some tiny portion of resources expanding the scope of human presence does not preclude attacking more immediate challenges.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    Good grief Columbus, you aren't even competent enough to round the Cape. Why would you go west?!
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    We learned a whole lot about the greenhouse effect by studying Venus...
  - thebooktocome 9y ago
    What if space based Earth science is what it takes to solve our environmental issues? Sagan's Blue Marble has done more for environmental preservation than decades of armchair environmental activism.
  - simonh 9y ago
    Are you suggesting that not going to Mars will solve all our environmental problems? This isn't an either-or question. If we really wanted to, there's no reason we couldn't do both and they're is a blocking issue for the other and some of the technology and science for both are complementary (planetary science, solar and battery technology, environmental control, automation).
  - simonh 9y ago
    Are you suggesting that not going to Mars will solve all our environmental problems? This isn't an either-or question. If we really wanted to, there's no reason we couldnt do both and they're is a blocking issue for the other and some of the technology and science for both are complementary (planetary science, solar and battery technology, environmental control, automation).
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    It's not the technology to tackle environmental issues that is lacking, it's the political will. Not going to space doesn't magically solve the problem of entrenched carbon-emitting interests having the power to block a short-term mandatory transition to renewable energy. Given that, it absolutely makes sense to colonize space, as Mars can't be ruined in the same way that we're ruining Earth, and the petroleum mining industry won't be coming along for the ride.
  - digikata 9y ago
    Research is needed, it's hard to predict, and Development for space forces the movement of practical, envelope pushing movement of research and theory into at some hard problem solving in ways that just more research doesn't accomplish. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells Space isn't solely responsible for solar cells, but I can't help but note these entries in the timeline. 1950s - Bell Labs produce solar cells for space activities. 1954 - On April 25, 1954, Bell Labs announces the invention of the first practical silicon solar cell 1958 - T. Mandelkorn, U.S. Signal Corps Laboratories, creates n-on-p silicon solar cells, which are more resistant to radiation damage and are better suited for space. Hoffman Electronics creates 9% efficient solar cells. Vanguard I, the first solar powered satellite, was launched with a 0.1W, 100 cm² solar panel. Would the solar cell technology we enjoy today have developed as quickly or at all with that little extra push of space investment to move it along? Would the research ever have ended up as practical without hard engineering problems to solve along the way? I think you'll find similar connections for fuel cells, and battery tech. You see metals research now which is applicable for the space application first, but the engineering knowledge will likely get re-applied in more expanded mundane applications in due time...
  - scythe 9y ago
    Yeah, we're going to plague a bunch of inanimate objects, and defile the sanctity of the asteroid belt. It amuses me that "atheists" have decided life itself is a plague threatening some great holy Natural-Universe. Your distaste for the people around you is showing. Dunno if you've heard, but this Universe is condemned. In about a hundred trillion years it'll run out of hydrogen and burn out. Might as well enjoy it while we can.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    People who view humanity as a plague upon the Earth definitely won't want us spreading elsewhere.
escribmac 9y ago
I think that trying to reach difficult goals will spark new innovation. Also, it's not like there's a direct trade off.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chrismealy 9y ago
I don't get it either. When it comes to manned spaceflight rationality goes out the window. Humans living on Mars makes about as much sense as homeopathy. I think it's some kind of nerd religion.
Eerie 9y ago
>Space hostile Earth is hostile, too. A large part of human civilization is dedicated to making Earth more hospitable for humanity than it is in its natural state. We can do the same for space. >Space empty Only in a sense that a large container with a single fist-sized diamond is empty. It is empty on average. It contains an incredible amount of resources. Our solar system could easily house trillions of people (in O'Neill cylinders). >for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming We already spend much more on these, than on space research.
cannonpr 9y ago
Do you want to build a safer basket ? Or invest in two baskets and split your eggs ? To some extent that is one argument, however space research in it's own right has generated a safer basket as well, as most engineering research is highly reusable. A lot of environmental problems for example could be solved via space based power generation that is beamed down.
kbyatnal 9y ago
Do you have any idea how many of our modern technologies were developed as a direct result of the space program? New technologies were needed to go into space and many of them have become essential for our lives. MRI, LEDs, Anti-Icing Systems, Artificial Limbs, Land Mine Removal, Firefighter Gear, Water Purification, Pollution Remediation, etc etc...the list goes on and on. Studies estimate a $7-$14 return on investment for every $1 of NASA expenditure. Source: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html
- paulcole 9y ago
  Everything from watchmaking to watch repair!
- valuearb 9y ago
  Wow, you are saying if you take a massive pile of money to hire a bunch of the smartest engineers away from private companies and pay them to solve problems, they'll do it? And if NASA didn't exist, and these engineers instead worked for less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial businesses, they'd invent nothing?
  - 0xffff2 9y ago
    Anecdotally, my group at NASA has seen several of our smartest engineers leave for the private sector in the last couple of years. They are all making heaps more money, but not one of them is doing the kind of innovative research that we do at NASA.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Yea, their research will now actually ship.
      - sqeaky 9y ago
        NASA is obligated to share their work with Americans. Many products ship with tech NASA invented that probably would not have been shared if a private enterprise came up with it.
tynpeddler 9y ago
Space probes may be cheap but they are slooooowwww. Most of the research done by spirit, opportunity and curiosity could have been done by a trained astronaut in an afternoon. As an example, in its 2623 day mission, spirit traveled less than 5 miles. Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. Some of you may be thinking, 'Hold on a second, if you took the money for manned exploration and poured that all in to rovers, surely you would get even more science done than humans could possibly do!" Perhaps, but I would argue that the research done to support the manned exploration should be counted in the scientific haul. Meaning that currently, for ten billion dollars, we could shoot rovers to every corner of the solar system using current rocket technology. But if we spent that ten billion dollars sending people to mars, we would have to develop new rockets, new infrastructure, new habitation technologies, cosmic radiation shields and much more. All that technology, plus the knowledge we gain on mars would be more valuable than simply sending rovers all over the solar system, partially because all that new technology would probably make it easier to later send rovers all over the solar system. In addition to the above, there is also the massive pr power of putting people on mars. Everyone in the world knows Neil Armstrong, but no one cares much about luna 2.
- jldugger 9y ago
  > Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. But how many rovers can you get for the price of one round trip space party?
  - codys 9y ago
    It's fairly hard to figure this out. What follows is a really bad comparison between Apollo & Curiosity, which completely ignores tech advancement, the difference between a moon flight and a mars flight, the length of time for each mission, the amount of data collected, and a whole lot of other stuff. The cost of Apollo program in 1973 was reported as ~$25 billion. In 2016 dollars, ~$135 billion. The Apollo program made 6 manned landings (I'm going to ignore non-landing missions as we're talking about rovers & consider them part of the development cost for the program). The curiosity mission was reported as costing $2.5 billion in 2011 ($2.6 billion in 2016 dollars). So with some really bad math (as noted earlier): - dollars per manned moon mission = 135/6 = 22.5 billion - dollars per unmanned mars mission = 2.6 billion - For the cost of 1 manned moon mission, we could have ~8 (22.5/2.6) unmanned mars missions.
TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Space is empty? I don't understand. In practice we have explored space to see new worlds. Things are far apart but there's lots of stuff in space.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
HarkMamilton 9y ago
Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright. We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one. If we don't get to space now, we will probably never get to space. Then it's only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid. Or we'll just get killed by an engineered supervirus and skip the whole pre-industrial decay phase. Going into space is our insurance policy.
- njarboe 9y ago
  There is still an amazing amount of coal in the ground. Check out the Powder River Basin in the US which, for one example.
  - Spellman 9y ago
    While true, it's also crazy expensive to extract.
    - njarboe 9y ago
      Not really. Wikipedia says that the USGS extimates that "At a price of $60/ton, roughly half (48%) of the coal is economic to produce." Current prices are near $10 a ton so only highly mechanized shallow strip mining techniques are profitable. Coal is about as valuable as other bulk earth products like sand and gravel. 19th century techniques could easily mine most of this coal. It is shipping, not extraction, that determines the price of coal at a given point on Earth. Civilization might need to restart near the mines, but there are still many of those places left. Oil on the other hand. That might be a problem.
  - eropple 9y ago
    There's a lot of it there, but it's hard to extract without modern technology. There's a little peat (arguably the most accessible type of high-energy fuel) left in the British Isles and Finland, but coal is requiring progressively more and more modern effort to extract.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Most people felt the same way about the Atlantic Ocean.
njarboe 9y ago
"Space hostile and empty." This is a feature, not a bug. There is a small fraction of humanity that has the desire to do very hard and physically dangerous things. Another fraction who greatly enjoy empty spaces and prefer having great influence over the culture they live in. On Earth, very hard and dangerous can be found, but the activities are either recreational (mountaineering) or involve hurting other people (military, criminal life). Physical empty spaces are still around on Earth, but culturally empty spaces are gone. All land on Earth is either claimed by nation states or must remain unsettled by treaty (Antarctica). Have a small sub-set of humans desiring to leave the over-crowded tribe and cross that river, ocean, or desert for the chance to start their own tribe/civilization is probably necessary for evolutionary survival of the species. Complaining about the waste in NASA's budget for human exploration, that I can understand, as they have not really advanced that cause since the moon shot. But to dismiss real human exploration all together ("drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration"), when a certain fraction of people need it for a fulfilled life, seems closed minded. Maybe a crack will form if you read this. With a world GDP of about 80 trillion dollars/year a few billion/year of public funds for human space flight does not seem unreasonable.
- kitsunesoba 9y ago
  Well said. Humanity hasn't had a true new open frontier in quite some time, and the negative effects of such are beginning to surface. It's an important component of a healthy civilization that's simply absent right now. Our restless have nowhere to go. And yes, surely we have enough people and resources to swing large-scale space operations alongside what we already do.
- javajosh 9y ago
  Maybe Musk and Bezos can live in a biosphere bubble on the asteroid belt maintained by an army of their (wholly-owned) mining robots. But Mars is a bad joke. It's deep in a gravity well and is a gigantic, cold Sahara dessert without breathable air. If physicists and engineers can come up with a massless drive and potent, safe energy to drive it (e.g. EmDrive powered by fusion) we cold probably send missions back and forth to nearby stars - a worthy goal. But even then it will be expensive and time-dilation will ensure that whatever glory the explorers get will be amongst strangers. And it seems incredibly unlikely that we'll find any planet sufficiently close to Earth to be worth colonizing! Now, if someone invents a unique, valuable zero- or micro-gravity industrial process then look out! Space will get real sexy real fast.
ptero 9y ago
Part of the reason is the same desire to see what is at the other side that pushed seafarers, voyagers and adventurers for ages to travel across hostile oceans, mountains and deserts. It is not that we "need to get drunk .. with romantic ideas of exploration" as a society; but as individuals enough of us do anyway. I personally see it as a good thing. We do need to watch the costs, which is why my hopes are with the industry or eccentric [bm]illionaires, not NASA which became very bureaucratic and risk averse.
- nunobrito 9y ago
  I happen to be Portuguese (land of pioneer seafarer) so had a chance to live with these legends in popular stories. There were other empires with better ship technology and huge fleets in place (e.g. China) and back in Europe one could find countries with better economical conditions to pioneer into the unknown seas (Genovese, Castillians, French, ..). Yet, it was a tiny land on that corner of Europe which did the initial jump into the unknown. Not just jumping, they crossed the whole of Africa using tiny boats and bargaining food at each stop. They succeeded because there was no other option. If the Portuguese crown were to make money, it had to risk doing what the others wouldn't. 500 years later. The US rulers don't see yet the money aspect in Mars, not even at the moon. But there is another "crown" already aiming for the moon, the Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st... It's going to be interesting. Let's see if a human can finally reach the moon.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
It might sound trite, but the character from the Matrix played by Hugo Weaving related the Human Species to a virus. I think it's actually a startlingly accurate definition if you look at how we consume and expand, without finding a homeostatic symbiosis with the other forms of the environment. It's in our nature to slash and burn and expand and grow, part of our DNA. Space tells people that they can continue being who they are, biologically, if you just find another world to find or build resources on. We want to be free to consume all we want, but want none of the costs or consequences.
pps43 9y ago
Going to space is disaster management. By the time we find an asteroid that's going to cause another extinction event it will be too late to start space exploration.
emodendroket 9y ago
Science that is "about sobriety and utility" is by its very nature focused on short-term, incremental gains.
sqeaky 9y ago
> Space hostile and empty and we have no guarantee earth won't become that way too. If the worst should happen we will need to live without Earth or we will stop living. A big rock could come through any day.

Quarrelsome 9y ago

because space is more than us and it isn't us. It gives us a non-nation based activity to pursue that is greater than the whole of earth. It represents new frontier, new resources and ways of thinking that transcend this planet. It is a form of evolution and of freedom that isn't shackled so much by our self-made problems of earth. There are new mistakes to make and that's super appealing.

zatkin 9y ago
We can't even cope with the environmental issues that we have on our own planet, so we avoid that and instead look to plaguing the rest of the solar system and beyond? Good grief.
- HarkMamilton 9y ago
  Environmentalism isn't an excuse to give up on every other aspiration humanity might hold.
  - justinator 9y ago
    I personally would vote in favor of putting space exploration on hold until we get a handle on the quickly accelerating environmental disaster we humans have set up that seems that it may just wipe ourselves out. Personally. One needs beauty in the world, yes, but one also needs to breathe.
    - HarkMamilton 9y ago
      Environmentalists will never be satisfied. There is always something to improve. If humanity dies or goes pre-industrial because someone engineered a supervirus and we refused to put effort into space travel, all our conservation efforts won't really matter much.
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      This doesn't make any sense though, as there's no reason they should be exclusive priorities. I, personally, would vote in favor of putting many things on hold until we increase humanity's resilience to catastrophic events by settling on other planets, but I recognize that priorities aren't mutually exclusive. Anyway, what's the point of focusing all efforts on Earth if human civilization is going to die out here anyway? That's the path we're currently on, and stopping space exploration isn't going to magically fix that. Wanting other baskets for the egg of human civilization is just pragmatism.
- marvin 9y ago
  You could have said the same thing about literally any exploratory initiative since humans first started using tools 50 000 years ago. Spending some tiny portion of resources expanding the scope of human presence does not preclude attacking more immediate challenges.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  Good grief Columbus, you aren't even competent enough to round the Cape. Why would you go west?!
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  We learned a whole lot about the greenhouse effect by studying Venus...
- thebooktocome 9y ago
  What if space based Earth science is what it takes to solve our environmental issues? Sagan's Blue Marble has done more for environmental preservation than decades of armchair environmental activism.
- simonh 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that not going to Mars will solve all our environmental problems? This isn't an either-or question. If we really wanted to, there's no reason we couldn't do both and they're is a blocking issue for the other and some of the technology and science for both are complementary (planetary science, solar and battery technology, environmental control, automation).
- simonh 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that not going to Mars will solve all our environmental problems? This isn't an either-or question. If we really wanted to, there's no reason we couldnt do both and they're is a blocking issue for the other and some of the technology and science for both are complementary (planetary science, solar and battery technology, environmental control, automation).
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  It's not the technology to tackle environmental issues that is lacking, it's the political will. Not going to space doesn't magically solve the problem of entrenched carbon-emitting interests having the power to block a short-term mandatory transition to renewable energy. Given that, it absolutely makes sense to colonize space, as Mars can't be ruined in the same way that we're ruining Earth, and the petroleum mining industry won't be coming along for the ride.
- digikata 9y ago
  Research is needed, it's hard to predict, and Development for space forces the movement of practical, envelope pushing movement of research and theory into at some hard problem solving in ways that just more research doesn't accomplish. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells Space isn't solely responsible for solar cells, but I can't help but note these entries in the timeline. 1950s - Bell Labs produce solar cells for space activities. 1954 - On April 25, 1954, Bell Labs announces the invention of the first practical silicon solar cell 1958 - T. Mandelkorn, U.S. Signal Corps Laboratories, creates n-on-p silicon solar cells, which are more resistant to radiation damage and are better suited for space. Hoffman Electronics creates 9% efficient solar cells. Vanguard I, the first solar powered satellite, was launched with a 0.1W, 100 cm² solar panel. Would the solar cell technology we enjoy today have developed as quickly or at all with that little extra push of space investment to move it along? Would the research ever have ended up as practical without hard engineering problems to solve along the way? I think you'll find similar connections for fuel cells, and battery tech. You see metals research now which is applicable for the space application first, but the engineering knowledge will likely get re-applied in more expanded mundane applications in due time...
- scythe 9y ago
  Yeah, we're going to plague a bunch of inanimate objects, and defile the sanctity of the asteroid belt. It amuses me that "atheists" have decided life itself is a plague threatening some great holy Natural-Universe. Your distaste for the people around you is showing. Dunno if you've heard, but this Universe is condemned. In about a hundred trillion years it'll run out of hydrogen and burn out. Might as well enjoy it while we can.
- njarboe 9y ago
  People who view humanity as a plague upon the Earth definitely won't want us spreading elsewhere.

escribmac 9y ago

I think that trying to reach difficult goals will spark new innovation. Also, it's not like there's a direct trade off.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chrismealy 9y ago

I don't get it either. When it comes to manned spaceflight rationality goes out the window. Humans living on Mars makes about as much sense as homeopathy. I think it's some kind of nerd religion.

Eerie 9y ago

>Space hostile Earth is hostile, too. A large part of human civilization is dedicated to making Earth more hospitable for humanity than it is in its natural state. We can do the same for space. >Space empty Only in a sense that a large container with a single fist-sized diamond is empty. It is empty on average. It contains an incredible amount of resources. Our solar system could easily house trillions of people (in O'Neill cylinders). >for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming We already spend much more on these, than on space research.

cannonpr 9y ago

Do you want to build a safer basket ? Or invest in two baskets and split your eggs ? To some extent that is one argument, however space research in it's own right has generated a safer basket as well, as most engineering research is highly reusable. A lot of environmental problems for example could be solved via space based power generation that is beamed down.

kbyatnal 9y ago

Do you have any idea how many of our modern technologies were developed as a direct result of the space program? New technologies were needed to go into space and many of them have become essential for our lives. MRI, LEDs, Anti-Icing Systems, Artificial Limbs, Land Mine Removal, Firefighter Gear, Water Purification, Pollution Remediation, etc etc...the list goes on and on. Studies estimate a $7-$14 return on investment for every $1 of NASA expenditure. Source: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

paulcole 9y ago
Everything from watchmaking to watch repair!
valuearb 9y ago
Wow, you are saying if you take a massive pile of money to hire a bunch of the smartest engineers away from private companies and pay them to solve problems, they'll do it? And if NASA didn't exist, and these engineers instead worked for less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial businesses, they'd invent nothing?
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  Anecdotally, my group at NASA has seen several of our smartest engineers leave for the private sector in the last couple of years. They are all making heaps more money, but not one of them is doing the kind of innovative research that we do at NASA.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Yea, their research will now actually ship.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      NASA is obligated to share their work with Americans. Many products ship with tech NASA invented that probably would not have been shared if a private enterprise came up with it.

tynpeddler 9y ago

Space probes may be cheap but they are slooooowwww. Most of the research done by spirit, opportunity and curiosity could have been done by a trained astronaut in an afternoon. As an example, in its 2623 day mission, spirit traveled less than 5 miles. Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. Some of you may be thinking, 'Hold on a second, if you took the money for manned exploration and poured that all in to rovers, surely you would get even more science done than humans could possibly do!" Perhaps, but I would argue that the research done to support the manned exploration should be counted in the scientific haul. Meaning that currently, for ten billion dollars, we could shoot rovers to every corner of the solar system using current rocket technology. But if we spent that ten billion dollars sending people to mars, we would have to develop new rockets, new infrastructure, new habitation technologies, cosmic radiation shields and much more. All that technology, plus the knowledge we gain on mars would be more valuable than simply sending rovers all over the solar system, partially because all that new technology would probably make it easier to later send rovers all over the solar system. In addition to the above, there is also the massive pr power of putting people on mars. Everyone in the world knows Neil Armstrong, but no one cares much about luna 2.

jldugger 9y ago
> Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. But how many rovers can you get for the price of one round trip space party?
- codys 9y ago
  It's fairly hard to figure this out. What follows is a really bad comparison between Apollo & Curiosity, which completely ignores tech advancement, the difference between a moon flight and a mars flight, the length of time for each mission, the amount of data collected, and a whole lot of other stuff. The cost of Apollo program in 1973 was reported as ~$25 billion. In 2016 dollars, ~$135 billion. The Apollo program made 6 manned landings (I'm going to ignore non-landing missions as we're talking about rovers & consider them part of the development cost for the program). The curiosity mission was reported as costing $2.5 billion in 2011 ($2.6 billion in 2016 dollars). So with some really bad math (as noted earlier): - dollars per manned moon mission = 135/6 = 22.5 billion - dollars per unmanned mars mission = 2.6 billion - For the cost of 1 manned moon mission, we could have ~8 (22.5/2.6) unmanned mars missions.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago

Space is empty? I don't understand. In practice we have explored space to see new worlds. Things are far apart but there's lots of stuff in space.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

HarkMamilton 9y ago

Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright. We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one. If we don't get to space now, we will probably never get to space. Then it's only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid. Or we'll just get killed by an engineered supervirus and skip the whole pre-industrial decay phase. Going into space is our insurance policy.

njarboe 9y ago
There is still an amazing amount of coal in the ground. Check out the Powder River Basin in the US which, for one example.
- Spellman 9y ago
  While true, it's also crazy expensive to extract.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    Not really. Wikipedia says that the USGS extimates that "At a price of $60/ton, roughly half (48%) of the coal is economic to produce." Current prices are near $10 a ton so only highly mechanized shallow strip mining techniques are profitable. Coal is about as valuable as other bulk earth products like sand and gravel. 19th century techniques could easily mine most of this coal. It is shipping, not extraction, that determines the price of coal at a given point on Earth. Civilization might need to restart near the mines, but there are still many of those places left. Oil on the other hand. That might be a problem.
- eropple 9y ago
  There's a lot of it there, but it's hard to extract without modern technology. There's a little peat (arguably the most accessible type of high-energy fuel) left in the British Isles and Finland, but coal is requiring progressively more and more modern effort to extract.

acjohnson55 9y ago

Most people felt the same way about the Atlantic Ocean.

njarboe 9y ago

"Space hostile and empty." This is a feature, not a bug. There is a small fraction of humanity that has the desire to do very hard and physically dangerous things. Another fraction who greatly enjoy empty spaces and prefer having great influence over the culture they live in. On Earth, very hard and dangerous can be found, but the activities are either recreational (mountaineering) or involve hurting other people (military, criminal life). Physical empty spaces are still around on Earth, but culturally empty spaces are gone. All land on Earth is either claimed by nation states or must remain unsettled by treaty (Antarctica). Have a small sub-set of humans desiring to leave the over-crowded tribe and cross that river, ocean, or desert for the chance to start their own tribe/civilization is probably necessary for evolutionary survival of the species. Complaining about the waste in NASA's budget for human exploration, that I can understand, as they have not really advanced that cause since the moon shot. But to dismiss real human exploration all together ("drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration"), when a certain fraction of people need it for a fulfilled life, seems closed minded. Maybe a crack will form if you read this. With a world GDP of about 80 trillion dollars/year a few billion/year of public funds for human space flight does not seem unreasonable.

kitsunesoba 9y ago
Well said. Humanity hasn't had a true new open frontier in quite some time, and the negative effects of such are beginning to surface. It's an important component of a healthy civilization that's simply absent right now. Our restless have nowhere to go. And yes, surely we have enough people and resources to swing large-scale space operations alongside what we already do.
javajosh 9y ago
Maybe Musk and Bezos can live in a biosphere bubble on the asteroid belt maintained by an army of their (wholly-owned) mining robots. But Mars is a bad joke. It's deep in a gravity well and is a gigantic, cold Sahara dessert without breathable air. If physicists and engineers can come up with a massless drive and potent, safe energy to drive it (e.g. EmDrive powered by fusion) we cold probably send missions back and forth to nearby stars - a worthy goal. But even then it will be expensive and time-dilation will ensure that whatever glory the explorers get will be amongst strangers. And it seems incredibly unlikely that we'll find any planet sufficiently close to Earth to be worth colonizing! Now, if someone invents a unique, valuable zero- or micro-gravity industrial process then look out! Space will get real sexy real fast.

ptero 9y ago

Part of the reason is the same desire to see what is at the other side that pushed seafarers, voyagers and adventurers for ages to travel across hostile oceans, mountains and deserts. It is not that we "need to get drunk .. with romantic ideas of exploration" as a society; but as individuals enough of us do anyway. I personally see it as a good thing. We do need to watch the costs, which is why my hopes are with the industry or eccentric [bm]illionaires, not NASA which became very bureaucratic and risk averse.

nunobrito 9y ago
I happen to be Portuguese (land of pioneer seafarer) so had a chance to live with these legends in popular stories. There were other empires with better ship technology and huge fleets in place (e.g. China) and back in Europe one could find countries with better economical conditions to pioneer into the unknown seas (Genovese, Castillians, French, ..). Yet, it was a tiny land on that corner of Europe which did the initial jump into the unknown. Not just jumping, they crossed the whole of Africa using tiny boats and bargaining food at each stop. They succeeded because there was no other option. If the Portuguese crown were to make money, it had to risk doing what the others wouldn't. 500 years later. The US rulers don't see yet the money aspect in Mars, not even at the moon. But there is another "crown" already aiming for the moon, the Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st... It's going to be interesting. Let's see if a human can finally reach the moon.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

It might sound trite, but the character from the Matrix played by Hugo Weaving related the Human Species to a virus. I think it's actually a startlingly accurate definition if you look at how we consume and expand, without finding a homeostatic symbiosis with the other forms of the environment. It's in our nature to slash and burn and expand and grow, part of our DNA. Space tells people that they can continue being who they are, biologically, if you just find another world to find or build resources on. We want to be free to consume all we want, but want none of the costs or consequences.

pps43 9y ago

Going to space is disaster management. By the time we find an asteroid that's going to cause another extinction event it will be too late to start space exploration.

emodendroket 9y ago

Science that is "about sobriety and utility" is by its very nature focused on short-term, incremental gains.

sqeaky 9y ago

> Space hostile and empty and we have no guarantee earth won't become that way too. If the worst should happen we will need to live without Earth or we will stop living. A big rock could come through any day.