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I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of o

• imustbeevil 9y ago
  We just got a different future. Different advancements were made. Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
  • quickthrower2 9y ago
    Man doesn't have a great track record of making that much progress in 30 years. The fact we've made so much technological progress in the last 100 is an anomaly. Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal. Give us a break!
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • wallace_f 9y ago
      The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions. Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster. The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well. It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings. There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
      • DubiousPusher 9y ago
        I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience. The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
        • wallace_f 9y ago
          I really think the lesson is one of competition. Without it, we'd never have the V2, and even if we did have the V2 we would still never have had the Saturn rockets. The Russians would never have developed the RD-180, and so SpaceX and BO would never exist.
          • na85 9y ago
            WWII is what gave us the V2. Reducing the deadliest conflict in human history to "competition" is... Troubling. Ultimately what seems to drive us forward (IMHO), is finding new ways to kill each other.
      • dredmorbius 9y ago
        Von Braun is not quite my idea of a moral exemplar. Tom Lehrer's take strikes me about right: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI
        • wallace_f 9y ago
  • sdenton4 9y ago
    It's nice to dream about how different space travel would be if our gravitational well wasn't quite so deep...
    • usrusr 9y ago
      Then stop being lazy and build that mass driver to make this gravity well less deep, one escaping pellet at a time ;) (Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)
      • mrec 9y ago
        If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree. Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
        • dougmany 9y ago
          Didn't the moon form from such a mass driver?
      • blacksmith_tb 9y ago
        Seems like a space elevator is a less scattershot approach? Even on rockets the acceleration your passengers and cargo experience is pretty serious, I'd hate to be in a rail gun's bullet.
        • mrec 9y ago
          Building a space elevator involves getting a substantial amount of stuff into orbit, i.e. the cable and counterweight, so this sounds a bit like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
  • methodover 9y ago
    The delta v required to get off Luna is way less than earth. That's one big economic advantage.
    • cnlevy 9y ago
      Yes. But only regarding another colony farther out in space, say, on Mars. Therefore comes back the original question.
      • ericd 9y ago
        The clearest answer to the economic question I've seen is asteroid mining. A single asteroid can contain orders of magnitude more platinum than has been mined in all of human history, in a very concentrated form. Which would obviously crash the market for platinum, and could encourage interesting new uses for it when it's no longer ~$1,000 per ounce.
        • Retra 9y ago
          How is that a clear answer? You're still shipping massive amounts of rock through outer space. If it costs you $100M/oz to mine and transport the stuff, then selling it for $1000/oz doesn't even make a dent. And crashing the market doing it is just lose-lose. Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
          • ericd 9y ago
            Why would it cost that much to transport it? You've got lots of gravitational potential energy to work with, in terms of shipping down to Earth, so it doesn't take the kinds of fuel that it takes to ship things out of the Earth gravity well. And you don't need to bring back the whole asteroid, just the products, so you're not shipping "massive amounts of rock through outer space". Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?
• ssijak 9y ago
  One of my life goals is to find alien life. Yeah, dont ask to much questions..
  • deleted 9y ago
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• chasil 9y ago
  Just assume there is life elsewhere. Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars. The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon. There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.
  • abecedarius 9y ago
    Your computer ran billions of instructions in the time it takes to read this. Therefore, it probably made a mistake in that time, even if the chance of a mistake in any one instruction is "astronomically low", right? No, many real-life frequencies are way below one in a billion.
    • opportune 9y ago
      That's a good point, but I think it's reasonable to say that the frequency at which planets are similar to Earth is high. Non-tidally locked, geologically active, high-water-content, with enough gravity to trap oxygen/CO2 but not hydrogen/helium, and within a certain distance from a star based on its output planets can't be that uncommon. I'm pretty sure Venus actually fits all those requirements - which isn't to say that there is life on Venus, just that superficially most of what we consider "the requirements" are there. In fact Mars fits all those requirements too, aside from geological activity. We can't know how probable life is given similar conditions to Earth because our sample size is too small. But there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets out there.
      • abecedarius 9y ago
        Yes, there must be a lot of Earth-mass rocky planets out there in habitable zones. Twenty years ago I'd have said we just don't know. There may've been some real progress too on figuring out the origin of life, but our knowledge is still compatible with almost all potentially-habitable planets being lifeless -- it wouldn't badly contradict what we know so far (afaik) and would explain why we haven't seen any advanced aliens taking stars apart, etc.
• QAPereo 9y ago
  Read The Three Body Problem trilogy and just hope we’re alone.
  • taneq 9y ago
    "If they exist", the third group said, "they'll be mean."
• rayiner 9y ago
  I was just talking to my mom about this. She was born in the early 1950s, in Bangladesh. She was talking about how she grew up reading science fiction books and when the U.S. made it to the moon, thinking that we'd have space colonies and stuff. But, in her view, technology has progressed much less than she thought it would have by now.
  • taneq 9y ago
    This seems to be a popular position, and I think it's because space rockets and cities on the moon are large-but-simple advances that people can get their heads around. Computer tech is so far past their "magic" threshold that a modern smartphone doesn't seem much different to the original microcomputers. Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."
    • rayiner 9y ago
      At least for her, computer technology didn’t result in structural change in the way people live. They had television, phones, cameras, etc., when she was a teenager. She uses her iPhone and iPad as a television, a telephone, a camera, and a combination of television and telephone (FaceTime). Neat and convenient, but not life changing in the same way as cars, planes, moon colonization, etc. Certainly not “magic.”
      • harryh 9y ago
        FaceTime is a little magical. How often would she get to see and talk to her grandkids without it? And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day. TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.
        • rayiner 9y ago