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The reason that we're not isn't technical capability: it's a lack of demand. Why spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars to put 10,000 people in spa
by ryanwaggoner 18y ago
The reason that we're not isn't technical capability: it's a lack of demand. Why spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars to put 10,000 people in space? Because we can? Not good enough...space exploration and colonization will only really pick up when we must do it to survive and/or there's a serious financial incentive.
- eru 18y agoOr when Nanotech will have made it cheap enough. (At least unmanned missions. Humen in space are mostly a PR gimmick anyway.)
- jraines 18y agoNot in the really long term -- what about when the sun dies? Think humanity will make it that long?
- jmtulloss 18y agoWell, there's nothing that can take us out now, and I don't see us allowing anything to evolve that can destroy us. So the two options are: 1. We do ourselves in 2. We get hit by a giant asteroid
- zacharypinter 18y ago3. Supervolcano
- jraines 18y agoWe're not really quite up to the task of "allowing" this or that to evolve just yet. (See drug-resistant strains of bacteria, the annual flu-shot crapshoot, etc)
- patio11 18y agowhat about when the sun dies? Geeks seem to have this funny blindspot when it comes to premature optimization if the premature optimization is something that would make for a good sci-fi novel.
- jraines 18y agoI'm not proposing we optimize right now for this eventuality. I'm pointing out that the "PR gimmick" is something that actually has to happen at some point. That's just one obvious point at which it has to happen. Your somewhat glib response reminds me this: But I should remember, Krauss said, that the long run is a very long time. He told me about a meeting he attended at the Vatican a few years back on the future of the universe: "There were about 15 people, theologians, a few cosmologists, some biologists. The idea was to find common ground, but after three days it was clear that we had nothing to say to one another. When theologians talk about the 'long term,' raising questions about resurrection and such, they're really thinking about the short term. We weren't even on the same plane. When you talk about 10^50 years, the theologians' eyes glaze over. http://www.slate.com/id/2096491/entry/2096507/ http://www.slate.com/id/2096491/entry/2096507/
- gravitycop 18y agoIf humans evolved into in silico entities, then human bodies would not need eventually to be in space, would they?
- michaelneale 18y agoYes unless there is some reason why that can't work (ie AI is impossible, or similar) then flinging meat around space doesn't make any sense.
- xiaoma 18y ago"Flinging meat around space" is a nice phrase I'll have to remember.
- deleted 18y ago
- dfranke 18y ago> Think humanity will make it that long? Whatever is around in six billion years is going to be as different from us as we are from bacteria.
- jraines 18y agoRight. But will that race be interplanetary and/or capable of deep space survival?
- dfranke 18y agoI could tell you with considerably greater confidence whether or not it will snow in Boston ten years from today.
- rsheridan6 18y agoBased on the fact that we haven't seen any aliens, and assuming that we're not the first intelligent species in the universe for roughly the same reason I assume I'm not the first person to have some bright idea for a web app, I'm going to guess no, or at least that it's not cost effective. Otherwise we'd probably have seen von Neumann probes or something like that by now (or more likely, we wouldn't be here).
- rw 18y agoI hear Revelation Space there :)
- rsheridan6 18y agoI haven't read it. I was just thinking my favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is_impossible_due_to_problems_of_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is_...
- maxwell 18y agoWe're quantifiably more bacteria than mammal. Evolution isn't linear, and considering humans are the only species (that humans are aware of) which can manipulate fire, build non-trivial structures with straight lines, communicate with symbols, work levers independently, carve stone, create metal tools, vary sonic pitch extra-physically, design automated processes, and travel beyond the stratosphere, there is the possibility that we're already nearly evolutionarily optimal for this universe. (Please correct me if I overestimated our uniqueness on any of the above.) Just because web source code looked a lot different fifteen years ago doesn't mean it'll change considerably fifteen years from now. Mutation can be beneficial, but it can also carry the unfortunate cost of breaking compatibility.
- eru 18y agoHumen won't be around in the long term.
- gravitycop 18y agoPeople do not move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii because they must do it to survive. It also is not cheap for them to do so. 1.3 million people currently live in Hawaii, though it would be cheaper for them to live on the mainland. If Hawaii can attract telecommuters, perhaps Earth orbit can attract telecommuters.
- jmtulloss 18y agoWe can take the space elevator to work!
- gravitycop 18y agoIt is 22,300 miles to GEO. At 100 mph, a trip to or from GEO would take 223 hours, or 9 days.
- jmtulloss 18y agoI guess we should go a bit faster then.
- gravitycop 18y agoFor faster travel, rockets tend to be chosen. What, then, would be the point of a space elevator? By the way, the top recorded speed of a Bugatti Veyron, the fastest production car in the world, is 253 mph - on the flat. Travelling vertically at that speed, a space elevator car (we might assume it is powered by a 1%-efficient laser-beam stationed on the ground and aimed at photovoltaic panels on the bottom of the elevator car) would take 88 hours (or 3.7 days) to get to GEO.
- jmtulloss 18y agoHaha, it's ok, it was a joke. Thanks for doing the math though :).
- aardvarkious 18y ago
- TomOfTTB 18y agoThe problem I have with this is that it's short sighted. It's the same sentiment that kept Europeans trapped on their little continent for centuries before the Americas were discovered. Humanity needs to realize exploration will always be an imperative. As for the financial aspect I’d point out that every time humanity has ventured out and explored the world around it the profits have been huge. Whether it's the technology from the space program or spices from the Americas exploration has always turned a profit. In this case being able to create a self sustaining enviornment in orbit is the first step to creating a self sustaining enviornment that can move beyond our orbit. That in turn is the first step in humanity's continued exploration of the universe we live in and the value of that is immeasurable.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoDon't misunderstand me...I'm not saying that this is the way it should be, just that this is the way it is. There are two paths to space: governments and private sector. The government path doesn't seem to have made a huge dent in the colonization goal over the last fifty years. It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended. And the reality of the "golden age" of space exploration is that the funding of the program was driven more by the need to beat the USSR than it was by the vision of space exploration as a worthy goal for humanity. As for the private sector, the issue there is that huge profits could be made, but the risks are way too high and the timeline is way too long. The handful of companies that could afford it are already making huge profits here on earth in things they understand and their shareholders are apt to take a dim view of those companies risking billions of dollars with little hope of return within the next couple decades. Sadly, the best hope for space colonization is either a) breakthrough developments in a tangential technical field that enable cheap access to space (read: nanotech enables construction of space elevator) and/or b) we trash our planet to the point that our survival requires governments to commit everything they have to space colonization.
- anamax 18y ago> It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended. We have lost ground since the Apollo program ended. At that time, we had some functional boosters left - they've been rusting in Florida since then. We also had the tooling to make more of the whole stack, but that tooling was intentionally destroyed as part of the Shuttle program. We have lost other material things. The biggest loss is probably that we've lost the belief that we should go to space.
- RobertL 18y agoActually I think more of our space cadets need to move to space. I'm not paying for it though. They're going to have to fork out whatever needs to be forked out to pay for their digs.