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> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the de

> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction event of the last few of million years. A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet.

tomrod 12y ago
Until when? The next large asteroid? The next close-by gamma burst? The sun goes nova? Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- revscat 12y ago
  That's not going to happen with chemical rockets. Until a radically different propulsion system is developed the only planet we have is this one.
  - skndr 12y ago
    The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology. No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
  - kstenerud 12y ago
    And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired." Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit. Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either. Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
  - cstross 12y ago
    Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce. This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide. No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        For all we know we're only returning the favor.
      - cstross 12y ago
        I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ... Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space? "Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal. While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!
- gohrt 12y ago
  Humanity is not going to keep itself together long enough to be threatened by the sun's nova.
moskie 12y ago
Such an incredible false choice you present.
robertfw 12y ago
I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.
- Retric 12y ago
  Early exploration was all about pillaging the planet. Much of the Sahara desert for example exists because destroyed the existing ecosystem which altered weather patterns and vastly expanding the desert. Recently we almost did the same to the Midwest in the US. In fact we still might be heading that way after the Ogallala Aquifer is used up. More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions. PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet. It might be hard to argue that our industrial pillage of the planet is solely a result of exploration. Anything weaker than that and I think you have the tougher position.
mikeash 12y ago
Instead of living through the greatest mass extinction event in the last few million years, we'd be living in harmony with nature, dying of now-curable injuries, starving to death when times are lean, seeing our mothers and wives and daughters die in childbirth, and living in profound ignorance of the nature of the universe. At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  There have been at least five mass extinction events that wiped out over 50% of the species on the planet. Possibly as many as twenty. The Permian-Triassic event supposedly took out 90-96%(!) of all living species.
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    And yet, here we are. I'm totally okay with causing mass extinction as long as something human-descended comes out the other side.
nether 12y ago
Kaczynski was right.
undersuit 12y ago
I think there are many other areas humanity could shift their focus away from to better help cohabitation of this planet than spaceflight.
revscat 12y ago
You are getting downvoted, but I actually agree with you. Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is, for me, an anachronistic hold-over from people who grew up with Heinlein, Asimov, etc., but is not something that is realistic given the environmental situation. Realistically, any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere. I know that this opinion is anathema on a tech-heavy site such as this one, but I must nevertheless express my respectful disagreement. It would be far, far more productive for the species to dedicate resources towards CO2 and CH4 reduction in the lower atmosphere.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is fundamental to the human species living sustainably in the long term. Correcting greenhouse gasses doesn't help us if the next day we find a planet-killer asteroid is a few weeks away.
  - yongjik 12y ago
    I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority. Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.
vcjohnson 12y ago
>A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet. This is a false dilemma. We have 7+ billion people on the planet. There is most certainly a significant amount of effort going towards the future you mentioned. They are not mutually exclusive (and are, most likely, going to be a product of each other)
pessimizer 12y ago
You're forgetting how cool it would be for rich people to burn a couple hundred thousand to fly in space for two and a half hours. It's clearly the highest expression of the human spirit, and you're a hopeless hater cynic. I wonder what the carbon footprint of space tourism is, and will be if it becomes cheaper and more popular? I feel guilty flying on a plane.
- brent_noorda 12y ago
  I worked out some quick math estimating 25,000 gallons just for the fuel for each tourist's 2-hour flight. Space tourism seems like the douchebaggiest idea ever created. I hope the in-flight space cocktails are worth it. http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elon-musk-cognitive-dissonance.html http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elo...
  - porsupah 12y ago
    Perhaps Skylon is more to your liking?
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Live a little! It's okay to be human-supremacist. Sheesh. Have neo-cortex, will dominate.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Boring.

tomrod 12y ago

Until when? The next large asteroid? The next close-by gamma burst? The sun goes nova? Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
revscat 12y ago
That's not going to happen with chemical rockets. Until a radically different propulsion system is developed the only planet we have is this one.
- skndr 12y ago
  The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology. No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired." Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit. Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either. Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
- cstross 12y ago
  Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce. This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide. No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      For all we know we're only returning the favor.
    - cstross 12y ago
      I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ... Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space? "Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal. While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!
gohrt 12y ago
Humanity is not going to keep itself together long enough to be threatened by the sun's nova.

moskie 12y ago

Such an incredible false choice you present.

robertfw 12y ago

I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.

Retric 12y ago
Early exploration was all about pillaging the planet. Much of the Sahara desert for example exists because destroyed the existing ecosystem which altered weather patterns and vastly expanding the desert. Recently we almost did the same to the Midwest in the US. In fact we still might be heading that way after the Ogallala Aquifer is used up. More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions. PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.
pessimizer 12y ago
>I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet. It might be hard to argue that our industrial pillage of the planet is solely a result of exploration. Anything weaker than that and I think you have the tougher position.

mikeash 12y ago

Instead of living through the greatest mass extinction event in the last few million years, we'd be living in harmony with nature, dying of now-curable injuries, starving to death when times are lean, seeing our mothers and wives and daughters die in childbirth, and living in profound ignorance of the nature of the universe. At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.

Turing_Machine 12y ago
There have been at least five mass extinction events that wiped out over 50% of the species on the planet. Possibly as many as twenty. The Permian-Triassic event supposedly took out 90-96%(!) of all living species.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  And yet, here we are. I'm totally okay with causing mass extinction as long as something human-descended comes out the other side.

nether 12y ago

Kaczynski was right.

undersuit 12y ago

I think there are many other areas humanity could shift their focus away from to better help cohabitation of this planet than spaceflight.

revscat 12y ago

You are getting downvoted, but I actually agree with you. Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is, for me, an anachronistic hold-over from people who grew up with Heinlein, Asimov, etc., but is not something that is realistic given the environmental situation. Realistically, any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere. I know that this opinion is anathema on a tech-heavy site such as this one, but I must nevertheless express my respectful disagreement. It would be far, far more productive for the species to dedicate resources towards CO2 and CH4 reduction in the lower atmosphere.

ceejayoz 12y ago
> Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is fundamental to the human species living sustainably in the long term. Correcting greenhouse gasses doesn't help us if the next day we find a planet-killer asteroid is a few weeks away.
- yongjik 12y ago
  I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority. Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.

vcjohnson 12y ago

>A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet. This is a false dilemma. We have 7+ billion people on the planet. There is most certainly a significant amount of effort going towards the future you mentioned. They are not mutually exclusive (and are, most likely, going to be a product of each other)

pessimizer 12y ago

You're forgetting how cool it would be for rich people to burn a couple hundred thousand to fly in space for two and a half hours. It's clearly the highest expression of the human spirit, and you're a hopeless hater cynic. I wonder what the carbon footprint of space tourism is, and will be if it becomes cheaper and more popular? I feel guilty flying on a plane.

brent_noorda 12y ago
I worked out some quick math estimating 25,000 gallons just for the fuel for each tourist's 2-hour flight. Space tourism seems like the douchebaggiest idea ever created. I hope the in-flight space cocktails are worth it. http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elon-musk-cognitive-dissonance.html http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elo...
- porsupah 12y ago
  Perhaps Skylon is more to your liking?
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Live a little! It's okay to be human-supremacist. Sheesh. Have neo-cortex, will dominate.

JabavuAdams 12y ago

Boring.