7 ms·

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 sustainabl

by 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.
  - Raptor22 12y ago
    > The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". We went from not flying anything heavier than air to going to the Moon in 66 years. If we really really wanted to, we could go to Mars in thirty. This is a problem of priorities, not technologies (although the technological problems are real, they are not insurmountable).
- revscat 12y ago
  While true, it is also not as direct of a threat. CO2 is affecting us now, whereas asteroids, etc., are (thankfully) only possibilities. Serious ones, to be certain, but not immediately threatening. CO2 is a direct and immediate threat.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Humans as a species will survive CO2, though, whereas asteroids conceivably can go from "not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      "... few days"
      - ceejayoz 12y ago
        I went with years there to be safe as I'm uncertain about what the detection levels are like for planet-killer sized asteroids. I know we discover house-sized ones passing between us and the Moon after they whiz by.
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        No detection. Who's looking? Many are found by amateurs, as you say, after they whiz by.
    - mhurron 12y ago
      > not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning. Unless the lead time is 50-100 years, years might as well be tomorrow, it's going to kill us all either way. Even that might be stretching it. > Humans as a species will survive CO2 Maybe, personally I believe humans will cause their own extinction. I'm just not sure yet if we're going to take all life with us or not. Dealing with CO2 is a toss up between making the planet uninhabitable or completely inhospitable to life.
atlantic 12y ago
Thanks. I expected the downvotes. But it breaks my heart that we have such a beautiful planet and we treat it like a trash heap, all the while dreaming of Mars and whatnot. Let's put our own house in order before we go off travelling.
- noselasd 12y ago
  "we" ? There's no we. There's just various groups of people. If one such group of < 10 000 people (spacex) can go off and build transportation to go to Mars, let them - no one should deny them to do that. Those same < 10 000 people probably doesn't know nor have the ability to fix all the problems on Earth, but they might be able to get to Mars.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  There's no reason for everybody to stay home and do housekeeping, then there's a big beautiful universe out there. Dare to dream big!
  - atlantic 12y ago
    If we can't even save our own home world, there is every reason to believe that we will do damage elsewhere. That being the case, best to stay home until we grow up a bit.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      The rest of our solar system is rocks. Hard to do much damage there. Anything we do has to be for the better (oxygen, water, life).
      - atlantic 12y ago
        Are you sure? I get the impression we're not very good at recognizing other life forms, or alternative forms of intelligence.
        12y ago
sliverstorm 12y ago
any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. So... what, we just halt development of all vehicles, globally, period? Bye-bye trains, planes, cars, bicycles, and buses? You can't develop the future of transportation or the future of propulsion systems if you literally shut down global commerce. Besides, an airplane (for example) is not wedded to the engine. Developments in prop planes carried over directly to jet planes, once the jet engine matured. Any future propulsion system that can replace jet engines will probably not be hard to work into many plane designs of the day.
7952 12y ago
To be fair space flight has some significant advantages from an environmental perspective. Earth observation satellites are essential for understanding how the atmosphere works and how the planet is changing. Also, the unique constraints of space have lead to the development of sustainable technology such as solar panels, fuel cells, and better water purification.
- jedmeyers 12y ago
  Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. (http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html)
  - 7952 12y ago
    Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    There are so many structural / societal problems in the way of feeding the poor that it's not a very interesting problem. You would have to re-engineer our society and power-structures. Better to make incremental progress on poverty, without constraining the innovators to work on problems that don't interest them, or that seem even more intractable than e.g. space travel or AI.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Fundamentally, we don't know where our resources would be best spent. We need to try all the things. The biggest lever we've got right now is computation, so yeah maybe it would be more efficient to develop AI / IA first and then mass space travel, but we can't be sure. Also, fundamentally we can accept a few billion deaths. That sounds and is grotesque, but it wouldn't be the end of humanity. I don't see how climate change kills us all in the next 100-500 years.

by revscat 12y ago

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.
- Raptor22 12y ago
  > The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". We went from not flying anything heavier than air to going to the Moon in 66 years. If we really really wanted to, we could go to Mars in thirty. This is a problem of priorities, not technologies (although the technological problems are real, they are not insurmountable).
revscat 12y ago
While true, it is also not as direct of a threat. CO2 is affecting us now, whereas asteroids, etc., are (thankfully) only possibilities. Serious ones, to be certain, but not immediately threatening. CO2 is a direct and immediate threat.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Humans as a species will survive CO2, though, whereas asteroids conceivably can go from "not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    "... few days"
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      I went with years there to be safe as I'm uncertain about what the detection levels are like for planet-killer sized asteroids. I know we discover house-sized ones passing between us and the Moon after they whiz by.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        No detection. Who's looking? Many are found by amateurs, as you say, after they whiz by.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning. Unless the lead time is 50-100 years, years might as well be tomorrow, it's going to kill us all either way. Even that might be stretching it. > Humans as a species will survive CO2 Maybe, personally I believe humans will cause their own extinction. I'm just not sure yet if we're going to take all life with us or not. Dealing with CO2 is a toss up between making the planet uninhabitable or completely inhospitable to life.

atlantic 12y ago

Thanks. I expected the downvotes. But it breaks my heart that we have such a beautiful planet and we treat it like a trash heap, all the while dreaming of Mars and whatnot. Let's put our own house in order before we go off travelling.

noselasd 12y ago
"we" ? There's no we. There's just various groups of people. If one such group of < 10 000 people (spacex) can go off and build transportation to go to Mars, let them - no one should deny them to do that. Those same < 10 000 people probably doesn't know nor have the ability to fix all the problems on Earth, but they might be able to get to Mars.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
There's no reason for everybody to stay home and do housekeeping, then there's a big beautiful universe out there. Dare to dream big!
- atlantic 12y ago
  If we can't even save our own home world, there is every reason to believe that we will do damage elsewhere. That being the case, best to stay home until we grow up a bit.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    The rest of our solar system is rocks. Hard to do much damage there. Anything we do has to be for the better (oxygen, water, life).
    - atlantic 12y ago
      Are you sure? I get the impression we're not very good at recognizing other life forms, or alternative forms of intelligence.
      - 12y ago

sliverstorm 12y ago

any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. So... what, we just halt development of all vehicles, globally, period? Bye-bye trains, planes, cars, bicycles, and buses? You can't develop the future of transportation or the future of propulsion systems if you literally shut down global commerce. Besides, an airplane (for example) is not wedded to the engine. Developments in prop planes carried over directly to jet planes, once the jet engine matured. Any future propulsion system that can replace jet engines will probably not be hard to work into many plane designs of the day.

7952 12y ago

To be fair space flight has some significant advantages from an environmental perspective. Earth observation satellites are essential for understanding how the atmosphere works and how the planet is changing. Also, the unique constraints of space have lead to the development of sustainable technology such as solar panels, fuel cells, and better water purification.

jedmeyers 12y ago
Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. (http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html)
- 7952 12y ago
  Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  There are so many structural / societal problems in the way of feeding the poor that it's not a very interesting problem. You would have to re-engineer our society and power-structures. Better to make incremental progress on poverty, without constraining the innovators to work on problems that don't interest them, or that seem even more intractable than e.g. space travel or AI.

JabavuAdams 12y ago

Fundamentally, we don't know where our resources would be best spent. We need to try all the things. The biggest lever we've got right now is computation, so yeah maybe it would be more efficient to develop AI / IA first and then mass space travel, but we can't be sure. Also, fundamentally we can accept a few billion deaths. That sounds and is grotesque, but it wouldn't be the end of humanity. I don't see how climate change kills us all in the next 100-500 years.