The death of Neil Armstrong, first person to walk on the moon, has touched a chord with millions of people. With memories of that moment so recently revived, how would you assess the health and value of space exploration?
The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)
Headed out the door when I saw this, so no time for a real response. However, here is a potentially useful reference for discussion: Atomic Rocket, a site for laymen dedicated to exploring the science behind space exploration-themed science fiction.
Posted by: Froborr | Aug 27, 2012 at 06:08 PM
Okay, so... I think there's enormous potential in space exploration for helping with out environmental issues. It can't do diddly for overpopulation (people are born too fast, we could never keep up), but there's reason to think we're at or near peak population anyway.
What it can do is give us places to mine that don't have living environments to destroy: The Moon has very nearly the same composition as the Earth's crust; all we can mine on Earth that we can't mine on the Moon is fossil fuels (which we should be getting away from ASAP anyway), radioactive elements (meh), and gemstones. (Okay, and anything else you need volcanos to get, like pumice, but I don't think pumice mining is a major environmental concern.) Mars is similar, but it has radioactives and gemstones. We could start mining the Moon within a decade; Mars would take longer, but it's still well within current technology.
What it can do is give us places to farm that don't have living environments to destroy: Comets, for example, if we can grab them, have all the basic elements you need for a farm, you just need to mix 'em a bit differently. Rather a bit harder, technologically speaking; I tend to be a pessimist about the pace of technological advance, so I'd put it at a century or two.
What it can do is give us places to generate power that don't have living environments to destroy: Orbital solar power plants could easily supply our needs for the foreseeable future, and we have the technology to build them... what we don't have is any way to get the power back to Earth. You could probably build a big microwave laser and beam it down to a receiver station on the ground, but I can think of lots of reasons multi-gigawatt orbital lasers pointed at cities on the ground are not a good idea. If we can crack the materials-science problems surrounding space elevators, that gives a simple solution--run a power cord down to the ground, hanging off the elevator cable.
The dream, ultimately, is for every polluting industry to be moved off the Earth, so that we can move closer to the environmental ideal: high-density cities (preferably arcologies) that produce little or no net pollution and consume little or no nonrenewable resources taken from the Earth, while sustaining a first-world standard of living for all inhabitants, and the entire rest of the planet allowed to return to wilderness. (Though of course people would still be able to live and farm and suchlike in the "wilderness" areas, as long as they do so sustainably or in small enough numbers that sustainability is not an issue.)
We are, of course, doing absolutely nothing to accomplish any of this, which is why none of it will ever happen. To paraphrase Larry Niven, it's raining soup out there, and we can't be bothered to learn to make bowls.
Posted by: Froborr | Aug 28, 2012 at 10:42 AM
It seems like the entire world I live in is built on technology from one of two places: military research, NASA.
Space exploration seems to have a lot of value here on earth, and I'm not really sure its value can be measured.
Plus, it's just plain cool. It's space.
Posted by: chris the cynic (on a borrowed netbook) | Aug 28, 2012 at 04:17 PM
Spam above at 8:17 am.
Posted by: Andrea, spamflagging | Aug 29, 2012 at 08:29 AM
Tangent time!
Long ago, I got in a rather silly argument with a friend of mine who generally opposes space exploration (more accurately, he considers it good but very, very, very low priority, and he considers manned space exploration in particular a waste of time and resources).
The source of the argument was a scene in an episode of Invader Zim, "Battle of the Planets." Zim travels to Mars and encounters a holographic floating head left behind by the long-extinct Martian civilization. The HFH explains that the Martians worked themselves into extinction to convert the entire planet into an enormous spaceship. Zim asks why, since they could never use it if they were extinct. "Because it's coooooool," replies the head.
I argued that this was an excellent and worthy reason for a species to wipe itself out, and far better than most of the available alternatives. My friend argued that it was really, really stupid.
These days I tend to think it's both...
Posted by: Froborr | Aug 29, 2012 at 09:33 AM
Heh. It is really, really cool.
Gah! Mining in space! We should be trying harder for things like that. We will get cool, useful stuff along the way, too.
I am so tired of stick-in-the-mud jackassses telling us we don't deserve to dream or move forward.
Posted by: Lonespark | Aug 29, 2012 at 10:40 AM