Apparently apropos of human, rather than robot, exploration, this article says:
Frankly, the chance of finding evidence of life on Mars will always make it a more attractive destination than our close, but definitely dead, satellite.
So it looks like everyone has conveniently forgotten all about Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 short story Before Eden.
That's the one where the humans visit Venus, discover life, high-five each other, and leave.
The next trip discovers that all the Venusian life is extinct, having been contaminated by the humans that had discovered it.
Back in the 1960s people remembered this story. Probes to Mars and Venus were deliberately sterilized before they landed. So far as I know that practice continues today.
The last thing you want to do to a planet that might contain life is to send living things from Earth to visit it. Their residue will screw up every experiment forever after. Even now, when all we send are sterilized robot probes, avoiding contamination by Earth-derived biomolecules is a major struggle.
In real life, no, but before it was discovered that under the clouds of Venus lies a surface where tin is a liquid, Venus was home to tropical jungles full of large, dangerous critters, and enormous swamp-based civilizations. Venus was also strangely prone to generating aliens with telepathy.
Just as science cost us Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars, science cost us fantastic Venusian civilizations.
On the plus side, we now have the green light to land humans on Venus without fear of contaminating any telepathic swamp-dwelling aliens.
The argument still holds for Mars, though.
It is fun to watch the SF writers relocate the dragons as the edges of the map get filled in. Europa is the new Venus. Clarke shifted the stage in 2010 without missing a beat.
Certainly not. In theory, any self-replicating molecule that can operate with random errors in the replication can support evolution, and therefore eventually lead to something vaguely like life.
Yet if we are trying to visit/colonize other planets, at some point this will have to change, right?
Unless you think we're looking for livable planets with no life already on them, at some point natural evolution and propagation of the species calls for us to mix the ecosystem, right?
This is something I've always been confused about. I'm not trying to argue with you, just understand some of the premises.
This is only bad news if you think that manned missions to the moon are a desirable goal. If you think of manned space flight as sucking resources away from much more interesting autonomous robotic exploration of the solar system, then you want the moon as inconvenient as possible to build a base on.
To make manned space flight seem so undesirable is disingenuous to the breathtaking reality of the first manned moon landing. It disheartens me to see that the accomplishment that once inspired a nation is widely and apathetically looked upon as a waste of resources.
Stephen Hawking puts it better than I do:
Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Manned missions involving highly trained air force pilots and school teachers on a government funded space ferry seem undesirable. Manned space flight involving random wealthy civilians seems to have taken its place.
Perhaps folks are tired of sending the typical astronaut to space on some government mission on their dime, and are ready to go themselves. If commercial space flight catches hold and the price comes down, my guess is people will get interested again real quick as it becomes a realistic candidate for the old "bucket list".
High speed trains don't capture the human imagination in the same way as steam trains. Volvos with air bags and seatbelts don't have the same response as 50s Studebakers.
And tunnel boring machines aren't as picturesque as 1000s of slaves chipping away at rock with stone tools - it's called progress.
If we want to send people far away in the long term, there are certaint problems involving people in space that are not solved sending unmanned spacecrafts. We need to actually send people. Ships with antiradiation shells, autonomous and sustainable life-support, etc.
We can solve those problems when they become relevant. Until we know what's out there we can't know when we'll want to send people far away.
And we better use robots for solving one problem a time, at least in early experimentation. For example, make robots measure absorbed radiation, to test those antiradiation shells. Or make them build a sustainable water supply and farm in the target planet, to prove it can be done.
That could be cheaper, and less risky in human lives, than trying to juggle all balls at once.
sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.
If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa?
I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.
I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y?
How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?
Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.)
We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.
Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money.
Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit?
I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.)
Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?
I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)
Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend.
zero-sum fallacy. You assume that all we get from the effort is some photos, ignoring the knowledge gains in fields as diverse as robotics, data compression/processing and astronomy (eg space weather) which must all be improved in pursuit of such a goal. The knowledge gained from such endeavors can have a direct impact back here on earth but helping us to build safer and more capable autonomous machines, make more of our bandwidth and thus lessen our energy use, and craft better satellites that be of greater utility in studying weather, deforestation, disease outbreaks and so on.
I strongly object to this 'what's it all for except vanity' whinge. We do it in order to obtain a greater understanding of our environment, and history shows that science and technology pretty much always pays for itself in the long run through benefits to all humanity. Just like delivering and utilizing aid more efficiently in places like Africa or Bangladesh could someday yield intellectual benefits that would aid the process of colonising a planet with scarce resources.
If we just wanted pretty pictures, we could buy coffee table books or a nice camera and go on a photo tour. The images from Mars are generally not that spectacular, visually. What makes them important is the tremendous step forward in human knowledge that they represent. That's why that photograph of Neil Armstrong (edit sorry, of Aldrin BY Armstrong) standing on the moon is, to me at least, still the single greatest achievement of humanity.
Thanks to the space missions we get technology that is useful for X and Y. So why not invest that money to research solutions to X and Y in first place instead? Presumably, with similar allotted funds we'd stumble into discoveries that are useful for Z (and maybe even W, if we're really lucky).
That's 3 or 4 letters for you, easy. And all we had to do was start with an useful goal. Who knew?
> Thanks to the space missions we get technology that is useful for X and Y. So why not invest that money to research solutions to X and Y in first place instead?
Technology doesn't work that way. Real life is not Sid Meier's Civilization where you pick what to research.
Because the fringe benefits of X and Y might not be apparent. Here's a long list of things that were developed for the space program and which have turned out to be valuable in other contexts; but which might not otherwise have passed the 'necessity test' for investment: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
Find some X and Y that pass the 'necessity test' then.
If X and Y don't warrant express investment in first place, how come they justify investments on space programs after the fact?
To defeat this reasoning, I suggest you try and find a reason why serendipity should work better in projects with less immediate usefulness. I could be convinced that's the case, but I haven't heard arguments in favour of this hypothesis so far.
Money spend on Aid in Africa probably dwarfs money spend on space research. Sub-Sahara Africa has swallowed more than 15 Marshall Plans with no signs of development.
Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable.
It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+.
In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed.
> I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo.
HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system.
As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.
So if you have money to throw around you'd rather throw it at lobbying for free trade in the rich world, so that e.g. African agriculture can compete better.
That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive.
But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers).
I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).
> That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive.
Absolutely We spend a lot of money on aid, and then spend orders of magnitude more to chancel that aid by killing the market for third world products. But fixing that problem will require us to make thousands of farmers unemployed, and that's political suicide. Especially in Europe, where agriculture subsidies are strongly supported by the political mainstream.
Most people will still want to buy cheap food. I buy organic from local quality farmers when possible, but it's just not always practical and economical. So if we massively import cheap food, we will lose a lot (most?) of the agricultural jobs in Europe and that's not politically tenable.
The other argument I've heard against abolishing food subsidies is a strategic one. We'd become dependent on food from countries that are often not politically stable. An oil crisis on the food level could be devastating.
I say, if that's the argument, then be honest about it and nationalize agriculture instead of pretending it's private businesses.
For some more optimistic aspects of the developing world (and especially Africa), see the newest special report of the Economist (http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?sto... (be sure to click "next article" at the bottom, if you want to read all of it).
The article is interesting about mobile phones. For interest sake, MTN is a South African company. Mobile phones make things such as informal jobs a lot easier (e.g. if someone wants to organise labour for a project).
The problem still however is price. In China it costs 0.15 Yuan to send a text message – in SA it can be the equivalent the equivalent of 1 Yuan. Voice calls are even more expensive (R3+ a minute – about 0.4 US$). I believe that the price elsewhere in Africa is even more expensive (since some of the base stations run on Diesel generators).
I also don’t think that telecoms growth should be seen as economic growth (it is not always coupled). Telecoms is however still a giant problem. In SA we have huge problems with extremely expensive Internet. This is extremely unfavourable. We have a lot of people that can speak English without an accent at the same time zone as Europe – yet it is too expensive to put up call centres.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending NASA. I'm defending the long-term value of space flight, and rejecting the idea that we have to get our affairs perfectly in order down here before we can head up into space. First of all, our affairs will never be perfectly in order, there will always be something else to fix - do you truly expect utopia to be achieved before we can allow ourselves to spend ANY resources on space? Second of all, if we suddenly stop all spending on space, all that money will not magically get redirected to humanitarian purposes (ok, a bit of a strawman, you never claim it would). Third, even if ALL the resources were redirected to good use, it would likely be for short-term fixes rather than any systemic gains.
I firmly believe that we can and SHOULD do both. NASA isn't the right model - something like the X PRIZE is much more exciting. The same is true of saving the world - pouring billions into humanitarian aid might work for specific short-term goals, but we need different models for long-term change - the obvious being more stable political and economic conditions to allow a self-sustaining standard of living.
It's a false dichotomy because, depending on who you ask, you can ALWAYS find a thing Y that is worth doing more than X. Given enough patience and small enough steps, I'm sure it's possible to build a chain of things that are increasingly higher priority to achieve, that nonetheless ends up being perfectly circular, like Escher's staircase.
feed starving man.
starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him.
we've just doubled suffering in our system.
when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity
This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations.
The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population.
Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance.
And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.
in india and china? no. in africa? yes. sending resources to places in contention is an easy way to cause further destabilization. see: cia in south america in the 60's.
if india and china's government's collapsed I would want to immediately cease aid to them as well.
an aside: this line of reasoning is my problem with libertarianism too. if historically under precondition X A caused B, it is quite silly to talk about A and B in a vacuum. see: nick szabo ranting about tort law :)
First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children).
I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory...
BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative.
About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished).
About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?)
Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.)
Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no.
Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil).
But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh...
The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation.
Another long term strategy would be to live in a sustainable way on this planet. Perhaps we could crack that first. The sun is good for another 5 billion years.
You need sustainability first then worry about redundancy. One requires a complete revolution in human thought and behaviour. The other, expansion and technical problem solving, comes naturally.
Manned missions don't catch people's imagination anymore either. "Space-optimism" of 60-70s is long gone. Now is the time to do real work in outer space.
It depends. We can't say for sure manned spaceflight doesn't catch people's imagination because since the early 70's we really don't send people anywhere interesting.
Er can't blame people: the ISS is as exciting as camping on your backyard. It may solve some problems and help develop some technologies important for future space travelers, but it's difficult to call it space exploration when you don't explore anything.
The state of science education also doesn't help either. Most people cannot appreciate how devilishly hard is to keep a presence in LEO.
As for keeping a presence on the Moon, it is important because we have to perfect a lot of protocols before we can pretend to be ready for a trip to Mars and, if anything goes wrong, rescue is a week away.
Even if you have to process a couple tons of rocks to get a liter of water, it would be cheaper than to send it from Earth and by landing a couple automated water factories before any humans venture there could also reduce the risks (and costs) further as they wouldn't have to carry a lot of water.
You can't perfect the manned spaceflight protocols with unmanned probes. The Moon is a stepping stone towards Mars and, if we can mine lunar regolith for metals, water and propellant (LOX, LH2), we are golden: the lunar base can become the best spot for building and launching spacecraft.
I wonder if there is carbon and nitrogen there too. That would make colonization much simpler.
You know what would really capture people's imaginations? Space piracy. With frikkin' laser beams. Once there are bad guys in space stealing our shit, you can be sure the public will rally around the idea of sending good guys into space.
That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long.
The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity.
The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.
1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!
What if you're a pragmatic scientist? Science is funded by the people. If they aren't excited about research, funding may drop. If we have to devote some of our resources, even a lot, into activities that keep people excited, then that's fine, so long as it's good for science (and the people) in the long run.
A pragmatic scientist might realize that a discovery in itself is neither good nor bad, and would fight for the public interest of doing science for the purpose of discovery, rather than politicizing what they feel the public is interested in discovering.
That's being pragmatic about science, not about the public. The wisdom of crowds has proved useful in all kinds of areas - collectively, human intuition is surprisingly good. A bit of crowd-pleasing might not be a bad thing; after all, nobody thinks of Christopher Columbus as 'the man who failed to discover a westerly trade route to India'.
Yes... I would expect a pragmatic scientist to be pragmatic about science, and a pragmatic politician to be pragmatic about public issues, ie politics.
I fail to see how Columbus holds any credence in the conversation, Columbus sought the favors of royalty for the purpose of creating wealth for royalty, the public interest was of no concern and never was to him. Nobody may think of Columbus as 'the man who failed to discover a westerly trade route to India', however some may think of him as foreshadowing the European colonization of the "New World"- thereby destroying and exploiting many indigenous people, or others may think of Columbus as the man who brought Syphilis back to Europe. Those would be pragmatic historical perspectives of Columbus...
And between scientists and politicians sit administrators, whose job bridge the gap between the two, so that scientists get the funds they need and politicians can credibly tell the public that they're getting good value for their tax dollars. Some funding devoted to projects that resonate strongly with the public may be a more effective guarantor of reliable future funding than an entire collection of good-looking balance sheets for projects that don't capture the public imagination.
As for Columbus, at that the time royal interest and the public interest were effectively the same. My point is that Columbus got the funding he wanted by being a bit of a salesman, and even though he never achieved his stated goal he's generally thought of as the guy who found a whole new continent.
Scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have done more for the public interest of science than any so called administrator, and oddly enough they tend not to impose their specific agendas in the process. If the "public" realized how much money goes into science vs how much money goes into the private military industrial complex they would be appalled. Or, perhaps the public is apathetic and "public interest" is merely a scape goat for the media. Someone, after all, must tell the public what they are interested in.
US/USSR(Russia now) had sent probes to venus, mars and moon for last 30-40 years. but only now we have info on widespread water availability.
maybe sensors have improved, computing power has increased, but ISRO did it indegeniously and using a low cost model, but needed 2 decades to achieve something great.
if humans can share space technology, we could have been couple of decades ahead in space technology
it would be great if we could atleast have a "2020 a space odyssey"
Maybe if humans could share space technology we would be decades behind in space technology.
US and USSR couldn't share technology because they were racing vs each other. If it weren't for that race, maybe they wouldn't have put the huge effort necessary to send people to space in the 20th century.
Frankly, the chance of finding evidence of life on Mars will always make it a more attractive destination than our close, but definitely dead, satellite.
So it looks like everyone has conveniently forgotten all about Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 short story Before Eden.
http://books.google.com/books?id=iL2-iRGDjScC&pg=PA60...
That's the one where the humans visit Venus, discover life, high-five each other, and leave.
The next trip discovers that all the Venusian life is extinct, having been contaminated by the humans that had discovered it.
Back in the 1960s people remembered this story. Probes to Mars and Venus were deliberately sterilized before they landed. So far as I know that practice continues today.
The last thing you want to do to a planet that might contain life is to send living things from Earth to visit it. Their residue will screw up every experiment forever after. Even now, when all we send are sterilized robot probes, avoiding contamination by Earth-derived biomolecules is a major struggle.