The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to get.
This means the number one rule is don't make us look bad. You can't waste too much money, you can't go making a bunch of controversial statements, and good grief, whatever you do don't have astronauts getting exploded on TV.
The analogy with the mission-centric military was a good one. Unfortunately, as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we're going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.
NASA should have but one mission: lower cost to orbit. If they can reach a 1000-fold reduction in cost to low-earth orbit, a lot of scientific research, exploration, and commercialization can take place.
Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it's pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politics.
Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.
I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.
So I think the only real options are:
1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a
century-long timeframe, but who knows)
3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology
developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I
would bet on)Going for #3, combined with LEO manned spaceflight on a commercial basis, and then maybe a Mars or Lunar mission privately financed, would be fine with me, even if the same money in government would be more productively spent on aid to the poor or lowering taxes. Let the government spend money on purely scientific missions (with robots or telescopes), and maybe on establishing regulatory frameworks and contracts for specific amounts of space freight to cover government missions.
(If things keep going well technologically, we could have a Mars Direct mission for about 2x the cost of a series of movies about a Mars mission... at that point, it actually becomes worthwhile for private financiers to do it for the media rights.)
With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can send up AIs or uploaded humans running on rad-hardened processors.
It goes back to the discussions about terra-forming. Is it better to adapt an entire planet (which is big, by the way) to human needs, or is it better to adapt humans to just live in that environment as-is?
Oh, and this sufficiently advanced technology gives you some other side benefits, including practical immortality, so that is worth pursuing by itself.
First, if we're talking about running an uploaded human-equivalent AI, we've got the processor power for that now, but it takes up a large server room. So I'd say we need to shrink stuff by at least 2 orders of magnitude to launch that into space. With corresponding gains in efficiency. So for that I think we're looking at 10 years at current rates of progress. Tack on another 5 for radiation hardening, because that estimate was based on commercial-grade hardware, which is almost as fragile as meat.
After you have that, it is a small matter of programming :-)
Brain uploading. I don't know if Kurzweil's "$1000 computer by 2035" prediction is right, but we'll certainly have it by the end of the century.
Accelerando features a good exploration of this. Your interstellar spaceship is a laser-propelled computer the size of a soda can, with everyone's brains simply uploaded into it.
Agreed. But there are other things being looked at in space in the commercial realm (ranging from tourism to resource extraction to energy generation) that require humans.
There is also an argument for positive externalities. I don't think anyone concretely foresaw the technological developments shot off the side of the Apollo missions. That's not a sufficient justification. But if one has two nations, one pursuing manned space missions and one not, the technological developments will happen in one and not the other. A more cosmopolitan perspective would be if you had two universes, one with a species that did this and another without...
In this entire discussion I'm not bringing up national pride, either, which has real-world significance in terms of how it affects the flow of intellectual talent, i.e. the brain drain.
It's hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect.
But if mankind doesn't eventually colonise other planets then we're almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us.
By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.
Why not focus on things that are problems now?
But ultimately, it's these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I'm not going to open the "what's the purpose of life" can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.
Nor telescopes, but that's beyond the point.
Mankind puts all its eggs in one basket. Our odds of survival against planetary catastrophes increase with the number of planets we colonize. The more spread we are, the bigger the chances. The timescales involved are huge but, just like someone wins the lottery every week, I'm willing to bet that, as we discuss, a civilization we know nothing of is being wiped out by an unforeseen catastrophe precisely because all of them lived on top of a single rock.
I also dispute the utility calculus you're performing.
At what cost could we move a sustainable colony elsewhere? What is the probability that we'll all be expunged by a bit of rock zipping around the solar system? Is there another way we could allocate those resources to achieve a better expected outcome?
Don't be so selfish. Odds are a couple of the survivors are distant cousins, so, at least some of your genes are safe. And you can also record messages for the survivors to safeguard.
Or we can develop the technology to upload you to a simulation somewhere else.
> What is the probability that we'll all be expunged by a bit of rock zipping around the solar system?
Given time, if we stay limited to the Earth, 100%
> Is there another way we could allocate those resources to achieve a better expected outcome?
Again, it depends on the timeframe we are talking about. I think the first thing we have to do is to thoroughly understand the threats we face. The second step is to understand what Plan-B looks like. We really need to look into environmental risks (Yellowstone, climate change), political ones (Iran with nukes), economic ones and the risk of a floating rock with our name on it hitting us soon enough. If a rock or an erupting Yellowstone or a bunch of fanatics with high-tech WMDs don't kill us, we may get fried when the Milky Way and Andromeda collide (it'll happen in about a billion years, and while stars won't likely hit each other too frequently, gas clouds will light up). If that doesn't destroy the Earth, the Sun will eventually swallow it as it gets old, in, IIRC, 6 billion years.
The Earth is doomed. Every planet and star is doomed. Even the universe itself is doomed. Its only chance is if someone smart enough survives long enough to figure out how to avoid it.
Think of all we've learned by putting humans into space. Think of all we'd have to learn to put humans permanently on the moon - from long-term temperature regulation to ecosystem habitats and materials science.
It's not the destination of the journey that matters. It's what we need to figure out in order to get there that does.
I, personally, am looking forward to a Kickstarter from a credible private team to start work on a space elevator. And I'm only half-joking.
It all depends on your kind of science. For an astronomer, manned space travel is pointless. In fact, space travel is pointless unless we invent some kind of FTL propulsion that can actually put a probe close to some interesting phenomena or allow us to look from another direction.
OTOH, a thousand rovers will tell us nothing about how human societies would organize in artificial habitats. A machine cannot tell how it feels to be able to hide Earth from view with your extended hand.
That's what manned space travel is for. It's not to bring back measurements or soil samples. It's to bring back stories that reminds us how extraordinary we can be.
And to inspire us to be extraordinary.
But say you're a Libertarian and have some ideas about how society ought to be structured. Meanwhile, society is clearly structured a certain way which (according to your worldview) is not consistent with that (e.g. the US government, undue tax burdens on the private sector, and bureaucracies like NASA) and it's not particularly likely that you're going to see massive restructuring of it in the near future.
Why would that stop you from taking issue with specific irrational policies of those bureaucracies? If space travel (or carbon-reduction or whatever-you-want) is clearly a goal of society, then you might as well try to cope with reality and at least try to make sure they go after that goal as effectively as possible, and limit the damage it's going to do.
(Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)
Similarly, NASA is geared up for yesterday's space race. We have to send a man to space! We have to send two men to space! We have to send a man to the moon! Uh, now what... We have to send a man to MARS!
Well, no, we really don't. Yes, we could. We know we could. We wouldn't learn anything significant by doing so that we couldn't learn for much cheaper here on Earth. It would be a massively expensive, complicated and dangerous tourist expedition-- a lot like sending soldiers to the Middle East, actually.
We all already live in space, on the largest, safest, most self-sustaining spaceship any of us can conceive of. The future of space exploration lies in the hands of semi- and fully-autonomous machines. There's no good reason for people to be in space, not for the foreseeable future at least.
Thereby creating a nation of people dependent on our aid, who, when we cease sending aid due to budget constraints, will likely decide to start a war anyway. coughNorth Koreacough
Not saying that line of reasoning is totally invalid, but it's definitely not so clear-cut that you can use it in an analogy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_L...
In the current state of the US, however, the political will for new military action is fairly minimal, for better or for worse.
The US would only have to make Assad think it was serious about another Libya in order to give him some serious misgivings. Get NATO to make some rumblings, which would encourage Chavez to issue one of his proclamations against American Imperialism, then make a backroom deal to get Assad out.
At the end of the day, the Bush Doctrine of democracy-at-swordpoint is simply ineffective. There exists, however, the very real possibility of using soft/"firm" power to encourage the outcomes you want.
1) The Assad family would have to find the threat from NATO credible. 2) They would have to believe that there is no chance of defeating the rebels militarily and outlasting NATO bombardment. 3) The major power players in the Assad government would have to be willing to accept life in exile, with no opportunity for travel or engagement with the rest of the world. (Even Ben Ali, the dictator who left Tunisia semi-voluntarily, has an international warrant out for his arrest.) 4) Some country (presumably America) would have to be willing to either pay them a significant lump sum out of their own pocket or allow them to loot Syria before they leave.
You could pick any one of these apart.
Not that I agree with the idea of paying off people, but Syria's total GDP is only about US$60 billion, hard to imagine that it would take "trillions".
2) What if the national leader you're trying to pay off believes himself to be a true partiot and refuses to surrender his country to US interests?
One of the most effective things that has been done to slow down America's middle-eastern conflicts is paying people not to fight. When I say that, I don't mean building schools and hospitals. I mean giving people cash money in exchange for them not shooting our men and women.
From:
"When in the course of human events,"
"and that, government of the people,
by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth,"
"We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators"
"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz)
The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are not particularly unusual, and I don’t think they represent a rising trend. That doesn’t mean they’re excusable or inevitable, and they may have important differences from past politicized wars. I’m not apologizing for them, I’m just saying they aren’t a new phenomenon.
<cough> Libya <cough> drones <cough>
Yep, the writing is already on the wall.
How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?
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