Manned Spaceflight Is A Waste Of Resources

[Ducman69]

The propose is expansion of Humankind, we already use probes to explore, lets move beyond that.....

Humankind is hugely impractical in space, very unhealthy and dangerous for the people we send up, and its massively slowing our progress, that's the point.

With robots we can take far greater risks, get much higher return on investment, and move more quickly towards actually colonizing Mars and setting up moon mining operations and the like.

We know enough now that humans living in spacestations or space craft for years on end just isn't a good idea, and they will be meat-cargo to transport through automated systems to get from A to B.

What we have moved beyond is the need for astronauts thanks to advances in software programming and robotics.

 

[DrLobotomy]

Ok. As a compromise we can send all the robots to explore so they wont stay here to kill us.

Everyone happy now?? OK. Good.

 

[LGZdarkside]

Humankind is hugely impractical in space, very unhealthy and dangerous for the people we send up, and its massively slowing our progress, that's the point.

With robots we can take far greater risks, get much higher return on investment, and move more quickly towards actually colonizing Mars and setting up moon mining operations and the like.

We know enough now that humans living in spacestations or space craft for years on end just isn't a good idea, and they will be meat-cargo to transport through automated systems to get from A to B.

What we have moved beyond is the need for astronauts thanks to advances in software programming and robotics.

With current technology this is true. But what about advances in shielding, propulsion, artificial gravity? These are the things we need to focus on, not a bunch of robots somehow doing this for us. How is that going to drive the technology we need to survive in space and expand beyond the planet? Being shipped as meat cargo? really, that's your vision of space exploration and colonization?

Here are some areas that show promise....

Shielding...

Propulsion...

Artificial Gravity...

Energy...

 

[M76]

Do you have any idea how many races can be raced with the resources that it takes to take a single human to space? Lol. I can tell you that's not an insignificant figure.

Talking down from a pedestal won't make your argument stronger. Especially if the argument is so weak. I'm positive there are much more resources spent on motor racing worldwide than on space travel. It's irrelevant either way. You spend as much as necessary.

 

[Bowman15]

I can think of a hundred more wasteful uses of our tax dollars than manned space flights. We need to learn what we can endure in space and the subsequent traveling through it long term. Humanity seems hell bent on destroying the Earth sooner rather than later.

 

[dgz]

I don't agree on the girl part.

You'd know hehe. Yeah, I remember that thing you posted some time ago

 

[Ducman69]

Lets pretend that resources are infinite, which they are not.

Money aside, the fact is that manned space travel is holding us back from our potential, and everyone here knows it but is too in love with the romantic FEELING of manned space flight to admit it.

If we abandon manned space flight we can increase the risk up to our economic capacity to launch equipment into space and tear out all the red tape that involves cancelled launches and multitudes of tests because of fear of what would become of the 0.00000000000000001% of people we send into orbit (it won't be you one way or another).

We can go on far more missions, far greater distances, without the need for return flights most of the time, and explore far more of our solar system and beyond.

With current technology this is true. But what about advances in shielding, propulsion, artificial gravity?

I like Star Trek too, but then I grew up and looked at what was the most practical means to achieve a goal.

These are the things we need to focus on, not a bunch of robots somehow doing this for us. How is that going to drive the technology we need to survive in space and expand beyond the planet?

First off, someone else is going to do this for you one way or another. You are an observer, and you might as well accept that reality, and you can see a lot better through a pair of artificial eyes in high definition than you can from some random space jock stealing all your poon regaling in stories of what he got to do in space (awesome for him, irrelevant for 99.999% of us).

Fact is, we (humanity at large) aren't going to survive in space, that's what our research has taught us. We are going to survive on other planets, not in space, and for that you can invest your money in biodomes and cryogenics, and the practical uses for robotics are immediately applicable to a myriad of other fields in the very near future.

The vacuum of space is a great desert, and large amounts of people aren't going to be living in it one way or another, and the idea of a handful of Star Trek captains and engineers flying through it at warp drive is great for fantasy novels, but the rest of us want much faster and more realistic results.

Once we have mastered unmanned space travel and have mapped the depths of the universe in great detail and have colonies on other planets, then you can always still use that technology to have people scooting around in manned space ships for tourism/entertainment purposes.

 

[LGZdarkside]

You have some good points, but yet I still disagree. You can accuse me of being a dreamer and that's fine, I'm in good company.

Stephen Hawkins can address this for me. I highlighted some relevant lines.


George Washington University, April 21, 2008

Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of Moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth?

In a way, the situation is like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. If nothing else, we wouldn’t have had a Big Mac or KFC.

Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them, and cause us to look outwards rather than inwards. Hopefully it would unite us to face a common challenge.

This would be a long-term strategy, and by long-term I mean hundreds or thousands of years. We could have a base on the Moon within 30 years, reach Mars in 50 years, and explore the moons of the outer planets in 200 years. By “reach” I mean with manned, or should I say “personed,” space flight. We have already driven rovers on Mars and landed a probe on Titan, a moon of Saturn, but if one is considering the future of the human race we have to go there ourselves.

Going into space won’t be cheap, but it would take only a small proportion of world resources. NASA’s budget has remained roughly constant in real terms since the time of the Apollo landings, but it has decreased from 0.3% of US GDP in 1970 to 0.12% now. Even if we were to increase the international budget 20 times to make a serious effort to go into space it would only be a small fraction of world GDP.

There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet like climate change and pollution rather than wasting it on a possibly fruitless search for a new planet. I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that and still spare a quarter of a percent of world GDP for space. Isn’t our future worth a quarter of a percent?

We thought space was worth a big effort in the 60s. In 1962 President Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. This was achieved on time by the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. The space race helped to create a fascination with science and led to great advances in technology, including the first large-scale integrated circuits which are the basis of all modern computers.

However, after the last Moon landing in 1972, with no future plans for further manned space flight, public interest in space declined. This went along with a general disenchantment with science in the West because although it had brought great benefits it had not solved the social problems that increasingly occupied public attention.

A new manned spaceflight program would do a lot to restore public enthusiasm for space and for science generally. 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 am arguing should be our long-term strategy.

A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would re-ignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy’s Moon target did in the 1960s. A new interest in space would also increase the public standing of science generally. The low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences. We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology, yet fewer and fewer young people want to go into science. As a small step towards curing this, my daughter, Lucy, and I have written a children's book

.

What will we find when we go into space? Is there alien life out there, or are we alone in the Universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.

But we don’t know how life first appeared. The probability of something as complicated as the DNA molecule being formed by random collisions of atoms in the primeval ocean is incredibly small. However, there might have been some simpler macromolecule which then built up the DNA or some other macromolecule capable of reproducing itself.

Still, even if the probability of life appearing on a suitable planet is very small, since the Universe is infinite, life would have appeared somewhere. If the probability is very low, the distance between two independent occurrences of life would be very large.

However, there is a possibility, known as panspermia, that life could spread from planet to planet, or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors. We know that Earth has been hit by meteors that came from Mars, and others may have come from further afield. We have no evidence that any meteors carried life, but it remains a possibility. An important feature of life spread by panspermia is that it would have the same basis, which would be DNA for life in the neighborhood of the Earth. On the other hand, an independent occurrence of life would be extremely unlikely to be DNA based. So watch out if you meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease against which you have no resistance.

One piece of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10 billion year lifetime of an Earth-like planet. This would suggest either panspermia or that the probability of life appearing independently is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the 10 billion years available. If it is panspermia, any life in the solar system or in nearby stellar systems will also be DNA based.

While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don’t seem to be any advanced intelligent beings. We don’t appear to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdoes? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven’t heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.

Why haven’t we heard from anyone out there? One view is expressed in this Calvin cartoon. The caption reads “Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

More seriously, there could be three possible explanations of why we haven’t heard from aliens. First, it may be that the probability of primitive life appearing on a suitable planet is very low. Second, the probability of primitive life appearing may be reasonably high, but the probability of that life developing intelligence like ours may be very low. Just because evolution led to intelligence in our case, we shouldn’t assume that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of Darwinian natural selection.

It is not clear that intelligence confers a long-term survival advantage. Bacteria and insects will survive quite happily even if our so-called intelligence leads us to destroy ourselves. This is the third possibility: Life appears and in some cases develops into intelligent beings, but when it reaches the stage of sending radio signals it will also have the technology to make nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. It would therefore be in danger of destroying itself before long. Let’s hope this is not the reason we have not heard from anyone.

Personally, I favor the second possibility, that primitive life is relatively common but that intelligent life is very rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.

Can we exist for a long time away from here? Our experience with the ISS, the International Space Station, shows that it is possible for human beings to survive for many months away from planet Earth. However, the zero gravity of orbit causes a number of undesirable physiological changes, a weakening of the bones, as well as creating practical problems with liquids, etc. One would therefore want any long-term base for human beings to be on a planet or moon. By digging into the surface, one would get thermal insulation and protection from meteors and cosmic rays. The planet or moon could also serve as a source of the raw materials that would be needed if the extraterrestrial community was to be self-sustaining, independently of Earth.

What are the possible sites of a human colony in the solar system? The most obvious is the Moon. It is close by and relatively easy to reach. We have already landed on it and driven across it in a buggy. On the other hand, the Moon is small and without atmosphere or a magnetic field to deflect the solar radiation particles like on Earth. There is no liquid water, but there may be ice in the craters at the north and south poles. A colony on the Moon could use this as a source of oxygen, with power provided by nuclear energy or solar panels. The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.

Mars is the obvious next target. It is half as far again as the Earth from the Sun, and so receives half of the warmth. It once had a magnetic field but it decayed 4 billion years ago, leaving Mars without protection from solar radiation. This stripped Mars of most of its atmosphere, leaving it with only one percent of the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, the pressure must have been higher in the past because we see what appear to be runoff channels and dried up lakes. Liquid water cannot exist on Mars now. It would vaporize in the near vacuum. This suggests that Mars had a warm wet period during which life might have appeared either spontaneously or through panspermia. There is no sign of life on Mars now, but if we found evidence that life had once existed that would indicate that the probability of life developing on a suitable planet was fairly high.

NASA has sent a large number of spacecraft to Mars, starting with Mariner 4 in 1964. It has surveyed the planet with a number of orbiters, the latest being the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These orbiters have revealed deep gullies and the highest mountains in the solar system. NASA has also landed a number of probes on the surface of Mars, most recently the two Mars rovers, which have sent back pictures of the dry desert landscape. However, there is a large quantity of water in the form of ice in the polar regions. A colony on Mars could use this as a source of oxygen. There has been volcanic activity on Mars. This would have brought minerals and metals to the surface which a colony could use.

The Moon and Mars are the most suitable sites for space colonies in the solar system. Mercury and Venus are too hot, while Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants with no solid surface. The moons of Mars are very small and have no advantages over Mars itself. Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be possible, in particular Titan, a moon of Saturn that’s slightly more massive than our Moon and has a dense atmosphere. The Cassini-Huygens mission of NASA and ESA has landed a probe on Titan which has sent back pictures of the surface. However, it is very cold, being so far from the Sun, and I wouldn’t fancy living next to a lake of liquid methane.

What about beyond the solar system? Our observations indicate that a significant fraction of stars have planets around them. So far, we can detect only giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn but it is reasonable to assume that they will be accompanied by smaller, Earth-like planets. Some of these will lie in the “Goldilocks” zone where the distance from the star is in the right region for liquid water to exist on their surface.

There are around a thousand stars within 30 light years of Earth. If one percent of these have Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks zone, we have 10 candidate new worlds. We can’t envisage visiting them with current technology, but we should make interstellar travel a long-term aim. By long-term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years.

The human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Thank you for listening.

 

[westrock2000]

My reaction to this guys thought process.

 

[Yossarian22]

I don't get it the whole anti-space exploration/NASA thing. Even conditionals like anti-meatsack launches. Is this a political thing? People need to stop being like bean counters and being so myopic. Three words: side spun technologies. You see it with the closest thing to megacorps that we have like IBM and such, to the point they will side spin companies along with patent portfolios.

For example, I don't really use cellular telephones in my daily life and I wish people would be more sociable and give more face/eye time in real life. Despite my personal feelings, it is PDAs and then by technological extension, cellular telephones that have allowed a whole CPU market to blow up. So for the Average Joe or even Average Citizen "bachelor's degree/nerd/scientist" Joe, you have all these cheaply available CPUs, micros, and DSP technology. Not only that, but at the TDP and ever increasing performance, they aren't exactly crap -- along with keeping purely niche business models alive and well like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all your (anti) social media.

Sending meat sacks is expensive but it's the same argument with UAVs on the other side of the planet and they aren't even any appreciable distance from the planet Earth itself. Do you want a Predator with crew back stateside giving you fire support or would you rather have an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior & crew who are using the entirety of their sensorium and are actually at greater risk, thus in a greater position to do an awesome job? All the hardware for the guys actually there are engineered to a higher standard because more lives are at risk. Also, you cannot view things from the end of a straw and back and manage very well. It's... myopic.

Even if nothing of value is produced in a government or any scientific venture, say, 2/3rd of the time -- the actual pursuit might lead to some happy accidents or side studies. History is peppered with these. The spending was worth it.

VR is in the same position as these 'fringe' technologies. It has literally been there for 30-40 years. It's just that someone who isn't an academic or military contractor is not going to spend $40k on a head mounted display with eye-tracking in a commercial setting. You can't possibly sell that as an entertainment device at the cost of production, supply & demand, &c... Now, within the last ten years, prices have been dropping and it has actually entering that commercial market. HTC Vive, Occulus, et cetera...

Consoles are a bit of a reverse example. Lots of proprietary hardware released but the software remains in the envelope of physical and fiscal restrictions of the least common denominator. It is one of the main reasons why I can get away with running modern games on an overclocked E8400 (released approximately 8 years ago, entire C2D line initially released 10 years ago) and Pitcarin @ 28nm.

 

[B00nie]

The propose is expansion of Humankind, we already use probes to explore, lets move beyond that.....

Build them on the moon using local "resources". Launch them with railguns into orbit using no earth based resources. Then move mining to the asteroid belt, etc... Have to get there first. If we sit around worrying about using "local" earth based resources it will never get done...

It seems you failed to understand my point. Use bots and resources in space to build the spacecraft that hauls people to Mars instead of building a huge thing on earth.

 

[Xrave]

Can't view the article, but obviously this guy has no concept of latency.

given our national debt, I'm personally against any space program

The amount of money given to NASA is peanuts compared to the US budget, and national debt. Right now they get about 18-19B, which is only 0.5% of the national budget. Even with only 0.5% they still crank out great science. I think their budget should be doubled at the cost of some other programs/things we pay for.

mars alone is a 6min delay vr won't work

The closest Mars has ever come to Earth was in 2003, and at this point it was a 3 min/6 min round trip communication time. On average it's 12.5 min one way, and if Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun it's 22 min one way.