Obama provides further confirmation that he wants a thorough review of the space program's priorities.
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Barack in Space
02 Mar 2008 02:49 pm
Comments (31)
Hopefully, in the unlikely event that Senator Obama is elected, he will take Professor Bob Parks' advice and deemphasize the manned space flight program.
"I'm fairly sure our planet is doomed and I'd like to be able to have some humans surviving at least in orbit until the planet calms down enough for them to move down."
You know, MNPundit, you're in distinguished company. Stephen Hawkings agrees with you, as do some other scientists.
I personally disagree on both counts. I'm not so sure Earth is "doomed," and even if it is, I still think the prudent scientific response would be to attempt to delay or prevent impending doom rather than try to engineer a solution that would only save a tiny fraction of humanity.
If humanity truly ruins its greatest gift, the planet Earth, it has no right to salvation or a tabula rasa. The only right thing to do is go down with ship.
Philly: giant asteroids don't care if we saved the whales. Just saying.
(Note: I'm in favor of saving the whales. I just don't think it's an either/or proposition, and there are plenty of terminal scenarios for human beings on this little rock that have nothing to do with us "ruining" things.)
We need to commercialize space. As long as governments control access we're not going to get anywhere. NASA should be a scientific research outfit only.
By the same token space needs to remain demilitarized for long as possible.
"Philly: giant asteroids don't care if we saved the whales. Just saying."
I think we should send whales into space in gigantic, water-filled spacesuits to fight the asteroids.
If we don't use whales to fight the asteroids in space, we'll have to fight the asteroids here.
Credit to Greg Easterbrook on this, but wouldn't it be better to shift a significant amount of NASA's focus and budget to actually achieving things in space that would benefit humanity in the near and mid term? Sure, a moon base would be nice, but the benefits are extremely unclear. If one of NASA's primary missions was to determine ways to harvest solar energy and beam it back to earth, it would revitalize the agency and potentially provide an enormous benefit.
Humans are spectacularly maladapted to existence in space. We require a tiny range of temperature variation, a constant supply of corrosive substances (oxygen and water), our physiology spontaneously undergoes major degeneration in the absence of gravity, and common forms of cosmic radiation kill us relatively quickly. Mitigating these problems requires massive, redundant equipment be raised into space and be supplied with a constant flow of energy and resources. And since we're unlikely to agree to suicide, we require all space missions to have provision for a return trip, effectively doubling the length of any interplanetary voyage.
The notion that some nontrivial portion of humanity could be put in space in a self-sustaining environment in the event of a planetary catastrophe is ludicrous. The idea of sending astronauts to Mars, is not quite so obviously impractical, but even that is a venture unlikely to make any sense given the amount resources necessary to bring it off.
If we don't use whales to fight the asteroids in space, we'll have to fight the asteroids here.
I can't resist quoting a Jack Handey piece from the current New Yorker here:
"Eventually, I believe, everything evens out. Long ago an asteroid hit our planet and killed our dinosaurs. But maybe in the future we'll go to another planet and kill their dinosaurs."
Dr. Memory: I still think that if we truly are capable of creating a Battlestar Galactica-style fleet to go off in search of a new planet, then surely we're also capable of detecting and destroying giant asteriods, n'est-ce pas?
Obviously, we're headed in a slightly ridiculous direction here (thanks, Petey) which is my point--NASA spending should not be prioritized, as MN Pundit would have it, on the basis of sci-fi doomsday scenarios.
I'm pro-NASA, by the way, although I do think that it's ripe for some overdue reform. But we wouldn't have a significant amount of the data scientists have used to understand global warming (among other things) without it. Space technology has been and should be a wonderful boon to our economy and our understanding of the planet and the universe.
If Humanity cannot survive here on Earth, we're not going to survive anywhere else. Period. There are many ways that space technology can be put to good use in helping us learn to live on this planet sustainably. Also finding, cataloging, and potentially altering the orbits of Earth-crossing asteroids and comets should be a priority. These catastrophic events do happen and we need to be ready for them. There is very little reason to put humans into space. Whatever can be accomplished by human space missions can be done more effectively and cheaply by robotic missions.
The first problem we should be trying to solve before we worry about anything else is cheap access to space. I think NASA has had quite enough time to fail at this objective, and we should be giving out large prizes to whichever private group can come up with better solutions.
I think we should also focus intensely on technologies that allow us to identify nearby habitable planets. As everyone above has noted, deep space (and Mars, and the moon) are incredibly hostile environments that will remain commercially untenable for the forseeable future. On the other hand, find a planet that has some signature of life, and people will be all over designs to achieve ~.1c and get a ton of probes headed in that direction that might send back data in a century or two.
I'm totally pro-space pro-all-things-science, but I would even go a step farther than Barack. A top to bottom organization of research efforts in all sciences, with the all mighty research funding dollar distributed in proportion to societal needs.
That would require an honest and fully competent person to determine how to translate the needs into research priorities, which might be too much to ask for.
Sounds like a well reasoned, thoughtful answer to me.
"If Humanity cannot survive here on Earth, we're not going to survive anywhere else."
You're not going to survive here or anywhere else.
Humans aren't going into space. Transhumans will.
The progress of technology will overtake the "manned space program" and render it irrelevant. When you can modify humans into a species capable of surviving anywhere, what do you need with a "spaceship"? When a Transhuman needs only an energy source, materials, nanomass, computing power, and knowledgebases to build anything needed for survival, what do you need with a spaceship or even a planet?
The real problem is the limited imagination of science fiction up to this point. Anybody who thinks we're going to have a future that looks like "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" or "Serenity" simply has no imagination.
But things are looking up. I just saw in Borders yesterday a collection of stories entitled "Transhuman" which explores this issue. From the Amazon description:
http://www.amazon.com/Transhuman-Mark-L-Van-Name/dp/1416555234
"Book Description
The rate of technological development today is exploding. Such diverse technologies as computing, communications, genetics, biology, and nanotechnology are rapidly pushing humanity to a new singularity, a point at which all the rules change and everything we assume about what it means to be human may no longer apply. Leading science fiction writers such as Wil McCarthy, Esther Friesner, James P. Hogan, Hugo-winner David D. Levine, Dave Freer, Wen Spencer, Mark L. Van Name, and others explore this strangest of new frontiers. From a criminal given a last chance at life in a very new kind of existence to a man struggling to claim his own humanity, from battles in the depths of very strange spaces to an amazing new version of keeping up with the Joneses, the stories in Transhuman take you where no human has gone before--but where many of us might one day go."
Wikipedia's entry "Transhumanism in fiction" is another interesting list of sci-fi that addresses, however imperfectly the point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism_in_fiction
The Orion's Arm, (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA) is an online science fiction world-building project that also covers more probable futures in great detail.
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
ALVY: Right. Well, I have to - I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth ...
I knew that was a Richard Steven Hack post from the second sentence.
This just in: Oil has been discovered on Mars. The race is on to build the first trans-planet pipeline. There is a big add in the NY Times for Oilfield roughnecks to be trained for space travel
'Flight of the Conchords' reference?
Korha: Good, you're learning.
BTW, I happen to agree with you that we should commercialize space.
My point is that by the end of this century, "manned space travel" will be an oxymoron. To get to that point, we need a nanotech program more than we need a manned space travel program.
The NASA budget is a pittance. If the US reduced the defense budget and simply shifted some of the money to NASA and nanotech research, we could have both easily.
Martian wage scales are extremely low and the workers are amazingly docile. What are we waiting for?
RSH -- by the end of this century, "international travel" will be an oxymoron.
There's no reason to send humans into space now.
In the distant future maybe, once there is a destination that actually makes sense.
If a independantly sustainable colony is possible, OK, but sending people to Mars is just a waste of limited resources. We keep improving robots each year. Robots are more suitable for space exploration than humans. And the rate of increase of artificial intelligence is much higher than that of human intelligence. In the time it would take us to get a manned mission to Mars, robots will no doubt have improved by an order of magnitude.
In the early days of space surveillance both the U.S. and the USSR planned to send up manned spy satellites. The Soviets actually did it a few times. Eventually it became clear that having a crew aboard the spy satellites was hugely expensive and completely unnecessary. Both countries dropped their spy astronaut programs, and now all space surveillance happens from unmanned platforms.
Moral: When they're really serious about accomplishing something in space they don't bother with manned programs.
"And the rate of increase of artificial intelligence is much higher than that of human intelligence."
Well, yes and no. While the rate of increase in computing power indicates that a computer will have approximately the raw computing power of the human brain by, say, 2020 or 2030, the real advances will only come once nanotech allows deep, real-time analysis of the functioning of the human brain.
And once that's done, the rate of increase of human intelligence should accelerate, in part based on the rate of increase of AI intelligence and in part based on the new knowledge of brain function.
It becomes a race between the enhancement of human intelligence and the enhancement of machine intelligence.
It's very unlikely that we're going to get any sort of "true AI" from incremental software developments enabled by an increase in raw computing power. Over the next two decades, that's probably all we can achieve in the AI area. Not that that's a negative thing, and it certainly can be applied to space exploration more cheaply than a manned mission, so your basic point is correct.
However, from a Transhumanist perspective, it's not a wise thing to try to produce a "true AI" anyway, as opposed to applying the technology of enhanced intelligence directly to enhance (or even replace) the human brain. The former risks a "Terminator" scenario, while the latter doesn't.
Of course, the latter results in Transhumans who may or may not agree to keep humans around either, but at least the option is there for humans to transmogrify into Transhumans. In the former scenario, it's up to the AI whether to keep humans around at all. I don't think a lot of humans would want that to be the only scenario in play.
The bottom line is that manned space missions today don't yield that much critical new knowledge that couldn't be obtained with automated missions - and by the time manned missions are more feasible for humans, there really won't be any "humans" around to do them. So the whole program at this point in time is essentially worthless.
Squeakyrat: "RSH -- by the end of this century, 'international travel' will be an oxymoron."
Uh, yeah, but what's your point?
Were it up to me, I'd like to focus a large section of the budget on reducing the cost to get a pound of matter into orbit, by at least an order of magnitude. Transhumanism or no, it's what will be needed in the long term if we are to expand beyond the limitations of this planet.
RSH: Yes. Well, as I think you mentioned, 'true AI' is neither necessary, nor I would argue desireable for a space exploration robot. It should follow instructions and a 'true AI' could conceivably go HAL or go on strike, or who knows what.
Equally important is that a robot wouldn't need human life support systems and can enter environments that would be lethal to a human.
So at least in the short to medium-term, robots make more sense. In the long term, once (if) these transhumans actually exist in fact, there may be reasons to send them into space.
I don't really understand the point of ensuring that the "seed" of humanity survives.
I mean, let's say we have nine billion people on Earth, and a five thousand in space.
Let's say that, for some reason, something terrible happens that wipes out those nine billion people on Earth. Surely, this would involve immense amounts of suffering and agony. Having some people in space wouldn't make any of that any better.
Then the space people can recolonize the Earth. But how does that in any way mitigate the horror of what happened to the billions who were annihilated by whatever holocaust swept the surface?
I guess I just don't understand the idea that the survival of humanity is, in itself, a worthwhile end. I think our being happy, healthy, flourishing, and feeling pleasure is good, but our mere existence seems to be pretty much neutral to me.
Of course, if humans don't exist, they can neither feel happiness nor sadness, be healthy nor sick, nor feel pleasure or pain. Still, I think the soundest approach here is to regard potential existence vs. potential nonexistence as neutral, and focus on improving the happiness, health, flourishing, pleasure, etc, of those who exist without trying to fiddle with producing more people to enjoy the pleasures of existence or try to prevent the existence of potentially miserable people on the grounds of attempting to bias the average upward. It just doesn't strike me as a very productive or meaningful approach.
Although, I suppose that, to some extent, I'd like H. sapiens to exist as a species, because to some extent I attach some value to all species existing. Still, there are probably all sorts of weird species of moths, ferns, or the like who are much more likely to go extinct sooner than humans.
I guess my more specific point is that there's no sense in which space travel could be used to rescue a significant fraction of humanity from whatever catastrophe we're postulating, in the sense that it would give any random human any reason to have any hope in her personal survival. Think of how much of a project it would be to get mere five hundred people into space -- and multiply that by a million, to rescue a mere billion people, 6% of the 9 billion populatiion. It wouldn't be a measure to ensure the safety of ordinary people -- it would only make sense as a measure to propagate the "seed of humanity," which I don't regard as being a particularly worthwhile project.
I mean "a mere half-billion people," not "a mere billion people."
Last I heard, Elson, to feel good, you need to be breathing.
If you're human, anyway.
Your points aren't terribly interesting, especially to me. I'm not at all concerned about the "survival of humanity". I'm interested in my survival, and that of those people I either like or respect or who can do something useful for me.
Nonetheless, it's clearly desirable for the human species to last at least long enough to produce Transhumans, who won't be susceptible to most planetary catastrophes. Whether that is the entire six or whatever billion or just ten thousand doesn't really matter, as long as enough of the species remains to continue technological progress.
There's no particular evidence that any planetary catastrophe is going to occur before the next fifty or 75 years anyway, global warming notwithstanding.
The bottom line is that a massive program of development of nanotechnology can resolve the energy crisis, the global warming crisis, the health crisis, and quite a few other "crises" within the next 25 to fifty years. And it would only require a five to ten cents a gallon gas tax and preferably the diversion of a few billions from the obscenely bloated defense and national security budget.
And by doing so, all issues relative to the space program can also be resolved favorably.
Comments closed March 16, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Hmm, in my opinion priorities should be as followed:
Research into better detection/scanning technologies (and using them).
Research for how best to establish a permanent human habitation in space.
I'm fairly sure our planet is doomed and I'd like to be able to have some humans surviving at least in orbit until the planet calms down enough for them to move down.
Posted by MNPundit | March 2, 2008 3:19 PM