This is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.
If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
151–160 of 246 posts
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#152Why don't more people realize that infecting as much of the cosmos with ourselves should be one of the MAIN GOALS of Humanity?! Ergo, space exploration technology should be a priority, even at massive costs, and even when those cost are measured in human lives and human pain and suffering. This, plus "defeating aging", plus "achieving superhuman general-purpose intelligence" (either by augmenting/improving human I or…
You might wanna justify those claims? Having a bunch of oppressed miserable humans rules by tyrannical AIs or whatever seems quite a bit worse then living happily on our single planet.
Better to have the seeds of humanity spread across many baskets, rather than in a single one that is perpetually endangered by an unlucky intersection with a rock.
Who knows if we'll ever be able to actually get outside our local system, but we're never going to figure out how to do it if we can't even setup shop in the cosmic equivalent of our front yard.
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Europe? I doubt it. The car doesn't quite have the same cultural significance as a symbol of adulthood/independence here, at least not to the younger generation.
That's what they pretend. However, the reality is this: * car sales do not drop, they oscillate depending on various governments subventions; * vehicle fleet keeps rising (albeit slowly because the market is saturated); * car owning per household has always been and is still on the rise (despite household size constantly decreasing); * the distance travelled with cars keeps rising as well. And visually, the amount of…
Three elements:
1) "suburbia" is now a thing in Europe too. Regular people cannot afford to live in city centres, they are the preserve of the wealthy. As population grows, more and more people are pushed further out, and they adopt suburbanization: big malls that cannot be reached if not by car, semi-detached houses in gated communities, etc etc. That's a lifestyle built for cars.
2) People will buy what manufacturers will sell. In a global market, car models are increasingly built with more than one country in mind. Inevitably, US tastes loom large.
3) The Hollywood influence cannot be underestimated.
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does your cost analysis account for the dividends in the form of new technology developed during the project?
Yes, cause the most crucial ones are technologies about getting things into orbit and sustaining life in obit, creating habitable environments and so on. Whether on a planet or in space those challenges aren't much different and whatever you gain as knowledge on a space station you can apply to a moon base later on. Furthermore, the challenge of building a space station and not suddenly run into budgeting or construc…
If you're talking about some kind of self-sustaining station, then space wouldn't be where you'd go first anyway. You'd want to establish a self-sustaining colony in the antarctic, where conditions are significantly more favorable and yet still incredibly hostile.
And if you aren't... haven't we already done that with ISS?
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#155Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs... " NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. " As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the pr…
ProTip™️: Copy and paste the headline of the article into Google to get the full article. I really need to write a Chrome extension for this but haven't had the time. :(
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#156Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now. I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and eco…
It isn't just that we develop tech that is useful in space, but that it also pushes the current tech to the next level: http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/worklife/10/04/nasa.everyday/...
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#157Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now. I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and eco…
Well, could it be possible to send currently homeless people to colonize the Moon?
(edited) Would these homeless people be sent to the moon mandatorily or voluntarily? If voluntarily, why only send homeless people? Why not send everyone who wanted to go?
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much of engineering is very different in zero-G. I want humanity to spread among the stars, so I want us to be able to construct habitats on planemos and smaller bodies. I don't see space stations as important in the long run; even interstellar spaceships would likely operate under continuous acceleration so involve little zero-G engineering.
Space stations are not important in the long run, but the technologies developed to make them enjoyable and safe places are indeed very important but in the short and long run. Planets will have different g's so first making things in zero-g work seems to be a much more solid approach to developing a long term space program. If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a spac…
> Planets will have different g's so first making things in zero-g work seems to be a much more solid approach to developing a long term space program.
I don't think that follows at all, because I think engineering at 2g or 0.5g or even 0.01g has a lot more in common with engineering at 1g or 0.15g than it does with engineering at 0g. Zero-g is qualitatively very different from non-zero g; stuff like room design, plumbing, HVAC, material constraints (the need to avoid things that can powder) are totally different.
> If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a space station is the best way to do that short of sending people out in space arks.
Within the solar system all journeys are relatively short and it's ok for spaceships to not be closed systems. For interstellar travel I think space arks will be necessary anyway. There's no really plausible way to get to another star in anything short of multiple decades.
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#159There are a lot of answers here about how expensive Apollo was, and about how those expenses haven't really gone away. Those answers are basically right: putting humans on the moon was, and would still be, enormously expensive.
But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.
None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.
Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.
A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.
And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
#160Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now. I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and eco…
Our economies of wealth are not built "on the back" of the people in the soup kitchens.
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.