I like to imagine a world where tax payers can choose where they wish to allocate their taxes.
NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
171–180 of 342 posts
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have trouble understanding the enthusiasm about space. Space hostile and empty. Why not simply send space probes and rovers at a fraction of the cost and spend the money more wisely, for example in projects which research aging, cancer, overpopulation and disaster management in face of global warming. Why do we need to make the exception for space and get drunk with nostalgia and romantic ideas of exploration, when…
"Space hostile and empty." This is a feature, not a bug. There is a small fraction of humanity that has the desire to do very hard and physically dangerous things. Another fraction who greatly enjoy empty spaces and prefer having great influence over the culture they live in. On Earth, very hard and dangerous can be found, but the activities are either recreational (mountaineering) or involve hurting other people (mi…
Well said. Humanity hasn't had a true new open frontier in quite some time, and the negative effects of such are beginning to surface. It's an important component of a healthy civilization that's simply absent right now. Our restless have nowhere to go.
And yes, surely we have enough people and resources to swing large-scale space operations alongside what we already do.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#173In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
"Politics could save us from an alien invasion!"
I'd rather hope in the opposite.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any idea how many of our modern technologies were developed as a direct result of the space program? New technologies were needed to go into space and many of them have become essential for our lives. MRI, LEDs, Anti-Icing Systems, Artificial Limbs, Land Mine Removal, Firefighter Gear, Water Purification, Pollution Remediation, etc etc...the list goes on and on. Studies estimate a $7-$14 return on investm…
Wow, you are saying if you take a massive pile of money to hire a bunch of the smartest engineers away from private companies and pay them to solve problems, they'll do it? And if NASA didn't exist, and these engineers instead worked for less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial businesses, they'd invent nothing?
Where are the brightest minds of our generation now? What are they working on? Most are trying come up with better ways for you to click on advertisements.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright. We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one. If we don't get to space now , we will probably never get…
There is still an amazing amount of coal in the ground. Check out the Powder River Basin in the US which, for one example.
While true, it's also crazy expensive to extract.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#176I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…
Creating interplanetary projects like the one above are extemely expensive. As the ISS showed is that costed !150 billion USD to construct making massive leaps into space should not be burden to a single country. With that the funding would be less, and the return even smaller. I believe a global space agency should be formed where each country can allocate the money they wish and set goals by panels to the direction…
I think competition might be more effective than cooperation when it comes to space exploration.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All the other details for Mars can be done with variants of what already exists or will fly shortly (commercial crew vehicles or even Soyuz, ISS modules for a transfer craft, launch vehicles like the EELVs used by the military or Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, in-orbit docking and propellant transfer which is commonly used on the Space Station, etc). I'll grant you a lot of that, but do you really think re-using ISS modu…
Yes it is feasible. The radiation regimes are not vastly different. They're within roughly a factor of two of one another. And since the transit time is about half a year, and we've had multiple people experience ~year-long trips in orbit at a time, I think we're well within our existing knowledge to say they'd do fine radiation-wise, though perhaps with a slightly higher risk than usual. Still better than being a sm…
By the way, radiation from coronal mass ejections and associated solar particle events (SPEs) is much easier to shield than radiation from galactic cosmic rays (GCRs are the primary concern for long-term astronaut exposure on Mars). Even the thin skin of the spacecraft is enough to reduce the SPE dosage to non-acutely-lethal levels, and rearranging the provisions (food and water) around a central location is sufficient to reduce the dosage due to solar particle events to a manageable level.
On board ISS, the crew return vehicles are not for ditching due to an SPE. Such radiation events travel fast enough that you'd likely be stuck in the crew return vehicle when it hit. The Station itself provides much better shielding from such events, and ditching in a hurry (landing somewhere random in the ocean) would be much more dangerous than sheltering in place.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#178In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
This is one of the answers to the Fermi paradox.
Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations.
The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being able to do so ourselves. And any explanation of the form "the ETIs wouldn't do that because reasons" just fails, because it just takes one event, over a very long time and large number of systems.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#179In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
That would explain the Fermi paradox
The Fermi Paradox is different. It's really about interstellar colonization, not just travel. It's basic geometric growth: the Universe is old-enough and geometric growth is fast-enough that, if interstellar colonization is possible, aliens would have spread across every habitable planet in the galaxy, just as all life does. They would already be here.
Therefore, there is some filter that prevents the vast majority of life from achieving interstellar colonization. Either the filter is behind us and we're the lucky first ones, or the filter is ahead of us and we are almost certainly doomed to stay trapped in our solar system until it is no longer habitable.
Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright. We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one. If we don't get to space now , we will probably never get…
There is still an amazing amount of coal in the ground. Check out the Powder River Basin in the US which, for one example.
There's a lot of it there, but it's hard to extract without modern technology. There's a little peat (arguably the most accessible type of high-energy fuel) left in the British Isles and Finland, but coal is requiring progressively more and more modern effort to extract.