[ot] Mars colonization
- Thread starter tleilaxu
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Agnostic Paladin
First Post
The developed countries don't really account for the majority of the world's population though, now do they?
Lurks-no-More
First Post
I'm so hoping that China won't implode/explode in the next few decades, so they might get into space, and hopefully pull the America from their lethargy.
(And besides, billion-people nations with nuclear weapons imploding is enough to ruin anyone's decade...)
(And besides, billion-people nations with nuclear weapons imploding is enough to ruin anyone's decade...)
Celebrim
Legend
It doesn't matter that developed countries have negative native population growth. What matters is that as developed countries they feel it uncivilized to shoot people who illegally cross the borders. By the time that they change thier minds (and believe me before it is over they will change thier minds), it will be too late. You think what China is doing for population control is draconian? You just wait and see what Britain and the US are doing in 30 years.
Back to space:
NASA didn't let us down. There budgets were gutted back when the Apollo program was still going. The research labs were gutted. Most of the best engineers and scientists had thier funding cutted. The guys that got us to the moon retired. Kids with 'the right stuff' were told to go to silicon valley - there was no future here. What was left was typical administrative beaucracy fighting for thier piece of the ever diminishing public pie. Heck, as the budget diminished, even the quality of the beaucrats slumped, because it became clear to everyone that NASA was a low prestige dead end career choice. That's not to say that there aren't a few good people left in the administration, but they are getting few and far between.
The truth is, we'd have people on Mars now if we wanted to. We just don't have enough people that want to, and the only cultures that colonize new worlds are the ones were everyone chips in. It takes a global effort to get into space.
Do you realize that the ISS is the first time since the Tower of Babel that the nations of the world have tried to build something significant together?
If we can do this then there is nothing that we cannot do if we turn our minds to it. This is the single most important event in human history, and they can barely get enough money to turn the lights on. Heck, even what they are building, impressive as it is, is a mere shadow, a joke, a child's toy, a sand castle, a mere monument, compared to the real working space station that NASA proposed back when they had a friend in the White House.
Back to space:
NASA didn't let us down. There budgets were gutted back when the Apollo program was still going. The research labs were gutted. Most of the best engineers and scientists had thier funding cutted. The guys that got us to the moon retired. Kids with 'the right stuff' were told to go to silicon valley - there was no future here. What was left was typical administrative beaucracy fighting for thier piece of the ever diminishing public pie. Heck, as the budget diminished, even the quality of the beaucrats slumped, because it became clear to everyone that NASA was a low prestige dead end career choice. That's not to say that there aren't a few good people left in the administration, but they are getting few and far between.
The truth is, we'd have people on Mars now if we wanted to. We just don't have enough people that want to, and the only cultures that colonize new worlds are the ones were everyone chips in. It takes a global effort to get into space.
Do you realize that the ISS is the first time since the Tower of Babel that the nations of the world have tried to build something significant together?
If we can do this then there is nothing that we cannot do if we turn our minds to it. This is the single most important event in human history, and they can barely get enough money to turn the lights on. Heck, even what they are building, impressive as it is, is a mere shadow, a joke, a child's toy, a sand castle, a mere monument, compared to the real working space station that NASA proposed back when they had a friend in the White House.
Storminator
First Post
Man Celebrim, you are depressed! 
Don't worry man, it'll all work out...
PS
Don't worry man, it'll all work out...
PS
Henry
Autoexreginated
Some quite depressing talk here.
I have one supposition: Mankind has almost NEVER been driven by sheer quest for knowledge alone. All the greatest endeavors have had motives of profit or power behind it. Every explorer from the Bering Pass Migrants onward in history was motivated by something OTHER than just the thrill of exploration. It's not evil by itself; it's human nature, and in my opinion likely never to change.
So my challenge is this: find a REASON to fund deep space exploration. Find a purpose to aspire to, a reason that the people with the money will want to fund Mars Colonization, and desire for the brain trusts of America and other nations to sink their craniums into. If you find THAT, you find the drive to succeed.
I have both studied and seen the progress that 20th century humanity can make when there is desire. There is NO task that cannot be accomplished by us if we truly have the desire to do it. America in particular built a reputation this century for doing the near-impossible, when it wanted to. That is the hope I forsee; that is the promise I see to be fulfilled. Give the world a reason, and it will spare no resource to get it done.
I have one supposition: Mankind has almost NEVER been driven by sheer quest for knowledge alone. All the greatest endeavors have had motives of profit or power behind it. Every explorer from the Bering Pass Migrants onward in history was motivated by something OTHER than just the thrill of exploration. It's not evil by itself; it's human nature, and in my opinion likely never to change.
So my challenge is this: find a REASON to fund deep space exploration. Find a purpose to aspire to, a reason that the people with the money will want to fund Mars Colonization, and desire for the brain trusts of America and other nations to sink their craniums into. If you find THAT, you find the drive to succeed.
I have both studied and seen the progress that 20th century humanity can make when there is desire. There is NO task that cannot be accomplished by us if we truly have the desire to do it. America in particular built a reputation this century for doing the near-impossible, when it wanted to. That is the hope I forsee; that is the promise I see to be fulfilled. Give the world a reason, and it will spare no resource to get it done.
Celebrim
Legend
Henry: I agree. And because I agree, I have studied the reasons for going to space in order to seek that driving reason for exploring space.
The problem is that no such reason exists. It is not that there aren't reasons, but they are none of the reasons that have evolved (or been designed into us if you prefer) to insure our continued survival. You cannot motivate a person to go into space out of greed, or fear, or any of man's baser emotions. There is no hope in space. Gene Rodenberry is hope. It is not reality. It coddles people into believing that space exploration should be easy, and makes shallow our real attainments. Science fiction is filled with stories of us encountering older and wiser civilizations which lift us into space. The fact is no one wants to work for it.
There is no economic reason to enter space. The cost of lifting things out of the gravity well, or lowering them back down in a controlled fashion prohibits meaningful material economic exchange between a space faring culture and a planetary culture, much less between two planetary cultures, much less between two planetary cultures around different stars. No one will get rich sending someone into space. No economic return will ever be recieved equivalent to the cost of the sending. It will always be cheaper to develop the means of production planetside. It will always be cheaper to find the raw materials planetside.
There is no population control reason for the entering of space. Forget all the science fiction stories you've read about colonization. They are fiction, and not supported by science. The economics of colonization don't support it. If the planet is teeming with people, then the few that you could lift out of the gravity well are inconsequential. And even if you could lift many, there isn't alot of habitable land to be found out there. There are no other earth like worlds. Earthlike worlds require life. Life has such an important impact on planetary chemistry that without life, after a time you end up with mars or venus. Even early 'Eden' worlds that might develop life are not habitable modern life. To make an earthlike environment requires centuries even if you have a suitable planet, which we don't. And to make matters worse, it requires of centuries of space faring development to reach the point where we have the capacity to find new worlds. In fact, I would make the prediction that no species whose motivation for entering space is finding new places to live ever enters space.
There are no cultural reasons for entering space. Sci-Fi writers always try to find parallels in colonialism, or imperialism, or nationalism, or humanism, or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that thier is no prior cultural paradigm. Going into space has no parallel in anything that humanity has ever done before. All those quaint parallels hinder rather than help, if they give people the false impression that going into space will obtain the same repayments as various prior human endeavors. And I would make the case that this is the reason that the general public has given up on space. Sci-Fi authors painted a picture, and when the expected picture didn't materialize, they rejected the concept. Reality did not match the expectation, and naturally disillusionment set in.
So the question remains, why do it? And the answers are I am afraid difficult to convince people on because we have so little prior experience in this regard.
1) Because we are in fact part of the larger universe here on this little peice of whirling sand. It is easy to think of Earth as a permanently isolated island. It is easy to think of Earth as the whole of the universe. It is easy to think of the events occuring on earth as being large in scale. It is easy to think of Earth as permanent. But in fact, none of this is the case, it is only two million years of experience which reinforces these beliefs. Only. One day, perhaps a few million years from now, or perhaps tommorrow, the Universe will impinge upon our existance in a very dramatic way. If we were to learn, for instance, that a hypernova was going to occur 118 light years from the Earth and that we would be directly in its path a century hense, there would be very little we could do about it. It is really hard to convince people to do something about a 1 in a million or 1 in a billion chance, and the thing is _it will always remain difficult to do so_. Therefore I conclude that this reason will not be an effacious reason until after it is too late, and since it won't be too late for at least a million years or so (on average) that if this were the only reason for going into space that humanity would not get there for another million years. It takes something like a 1km asteroid smashing into the planet before people realize culturally that thier survival may depend on preventing those 1 in a million chances.
No civilization that fails to leave its homeworld will be long lived in a geological sence, but ask the average person about whether he cares what will happen a million years from no and he will tell you that he doesn't care about what happens next century.
2) Because it is hard to do. We are rapidly reaching the point were very little that occurs on the surface of the planet that doesn't involve the evil that men do to each other is very hard to do. Sure, we may find that there are limits to any degree of science, but for the most part life is becoming quite comfortable and easy for the wealthier parts of society. This is a problem. Only the wealthiest and most sophisticated cultures can muster the resources to get into space, and yet we are motivated as a species to do something when we are uncomfortable and when we lack. Content cultures will never go into space, but discontent cultures will likely either lack the means to do so or else focus thier attentions on solving thier discontent in a more immediate fashion.
One might wonder why we should do something just because it is hard to do it, but the answer is quite simple. Unless we continue to challenge ourselves we will never develop new capacities. Consider how much of modern technology would never have been invented were it not for say military considerations. Historically, things are invented to serve some purpose, and then it is realized that they will equally serve (and perhaps better serve) some unrelated and unforeseen usage. Computers were built primarily to break military codes and build nuclear bombs. For many years, that was all people thought they would ever be good for. Why would you need to do all that math? What good is an expensive machine the size of a tennis court to the average person anyway? The Internet was developed by the military for the military. And so it goes.
Space is our alternative to blowing ourselves up. It is our alternative to worshiping as heroes people who pretend to be heroic. Until we devote ourselves to doing what is hard, instead of devoting ourselves to our leisure, then we will continue to live in the world we are in where actors, lawyers, brokers, bankers, and sports figures are esteemed more highly than scientists, engineers, teachers, technicians, craftsmen, policemen, firefighters, explorers, and soldiers. Granted, we will go through occassional periods when we are shaken from our comfort were we remember what is important, but such times are very fleeting.
When you are comfortable, you give up on progress. In the 4th century before Christ, the engineers of the isle of Rhodes developed steam engines and complex gearing systems - what we would call today mechanical computers. They developed the means of casting large iron objects. They developed windmills and waterwheels. We know from the archealogical record that those advances were not completely repeated until the 14th century after Christ. Why were 1700 years of progress lost? The answers is that the men of the day looked at such inventions and said, "They are toys for the rich. They have no practical value. They will never accomplish what could not be more cheaply accomplished by slaves - and we have slaves in abundance. And furthermore, slaves need work, else they will be discontent and who would feed them if they did not work anyway? Rome has no need of such things."
We went to the moon. It is hard to believe, but it is true. We went to the moon and we said, "This is a pursuit of the rich. It has no practical value. There are many pursuits on this Earth, many more pressing difficulties to solve before we turn to such matters. America has no need of such things."
And so we started making titanium golf clubs, and turned our attention to making a better running shoe.
The hope of mankind is in the geeks.
The geeks are the most powerful force for good on the planet today. You think I'm kidding you. You think I'm only saying this because I''m a geek. But I'm not.
You have a PC in front of you today. It is a far more powerful machine than you need.
If you are a geek, you just went into a state of rebellion.
Far more powerful than I need!?!?! Heck, I can only get 80fps when playing Quake III at XxY resolution!!! I need more power.
Exactly.
It is my opinion that the most significant reason for the rapid advance in personal computing (and all the attendent benifits) is gamers. Without gamers willing to shell out huge ammounts of money for the latest most impractically powerful computing machine so that they can play there games, there would be little economic reason to get millions of such machines on the market - much less millions of such machines on the market cheaply. How many machines do graphic artists and CAD people need? All the rest are playing games, and even then you have to ask whether or not graphic artists and CAD people would have been so quick to adopt the personal computer had it remained an expensive professional tool and not something in everyone's home.
If we are going into space, it must be the geeks who take us there. Comfortably discontent intellectuals who want to go into space just because it would be cool.
That's my last best hope for the future.
And I have no doubt that they will be getting thier in a ship named Enterprise and staying in a station named Babylon.
The problem is that no such reason exists. It is not that there aren't reasons, but they are none of the reasons that have evolved (or been designed into us if you prefer) to insure our continued survival. You cannot motivate a person to go into space out of greed, or fear, or any of man's baser emotions. There is no hope in space. Gene Rodenberry is hope. It is not reality. It coddles people into believing that space exploration should be easy, and makes shallow our real attainments. Science fiction is filled with stories of us encountering older and wiser civilizations which lift us into space. The fact is no one wants to work for it.
There is no economic reason to enter space. The cost of lifting things out of the gravity well, or lowering them back down in a controlled fashion prohibits meaningful material economic exchange between a space faring culture and a planetary culture, much less between two planetary cultures, much less between two planetary cultures around different stars. No one will get rich sending someone into space. No economic return will ever be recieved equivalent to the cost of the sending. It will always be cheaper to develop the means of production planetside. It will always be cheaper to find the raw materials planetside.
There is no population control reason for the entering of space. Forget all the science fiction stories you've read about colonization. They are fiction, and not supported by science. The economics of colonization don't support it. If the planet is teeming with people, then the few that you could lift out of the gravity well are inconsequential. And even if you could lift many, there isn't alot of habitable land to be found out there. There are no other earth like worlds. Earthlike worlds require life. Life has such an important impact on planetary chemistry that without life, after a time you end up with mars or venus. Even early 'Eden' worlds that might develop life are not habitable modern life. To make an earthlike environment requires centuries even if you have a suitable planet, which we don't. And to make matters worse, it requires of centuries of space faring development to reach the point where we have the capacity to find new worlds. In fact, I would make the prediction that no species whose motivation for entering space is finding new places to live ever enters space.
There are no cultural reasons for entering space. Sci-Fi writers always try to find parallels in colonialism, or imperialism, or nationalism, or humanism, or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that thier is no prior cultural paradigm. Going into space has no parallel in anything that humanity has ever done before. All those quaint parallels hinder rather than help, if they give people the false impression that going into space will obtain the same repayments as various prior human endeavors. And I would make the case that this is the reason that the general public has given up on space. Sci-Fi authors painted a picture, and when the expected picture didn't materialize, they rejected the concept. Reality did not match the expectation, and naturally disillusionment set in.
So the question remains, why do it? And the answers are I am afraid difficult to convince people on because we have so little prior experience in this regard.
1) Because we are in fact part of the larger universe here on this little peice of whirling sand. It is easy to think of Earth as a permanently isolated island. It is easy to think of Earth as the whole of the universe. It is easy to think of the events occuring on earth as being large in scale. It is easy to think of Earth as permanent. But in fact, none of this is the case, it is only two million years of experience which reinforces these beliefs. Only. One day, perhaps a few million years from now, or perhaps tommorrow, the Universe will impinge upon our existance in a very dramatic way. If we were to learn, for instance, that a hypernova was going to occur 118 light years from the Earth and that we would be directly in its path a century hense, there would be very little we could do about it. It is really hard to convince people to do something about a 1 in a million or 1 in a billion chance, and the thing is _it will always remain difficult to do so_. Therefore I conclude that this reason will not be an effacious reason until after it is too late, and since it won't be too late for at least a million years or so (on average) that if this were the only reason for going into space that humanity would not get there for another million years. It takes something like a 1km asteroid smashing into the planet before people realize culturally that thier survival may depend on preventing those 1 in a million chances.
No civilization that fails to leave its homeworld will be long lived in a geological sence, but ask the average person about whether he cares what will happen a million years from no and he will tell you that he doesn't care about what happens next century.
2) Because it is hard to do. We are rapidly reaching the point were very little that occurs on the surface of the planet that doesn't involve the evil that men do to each other is very hard to do. Sure, we may find that there are limits to any degree of science, but for the most part life is becoming quite comfortable and easy for the wealthier parts of society. This is a problem. Only the wealthiest and most sophisticated cultures can muster the resources to get into space, and yet we are motivated as a species to do something when we are uncomfortable and when we lack. Content cultures will never go into space, but discontent cultures will likely either lack the means to do so or else focus thier attentions on solving thier discontent in a more immediate fashion.
One might wonder why we should do something just because it is hard to do it, but the answer is quite simple. Unless we continue to challenge ourselves we will never develop new capacities. Consider how much of modern technology would never have been invented were it not for say military considerations. Historically, things are invented to serve some purpose, and then it is realized that they will equally serve (and perhaps better serve) some unrelated and unforeseen usage. Computers were built primarily to break military codes and build nuclear bombs. For many years, that was all people thought they would ever be good for. Why would you need to do all that math? What good is an expensive machine the size of a tennis court to the average person anyway? The Internet was developed by the military for the military. And so it goes.
Space is our alternative to blowing ourselves up. It is our alternative to worshiping as heroes people who pretend to be heroic. Until we devote ourselves to doing what is hard, instead of devoting ourselves to our leisure, then we will continue to live in the world we are in where actors, lawyers, brokers, bankers, and sports figures are esteemed more highly than scientists, engineers, teachers, technicians, craftsmen, policemen, firefighters, explorers, and soldiers. Granted, we will go through occassional periods when we are shaken from our comfort were we remember what is important, but such times are very fleeting.
When you are comfortable, you give up on progress. In the 4th century before Christ, the engineers of the isle of Rhodes developed steam engines and complex gearing systems - what we would call today mechanical computers. They developed the means of casting large iron objects. They developed windmills and waterwheels. We know from the archealogical record that those advances were not completely repeated until the 14th century after Christ. Why were 1700 years of progress lost? The answers is that the men of the day looked at such inventions and said, "They are toys for the rich. They have no practical value. They will never accomplish what could not be more cheaply accomplished by slaves - and we have slaves in abundance. And furthermore, slaves need work, else they will be discontent and who would feed them if they did not work anyway? Rome has no need of such things."
We went to the moon. It is hard to believe, but it is true. We went to the moon and we said, "This is a pursuit of the rich. It has no practical value. There are many pursuits on this Earth, many more pressing difficulties to solve before we turn to such matters. America has no need of such things."
And so we started making titanium golf clubs, and turned our attention to making a better running shoe.
The hope of mankind is in the geeks.
The geeks are the most powerful force for good on the planet today. You think I'm kidding you. You think I'm only saying this because I''m a geek. But I'm not.
You have a PC in front of you today. It is a far more powerful machine than you need.
If you are a geek, you just went into a state of rebellion.
Far more powerful than I need!?!?! Heck, I can only get 80fps when playing Quake III at XxY resolution!!! I need more power.
Exactly.
It is my opinion that the most significant reason for the rapid advance in personal computing (and all the attendent benifits) is gamers. Without gamers willing to shell out huge ammounts of money for the latest most impractically powerful computing machine so that they can play there games, there would be little economic reason to get millions of such machines on the market - much less millions of such machines on the market cheaply. How many machines do graphic artists and CAD people need? All the rest are playing games, and even then you have to ask whether or not graphic artists and CAD people would have been so quick to adopt the personal computer had it remained an expensive professional tool and not something in everyone's home.
If we are going into space, it must be the geeks who take us there. Comfortably discontent intellectuals who want to go into space just because it would be cool.
That's my last best hope for the future.
And I have no doubt that they will be getting thier in a ship named Enterprise and staying in a station named Babylon.
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad
Fast Learner said:
Note also that Zahi has an admitted bias against finding that slaves built the pyramids. He was appointed to the position chiefly because of this belief. It is currently to Egypt's political advantage to claim that jews had nothing to do with the pyramids, and that Egypt does not have a history of slavery, but that the ancestors of the Egyptian people built it voluntarily as a sign of greatness. He basically says that is his agenda in the National Geographic show, but he justifies this with the evidence he presents. But he is not talking in objective terms - he is constantly drawing conclusions from evidence that any objective observer would say "okay, that is one possinle explination of several dozen explinations".
I am not saying Zahi is wrong. Just that he seems very biased, and has motive for that bias.
As for someones professor saying "unresolved", how nice. Consensus can be unresolved. You can have a majority of people thinking one thing (the consensus), a minority thinking another, and the issue remaining unresolved. As a counter to your "professor", I cite my own (who also happens to be the US archeological director in charge of Jordan archelogical affairs, and a personal friend of the King of Jordan). He claims it is the overwhelming consensus that slaves built at least a few of the pyramids and temples in Egypt, and even then best evidence against that theory is only applicable to the Giza pyramids, and not the non-Giza pyramids. Nobody has offered even a shred of evidence that the pyramids in the lower kingdom were built by anyone other than slaves, including Zahi.
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