This might mean the following:
1.) termination of tourism
2.) plans for manned mission to Mars suspended
3.) station Alpha assumes military functions
Space exploration is a casuality of this war that will last generations.
I can only hope that the eventual outcome of this, ten/twenty years from now is that we will have gotten on with the business of perpetuating civilization. Which includes pioneering space. NASA like's it's "Right Stuff" image and doesn't want to do anything to damage it like sending up ordinary (more or less) people up there. That translates into very real discouragements of private industry in space. I fear now that NASA has yet another excuse, and a very powerful one, to keep the average person from space.
Perhaps the patriotism will last for ten/twenty years. If history is any indication, it will last the generation until or children ask us why we care so much about the flag. Patriotism translates into support for the space program. Perhaps the money that is now being thrown around to combat the current crisis will make people realize that government money actually needs to be put somewhere and used. Perhaps that somewhere will include the space program.
There are a lot of perhaps there, and I am much less optimistic than I normally like to be, but at this point, I can only hope.
That was, of course, a PR nightmare, AND the fault of certain higher-ups who rushed the program.
That, I think, is the biggest stumbling block... we've become such pansies that we're no longer willing to accept that real progress takes sacrifice and MEANS risking death.
It's not about freedom or exploration or progress anymore. It's become about avoiding risk at all costs.
And I don't mean JUST in the Space Program.
[ October 09, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]
I'm also tired of NASA having a big stick up their ass when it comes to the commercialization of space. They should take a hint from the Russians. They have the right idea.
It is rather ironic that back 30 years ago we were the defendes of democracy and capitalism and Russia was the one trying to stomp it into the ground. Now Russia is on the fast track toward turning their space program into one gigantic business and WE'RE the ones seemingly trying to prevent capitalism in space for as long as possible. History is hardly void of ironies don't ya think?
[ October 09, 2001: Message edited by: MIB ]
On the other hand, our signing a UN treaty that said that no one could lay claim to any celestial body from asteroids on up was a clear impediment to commercial interests in space.
quote:
They should take a hint from the Russians. They have the right idea.
Memo
From: Dan Goldin
To: Employees
Re: New Focus
In recent months we have all seen NASA overtaken by our Russian counterparts. To combat this, I am putting into place the following morale-boosting programs:
1.) Astronauts will no longer be paid.
2.) Neither will anyone else.
quote:
Originally posted by The_Tom:
Yes. Because we all know that humanity would be better off if whatever collections of dirt surrounded by imaginary lines that had the finances to plant a flag on space rocks and call them their own did.
If you are being sarcastic, I'd like to say that we probably would be better off.
quote:
Originally posted by First of Two:
The last time NASA went to put a civilian in space, she ended up in little bitty bits.
Last I checked, John Glenn, Jake Garn, & all those scientists & mission specialists weren't active or even reserve duty military.
But the point still stands with John Glenn, though as far as the public was concerned, he was an astronaut on STS-95. There was no PR for the other guy or anybody else. Hell, even I haven't heard of him.
quote:Well, this is the first I've heard of such a treaty. However, to me it doesn't seem to be that much of an impediment to commerce in space. If you don't own an asteroid you can still mine it or whatever. You just won't be the only person to be able to mine it. So in a way I think that this would be beneficial in that it would create a race to mine the resources which, like the arms race, would further technology in general.
On the other hand, our signing a UN treaty that said that no one could lay claim to any celestial body from asteroids on up was a clear impediment to commercial interests in space.
quote:
such an agreement is absolutely necessary in preventing future possible conflicts, though I'm sure conflicts will still arise, regardless.
Then wouldn't the treaty be a failure then? If it's inevitable (which it most likely is), then lets admit it and let the colonialism begin!
quote:
If you don't own an asteroid you can still mine it or whatever.
No, you can't. Believe it or not, the legal condition of the asteroids and other objects is the same as the legal condition of Antarctica. Nobody can claim any part of it or make use of any resources that might be found there. It's a preserve.
What there is on the asteroids that might need to be preserved is beyond me, but remember, this treaty was dreamed up by the same people who wanted to prevent mining on the moon because it might 'mess up the moon's ecosystem.'
What they really wanted to prevent with this treaty was the dominion of the US over space, which would be what would happen since we're the only nation with the tech, finances and resources to make such claims.
They didn't want us going out and grabbing all the Near Earth Asteroids while they're still squabbling over their borders.
Maybe that has a silver lining... if we had, we might now be dropping rocks on Kabul.
Try to image the world of "Silent Running" where the only forests left are now orbiting Saturn.
quote:
Absence of native flora or fauna does not necessarily denote a lack of ecosystem.
Yes, it most abso-friggin'-lutely DOES.
ecosystem � a local biological community and its pattern of interaction with its environment. Also, ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM, HOLOCOEN.
The Moon has no flora or fauna, or ANY 'biological community,' therefore it CANNOT have an ecosystem.
It MAY be construed to have an 'environment' in the sense that any area of space is an 'environment,' from the inside of my shoe to a cubic meter of empty space 75 A.U. from the Sun, to the core of said Sun, but without life it cannot have an ecology or an ecosystem.
However, the lunacy (*rimshot*) of this one guy doesn't mean that (a) the moon has or hasn't a natural heritage value that may well be worth preserving in some manner or another, or (b) there is or isn't a good argument for keeping or regulating the commercial exploitation of space.
What your argument therefore amounted to was "Some idiot says the moon has an ecosystem and clearly he's wrong and because of that the people who banned territorial claims on the moon (which were undoubtedly for the above reason) were also wrong."
Shall we all start counting the logical fallacies together?
[ October 28, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Tom is my new hero.
[ October 28, 2001: Message edited by: PsyLiam ]
The first has to do with man-made, largely land-based objects. The second has to do with naturally-existing bodies. They have vastly different provisions.
So no, the ABM system would NOT void this treaty (though it WOULD void the ABM Treaty). Nor would it 'open the door' for commercial development of space.
As for the 'Natural Beauty' of the Moon... for whom, colonists? Colonists would by necessity drastically alter the Moon's surface. More alteration would be in-line with their needs and likings, not against it. Imagining giant strip-mines marring the surface of the Moon as seen from Earth is silly. It's too far away to see. Even the detail we can resolve with our big backyard telescopes isn't too big... and we don't observe the Moon with much bigger than those, anymore, because we already KNOW all about it that visual surface scans can tell us.
Of course, NEA's would be even better to mine than the Moon, and don't present the aesthetic 'problems.'
::looks around self-consciously at the silence::
Reminds me of a very old game by Maxis called 'Sim Earth' in which the colonization of Mars was one possible game scenario... it doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore.
[ October 31, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
Planets Suck
And Sol, I can't begin to describe the massive amount of fallacy that lies in your statement. My example of building little cottages a few at a time or an entire free floating artificial continent at once stands.
quote:
Nobody's calling the analogy perfect. But it's a historical fact that once nations have stopped expanding, then they die or at least lose their power. I could use Rome, England, Spain, Japan, Russia all as examples.
Yes, let's all join hands and dance around praising imperialism and colonialism, shall we? A nation that doesn't expand is no nation at all!
There's no natives on the asteroids. You don't have to colonize at the expense of anybody else anymore.
The real reasons to go into space are the eventuality that another dino-killer will hit, the fact that Earth has finite resources and space, and the fact that no matter what we do, eventually it will be uninhabitable, although that may take millions of years.
Life's Prime Directives: Survive! Grow! Reproduce!
Why not Mars? 2 words: "gravity wells." It is easier and cheaper in terms of 'lifting costs' (lifting bodies from the surface of a world to orbit or beyond and bringing them back) to do things in the microgravity of space than in any gravitational field, even Mars's.
quote:
eventuality that another dino-killer will hit,
As long as Bruce Willis is alive, we've got a fighting chance.
For the love of all that is empirical and scientific read "The Case for Mars" and if so inclined, "Entering Space". Debating from ignorance is no debate at all.
In the program, there is a dicussion on why we should leave Earth. One of the reasons is the perpetuate the human species. In the distant future, our lovely planet will be incinerated and blown apart by the sun. If we live on Mars, we will buy additional time to leave the system before this world is, too, destroyed.
Now, comes the really sucky part of the whole situation. Our system travels through the Milky Way Galaxy, like a horse on a carousel. Every thirty thousand years or so, our system enters densely populated areas of the galaxy. (Densely populated=many star systems crammed into a small area, well, a small area for a galaxy.) Our system is influenced by these other star systems. Influences can include dislodging a rock in the Oort cloud which then takes a very long time to reach the inner system, if this drifting 'bomb' isn't grabbed by one of the larger worlds, say Jupiter. This is one major concern.
Another major concern is the explosion of a star. Unlike in Star Trek, where novas are shown to be rather benign events, a nova can disrupt or even destroy another solar system. If this happens (a star explodes next to our star), we will die before understanding what has killed us.
Another suggestion for the destruction of our system, which is rather remote, is a roving black hole. There are many black holes in our galaxy and some are not fixed in a path like our sun. They rove the galaxy until one of them latches onto a healthy star and begins to 'snack' on this star. If there are worlds in this striken star system, they are destroyed by the entrance of the black hole.
Having said that, I think we'll all be dead before it ever comes to pass.
No! Novas are dangerous? (Sorry TE, but what episodes of Trek do you watch where novas are fireworks for the whole family to enjoy?)
"If this happens (a star explodes next to our star), we will die before understanding what has killed us."
Er, so if Alpha Centuri exploded, we'd die? How exactly?
"Every thirty thousand years or so, our system enters densely populated areas of the galaxy. (Densely populated=many star systems crammed into a small area, well, a small area for a galaxy.) Our system is influenced by these other star systems. Influences can include dislodging a rock in the Oort cloud which then takes a very long time to reach the inner system, if this drifting 'bomb' isn't grabbed by one of the larger worlds, say Jupiter. This is one major concern."
What? You mean we've only got 30,000 years left to start colonising? My god! I'd better skip dinner tonight and get straight on with designing that suspended animation transport ship.
My science stuff isn't up to much, but I thought that scientists hadn't even seen a black hole yet, just hypothesised their existence based on...stuff. And yet you're saying that they also know about roving black stars? How are they charting these? Through our magical space sensors?
"In the distant future, our lovely planet will be incinerated and blown apart by the sun. If we live on Mars, we will buy additional time to leave the system before this world is, too, destroyed."
Time it'll take us (if we really got our arses into gear) to colonise Mars: Less than 200 years (300 if you want to be generous).
Time it'll take for the sun to explode: A few million.
Again, the evidence points to "what's the hurry?"
quote:
Er, so if Alpha Centuri exploded, we'd die? How exactly?
Yes, and rather horribly, I'm afraid. A supernova puts out enough radiation to essentially sterilize any inhabited body out to a distance of many tens of lightyears.
Of course, none of the stars in the Centauri system are going to go supernova tomorrow, or ever. And I don't _think_ there are any stars on the verge of exploding that are close enough to worry about.
Still, that's today. We are moving around, after all. Could wind up in a bad neighborhood.
Anyway, I'm actually all in favor of people living on Mars, though my reasons are a bit more abstract. I think, if it's resources we're looking for, asteroids make much more sense.
Oh, and a supernova near enough to kill us will kill us no matter which planet we're on in this system, unless we're in the center of one, and maybe not even then, depending on distance. We're talking about a LOT of radiation.
So to survive such an event, we'd need to spread across a larger region of space than could be irradiated by a single supernova. This is no mean feat.
Of course, to steal from that guy who wrote Survivor, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everything in the universe drops to zero. Can't get away from heat death.
Well, probably can't.
quote:You know, OnToMars, perhaps someday you might consider reading the previous posts before you start ranting ("Debating from ignorance", if you will). Read the whole thread. You'll find that we were talking about asteroids, or NEAs.
First, everything is already there. Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen (we think). We can make air, fuel, water, grow plants, make bricks and cement, even make plastic using shit already on Mars! Compare that to lifting a 10,000 person habitat into orbit that has to be built from scratch.For the love of all that is empirical and scientific read "The Case for Mars" and if so inclined, "Entering Space". Debating from ignorance is no debate at all.
"You mean we've only got 30,000 years left to start colonising?"
Well, the last time it happened was a while ago. So we'd have less than 30 000 years (assuming that's the right number). It would be like saying "Well, the lifetime of a star like our sun is nine billion years, so we don't have to worry about it for nine billion years". That would, of course, ignore the fact that we've already used up half that time.
Yes, I know four or five million years is still a long time, but it's just an analogy. If we only have 30 000 years, and it's been, say, 29 999 years since the last occasion, we should get cracking...
Earlier, a poster asked if black holes are invisible, how can we spot them? Quasars. Extremely strong radiation. These are two examples. The simplest analogy-you may not see the predator that killed the deer, but you can see the evidence of the predator on the deer and around the deer.
[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: targetemployee ]
[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
quote:
The simplest analogy-you may not see the predator that killed the deer, but you can see the evidence of the predator on the deer and around the deer.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ, now Target Employee is developing a sense of humor. The world is coming to an end.
Hmmm.
Liam, better get to work on that sleeper ship ...
quote:
under normal terrestrial conditions i.e. with gravity
On an asteroid? In space? First of all, to get one suitable you'd have to go beyond Mars in the first place, and an operation as complex as changing the orbit of an asteroid WOULD require people - at least at our level of technology anyway. And again, why would you go so far as to build a world from scratch (or with an asteroid, 90% or so from scratch) when there is a world in which you can set up one piece of machinery and create your fuel, air, and water from it. It's called the Sabatier reaction, and is 19th century industrial chemistry.
And how much energy do you think it would take, not only to make an asteroid into some semblance of habitable, but to spin it at such a rate that it produced a 1G environment? A lot. An experiment has been run - as a preliminary to a further experiment - testing the ability of mice to live and reproduce at 25 rpms. This experiment was done to make sure the Coriolis Force wouldn't be an obstacle in the successful execution of the Translife Project, which will test the ability of mice to live and reproduce in an artificial gravity enivronment (and with any luck, I will be a part of). If successful, it will show the validity of artificial gravity as a means of combating the negative effects of zero g in space travel but it will also empirically show (though I haven't heard any scientist dispute the claim yet) that animals and people can live just fine in .38G.
Then there's the day/night cycle. 24 hours and 40 minutes on Mars. How long on your asteroid? Well, I'm sure the massive fusion strip lights that have yet to be invented can be programmed for whatever cycle you want.
I have yet to see why Mars would be a better candidate for MINING (which is what I thought we'd started off talking about) than a Near-Earth Asteroid (which, incidentally, you don't have to go beyond Mars to find... there's estimated to be something like 10,000 that approach or cross the Earth's orbit.)
One would think that several aspects of mining would be easier in microG's. Certainly all the activity would help prevent deterioration like it does on the Station -- if we used humans at all. There'd be a much shorter trip down from Earth Orbit ('Roid capture being feasable with mass-driver technology), and no Martian gravity well to lift resources out of.
Now, if we're talking human colonization, then Mars is probably the place to be, followed by Titan and maybe Europa or a terraformed Venus (though I expect that one would be darned hard.)
Still, if you're going to bring in the kind of water a city on Mars would need, (depending on how much water there actually turns out to be there, and how easy it is to reclaimZ), you'll still need 'Roid-grabbing technology, for water ice.
quote:
Originally posted by First of Two:
...you'll still need 'Roid-grabbing technology, for water ice.
A giant tube o' lube & some rubber gloves?
[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]
You know the Earth's magnetic poles flip every few thousand years, right? We're due for that any moment now. Goodbye cosmic ray shielding (i.e. magnetosphere). Goodbye all electronics. Goodbye modern mankind.
And not a nuke or asteroid in sight.
The standard equation for centripetal acceleration in terms of angular velocity is IIRC:
a = (w^2 )* r
where a is the centripetal acceleration (let's say we want 9.8ms^-2, w is the angular velocity, and r is the radius.
Solving for w gives:
w = sqrt(a/r)
If we take for example a radius of 5km, this means we need an angular velocity of ~4.4e-2rad/s to get standard Earth gravity. This is about 0.5rpm.
As you can see, the gravity (or acceleration, to be pedantic) felt depends on the radius, which is the beauty of it. On an asteroid you could have a range of different gravity values depending on your position in the asteroid, from microgravity near the centre, to high values further away. To me, this would seem to be an ideal environment for space science and engineering to flourish.
As I mentioned, the problem would be to get the asteroid into a symmetric shape(well, not really shape as such, but symmetric in terms of mass) about it's spin axis. This is because (sorry, but my rotational dynamics is a bit rusty, so I can't go into detail) if the asteroid is not symmetric you get a non-diagonal inertia matrix. This probably doesn't mean much to most of you but it just means that the thing's spin will wobble and become unstable. However, I think that by the time we have the technology carry out the (admittedly rather daunting) task of moving an asteroid, getting the asteroid to be symmetric won't be too difficult.
I must also disagree on the point of living in low-gravity environments. Sure, I accept that it's probably fine to live in low g's, you'd probably even live longer, but what if you want to return to Earth? As far as I know there is a certain invisible line beyond which full recovery to normal gravity physiology is impossible. I don't think many people would be prepared to forsake coming back home ever again.
As for the issue of bringing materi�l to the asteroid, well, I'll just have to agree to disagree with you and say that it's necessary to bring a certain amount, initially very high, but decreasing as an infrastructure is built up.
The issue of the day/night cycle is something which I personally would consider to be fairly minor. Of course artificial lighting of some form would be necessary, but there are a lot of possibilities for generating and transmitting power in space, and fusion(high temperature fusion, not the unverified cold fusion) may not be as far away as you think. As far as I know experimental tokamaks have been making steady progress towards productivity, and plans for proper prototype reactors are underway.
Eclipse: I don't know much about that particular phenomenon, but I never heard anything about it being lethal. Have you any articles on it?
[ November 09, 2001: Message edited by: Jernau Morat Gurgeh ]