Senate Space Exploration: Waste of Resources or Mankind's Last Hope?

There are Star Wars fans who want to know about reactor size and output.

Or humans who think we can colonise the stars.

 

I just think it's cool that the chewy center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole. it makes everything else seem unimportant. Yes, I know my dentist is angry I cancelled my appointment at the last possible minute, but is she aware that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy? Holy crap!

 

Ken's Dentist: "I told you, floss twice a day, no once!"
Ken: "Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying. The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself."

 

The arguments of the 70s said that we could spend the money better on fixing problems on Earth. Can you name a single problem that has been fixed by halting manned exploration?

STS was never about exploration, it was about deploying and maintaining satellites in LEO. It was a system to deploy plumbers, electricians and engineers a few miles up, then glide them back down. We'd already been there and done that by 1981, and the shuttle program was a colossal waste of money compared to Soyuz.

We haven't explored even 1% of the Moon in any meaningful sense. All the Apollo missions landed in a very similar area, the job of exploring the moon is far from complete. It's definitely an area of research and exploration that we have 'missed out on'.

Venus is another. There are areas of the upper atmosphere that could support life (and that we could extract water/oxygen/hydrogen from), and the engineering problems required to float there do not seem like a problem (airships are a very well known technology).

Mars exploration is ongoing but painfully slow - rovers are becoming incrementally more autonomous but they're still less intelligent than an average toddler. All the engineering advances in robotics are welcome, but none of our Mars probes are able to outperform an actual human. We're already designed to lift, to dig, to move, to see. We can do research in situ. We can change the parameters of the mission in situ.

There's no actual need to do any research or any exploration of any kind anywhere, but that's not a valid argument against doing it. All the technology we need for a successful Mars mission exists today, there are only excuses not to go, no valid reasons as far as I can see. Money isn't a problem. NASA estimates $100bn over 30-40 years to go to Mars, so let's call it a round trillion, just to be ultra-pessimistic. That would be about 33bn per year, compared to defence spending of 600bn per year. You could decommission a few nuclear warheads a year and offset that cost without cutting into healthcare, infrastructure, or any of the good stuff.

 

Can you explain why we need a manned space mission besides the fact that it makes you feel like humanity is getting more technological?

 

It's incredibly easy to accelerate to the kinds of speeds we need to reach to make travelling that distance viable, Vivec. There is no risk from a small rock or other piece of solid debris hitting the hull of that ship and tearing through it like a bullet through butter. NASA is working on warp drives so relativity isn't an issue, and slowing down is pretty easy too.

Plus humans could handle near-constant 15gs of that acceleration.

 

why waste money on manned Mars exploration when there are so many bad, hyperexpensive ideas for doing dumb things close to home?

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tensile_vs_shear_strength.png

 

^This. Again the simplest solution to the issue of funding is the most often ignored. I realize it's highly unlikely we'll ever see a move like that though...especially with the Trump administration.

 

isn't this the plot of Moonraker ?

 

Drax: A Hero for Our Time

 

I guess that needs to be a genetic virus that kills 99 out of a hundred people, but not your kids.
That means you need to get involved personally.

When you do, how much for including mine as well?

 

A good way to mitigate climate change would be to engineer a virus that kills the top ~10% wealthiest people in the developed world.

But we can't support that because they're rich and mostly white.

 

7 billion people in 2011. 7.4 billion people today. There are 2 kinds of crazy. Crazy #1: this isn't a problem. Crazy #2: there's something we can do about it. I pretend to be be Crazy #2 for fun, but really I'm just excited that I'm going to die soon.

 

it's the virus bit I'm not keen on , where's the fun in that ? couldn't it be more like Death Race 2000 ?

.

 

ideally we should all be able to die happy. Disney supposedly has 50k visitors a day. If we could get them all into "Mars launch" simulator rides that end with "the fuel tanks blowing catastrophically at liftoff." 19 million people a year. set up five "theme" parks around the world to process visitors. nearly 100 million people a year. This would get people wealthy enough to travel and take expensive vacations first.

 

sorry to double post. This is I think a lovely video.



It helps understand what's really meant when we say "Climate Change is the Defining Challenge of the 21st Century"

What are the main drivers of climate change:

-burning fossil fuels (heat, cooking, transportation, agricultural production, manufacturing and consumption of consumer goods and services that require modern energy)
-clearing forests
-consequences of agricultural production: livestock methane, fertilizer use.

the drivers of those things: the human population. First feeding and clothing us and providing us shelter, then providing us *some* level of access to modern energy-intensive goods and services.

The more people on the planet, the more radically some or all of us will have to reduce the energy-intensity of our lifestyles in order to meet the emissions targets necessary to prevent an even larger change in mean global temperature that is already going to happen no matter what we do.

Climate change denial I think is an emotional response to a deep-level understanding of the inability to address this situation. There are no mechanisms for undertaking the global process of preventing the climate change worst-case scenario from playing out.

 

And the resulting economic collapse would be a catalyst for resource wars, but sure, make it all about not understanding economics.

 

Because I was serious and not mocking Malthusian wet dreams.

Good job coming to the defense of capitalism and the rich, though.

 

Someone has to bring common sense to kick memetastic champagne socialism in the ghoulies.

 

Come now Ender, engineering a virus to kill the rich is memetastic anarchism. Memetastic socialism would send them to gulags.

 

Speaking as a memetastic anarchist I disapprove of the use of viruses as then the rich could not be safely seasoned, cooked in a smokepit for several hours, covered in barbeque sauce, and served on a hamburger bun. Pulled pork sandwiches, if you will.

 

And... hope

 

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/02/n...runch)&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook

Free NASA apps and software. Cool stuff.