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From: Peter Flass on 15 May 2010 15:25 AES wrote: > > > [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think that > at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting funds > on.) What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying.
From: Jamie Kahn Genet on 15 May 2010 19:48 Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> wrote: > AES wrote: > > > > > > > [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think that > > at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting funds > > on.) > > What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the > sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone > invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying. The obvious next major step for hummanity is to expand outwards to Mars and eventually teraform it. Having a whole second planet to live on and exploit (sadly necessary) for resources would be of massive benefit to us. Or we could stay here on our little home planet and see just how bad overcrowding can get... -- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
From: Morten Reistad on 15 May 2010 20:03 In article <hsmsep$ppc$4(a)news.eternal-september.org>, Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> wrote: >AES wrote: > >> >> >> [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think that >> at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting funds >> on.) > >What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the >sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone >invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying. For the time being there is no alternative. A manned trip to mars, or the moon, will not change that. Or, possibly, it will change it for the worse by expending a lot uf resources we need to spend on science, not engineering for some prestige project. Let's face it. No matter how much we try, we will not be able to perform interstellar flight for a few hundred, possibly thousand, years. First we must do something about our profound ignorance about space. We need to research the place. We need a thousand unmanned missions, or more, to get past the stage of discovering truly basic stuff about these other places. Just 5 years ago we had a major controversy about wheather mars had water, or could theoretically harbour life. Now we can go about discovering other stuff. We are on a decent track with unmanned missions. We just need to scale that up a thousandfold. We need some very basic tools too; like how to get mass into orbit without this staggering waste we are doing now. We aren't even up to von Braun's level now; capabilities have been going down, not up. We need those 10 hubbles, another dozen stereo/soho's, a score or pioneers, and rovers everywhere. Titan, Europa, the moon, mercury, a handful of asteroides, even hitchiking with a few comets. We should also send a score of probes to promising star systems. The budget for all of this would be around two times that of the space station. Then, in 30 years, we could pick up the pieces and see where we should go next. -- mrr
From: despen on 15 May 2010 20:33 Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> writes: > AES wrote: > >> >> >> [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think >> that at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting >> funds on.) > > What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the > sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone > invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying. When the sun starts expanding, Mars may warm up for a while. Only then would sending a few people to Mars make any sense. Even then, it can only be done for a short term extension of human life, moving any significant part of the population is out of the question. After Mars warms up, it will then be bathed in radiation and after that get colder than it is now. No inner planets will remain. Expansion into the Solar System makes no sense. To expand beyond the Solar System: 1. Find habital planets. Either with telescopes, or robotic missions or a combination of both. This may take thousands of years. 2. If there is no life on a potential habital planet, we'd need to "seed" that planet with life forms we are compatible with. This may take tens of thousands of years and is still robotic missions. 3. Once the target planet is ready, we can figure out whether to send a live crew on a thousand year voyage or whether we just want to send eggs or DNA to be raised by robots. The future of space flight is clearly robotic. Man is too fragile for the trip.
From: despen on 15 May 2010 20:33
jamiekg(a)wizardling.geek.nz (Jamie Kahn Genet) writes: > Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> wrote: > >> AES wrote: >> >> > >> > >> > [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think that >> > at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting funds >> > on.) >> >> What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the >> sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone >> invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying. > > The obvious next major step for hummanity is to expand outwards to Mars > and eventually teraform it. Having a whole second planet to live on and > exploit (sadly necessary) for resources would be of massive benefit to > us. Or we could stay here on our little home planet and see just how bad > overcrowding can get... Overcrowding? There is no way we can solve overcrowding by sending humans to Mars. All we can do is create another overcrowding problem. To terraform Mars we'd need to increase it's mass so it could hold an atmosphere we can breath. |