Space, the lost frontier

[Magpie_Oz]

Short-term, we need to get a vehicle.. now. Retiring the Shuttle with no replacement shows the kind of blatant short-sightedness only seen in US Congressmen.

Mid-term... just because Hollywood makes movies about things doesn't mean they cannot happen. The rocks are out there and NEED finding. We have the nukes left over from when we were thinking of ending civilization back in my youth.

Long-term... The Space Elevator, or Orbital Tower if you will.

Short term , in defence of the US Congress (which I never ever ever do) BIG advances are being made in commercial enterprises into space, Virgin being one of them but there are many others. Removing the Government funded space programme opens the market up. Often the way, a Govt does the initial work and then private enterprise takes over.

Mid-term, VERY VERY real possibility a recent launch placed a telescope in space that has as one of it's tasks the mapping of the numerous near orbit objects that could hit us.

Long-term - there was a break through just recently can't remember exactly but basically a new type of "string" has been theorised that brings tis on a bit closer.

I think the big problem in recent years is tat our presence in space has become part of the everyday so some of the hype has gone.

Also many of the advances that have been made in recent times are so incredible that most of us cannot understand why they are significant.

Perfecting a nanobot power plant is nowhere near as tangible and cool as a massive noisy rocket exploding it's way to the moon and back. But it is just as, if not more so.

[Affentitten]

Reason A. Too many of us now. Getting worse. Only ONE cheap way off.

----

Well it's the 'getting off' that causes the population problem. And condoms are still cheaper than moon bases!

[Michael Emrys]

Reason A. Too many of us now. Getting worse. Only ONE cheap way off.

It is as close to impossible as anything I can conceive of that shipping people off planet is going to solve the over population problem. Reason: people are being born at a far faster rate than we can possibly send them into space.

I think that exploration of space and possible colonization of other planets is a really good idea for a lot of reasons, but the only way to cure over population on earth is through rigorous birth control...or maybe a megaton war followed by mass starvation. But that second alternative is not one that I contemplate with any comfort.

Michael

[gunnergoz]

Nature has ways of dealing with overpopulation. I think someone named Malthus had something to say about it once.

[dieseltaylor]

Condom use could become very much more popular soon : )

CSD500, the Condom Safety Device, will be a condom to be used by healthy men to help maintain a firmer erection during intercourse whilst wearing a condom.

In a double blind clinical study comparing CSD500 against a standard condom co-sponsored by Futura, of those who expressed a preference, a significant proportion of both men and women reported improvements in the firmness of the man's erection during intercourse when using CSD500, compared against a standard condom. A result that was highly statistically significant. Furthermore, of those who expressed a preference, a significant proportion of both men and women also felt that CSD500 increased the ***** size and a significant proportion of women reported a longer lasting sexual experience with CSD500.

The company also do a similar thing for the other problem

Contrary to the perceptions given by the increased awareness of erectile dysfunction ("ED"), premature ejaculation ("PE") is probably the most common form of male sexual dysfunction. The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviour, published in 2003, reported an overall global prevalence rate in men of 21.4%.

[Affentitten]

PLus if you ship people to Moon Base Alpha, won't they just have babies there too? And population variation in an environment like that will be even more critical to manage.

[dieseltaylor]

The prototype energy bag, designed by Thin Red Line's Maxim de Jong, displaces 40 tons of seawater, and is to be anchored to the seabed by its array of Vectran® fibre tendons capable of restraining a total load of 250 tons—yet the entire systems weighs only 75 kilograms (165 pounds). The design is based on Thin Red Line's inflatable space architecture currently being investigated in several NASA programs

Looks like the spin-off does exist

[abneo3sierra]

I still remember reading "Weekly Readers" in primary school, where they told us that by the year 2010, we would be flying in our vehicles to jobs in the upper atmosphere,at fuel bases where large cruisers enroute to Mars, etc. docked for the tourists to shop. Maybe someday...

In the meantime, the numbers on your chart actually are pretty sad JonS...hard to believe that when those people die, it will go back to 0.

[Jev.Dk]

I was born long enough ago to have been alive when men were landing on the Moon, but not so long ago that I actually remember it. I do sort-of remember Skylab, though, and I defintely remember being excited about the Space Shuttle. It seemed to me, even as a kid, that with travel into space becoming a logistics problem, rather than an engineering problem, then I must be living on the cusp of a wonderous time.

It hasn't quite worked out that way. I came across this cartoon today http://xkcd.com/893/ (don't miss the roll-over text), and it made me sad.

I've had a project bubbling away in the back of my mind to put together a graph of < man-days in space > by < year >, from Yuri Gagarin up till now. I suspect that would cheer me up. We (the collective 'we') aren't going to other worlds any more, but I sense that the number of mandays is still on a growth curve. With China, India, the Danes(!), and Virgin(!) all getting into manned spaceflight alongside the US and Russia, maybe we will slip the surly bonds of Earth again, and start sending people back out into the solar system.

I hope so.

Jon I feel the very same way, and im working on it right now.

We(www.Copenhagensuborbitals.com) are having a launch this june, from the 1st to the 14th we have a launch window. Although its not into space yet its in the right direction.

Although we dont have the budget of NASA we do think we will succed.

Keep an eye on our page for updates, and have a look at some of the pictures ive taken so far.

www.flickr.com/Jevski

Ad astra

Jev

[gunnergoz]

I'm all for it. The SF visionaries have it right...spread out the gene pool all over the solar system. Beyond, if it ever becomes technically feasible. It's all there for the taking, after all. We just have to get motivated to do something besides kill one another.

[Boeman]

Would it surprise anyone to realize that human science knows more about Mars than what's under the sea?

The oceans, much like the rest of nature, is something we've never been able to fully explore much less tame.

It seems however, that the world is content to let the oil industry do the exploration for them. If they uncover any species that have been previously unclassified during an excavation, scientists will be the first on the scene to observe and tag their object of desire as they simultaneously watch its habitat being dismantled in the quest for oil.

As for manned space exploration, one can only assume that the ultimate goal is colonization. If so, would it be out of line to speculate that initial colonization efforts of Mars could perhaps, mirror that of Australia's convict past?

With the incredible amount of risks incurred on such a journey, let alone surviving on the planet's surface, only the most desperate would be willing to undertake such a venture. Deathrow criminals would fit that bill; allowing governments around the world to kill two birds with one stone - saving on the associated costs of housing them in their country of origin while providing a cheap and highly expendable labour force to build the foundation on what will ultimately become a major population center.

The motivation for the signatories apart from avoiding immediate death to accept such a predicament would lie in the solace that they are supporting whatever family they leave behind with the remuneration they receive on a space expedition.

I don't necessarily expect the proposition of commuting a death sentence to life in a hostile environment roughly 54.6 million to 401 million km from Earth to be politically expedient in North America or Western Europe in the near future - but leaping ahead a generation down the road when ethical considerations become muddled with fiscal conservatism? Who knows?

Today, the convicted criminal manufactures license plates for GM. Tomorrow, the convicted criminal could be operating machinery to dig trenches on Mars' surface for NASA.

Yes, a prison colony as a start is not an illustrious mark in the annals of space exploration. As history has shown however, seldom has colonization and the labour of condemned men ever been a mutually exclusive affair.

[dieseltaylor]

Today, the convicted criminal manufactures license plates for GM.

I thought he went to a dealership and sold Volt cars between dealers to take the Federal $7500 money before selling it on.!

If we cannot mange the ocean when we have already arrived on the planet and have all possible resources plus breathable atmosphere the concept we could colonise alien planets from light years distance seems stark raving bonkers.

Given the South Pacific could contain all the land continents it does seem bizarre to be looking skywards.

[Magpie_Oz]

I think you might find that the convicts who built Australia and the average criminal in today's prisons are two very different animals.

Most people who were transported to Oz were victims of desperation crimes the punishments for which were vastly out of proportion.

I doubt that transportation to Mars is going to be a winner, I think Amnesty International (or Galactic I suppose) might have something to say about it too.

Perhaps they might ask for volunteers, I would go in a shot. They'll need surveyors I'd expect.

[JonS]

Indeed. There would, I suspect, be absolutely no shortage of volunteers to go to Mars. NASA has not, I believe, had any trouble recruiting people to fly the Shuttle, despite it being an insanely dangerous method of travel.* I think Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy gives a more likely picture of the make-up of early colonisation efforts than someone's politically slanted wet dream about convicts.

Incidentally, that old saw 'we know more about Mars than we do about the oceans' is bollix. There is a lot we don't know about the oceans, true, but there is a vast amount we do know. We know and understand the tides well enough to be able to predict them with uncanny accuracy for any location on Earth for any reasonable time in the future. We've mapped the entire oceans in great detail. We know a huge amount about a huge number of oceanic species, and a bit about an even huger number. We know about ocean currents, and the effect they have on life and climate. And the list of what we know goes on and on. On the other hand, we don't even know if there is life on Mars, not how much water there is there.

Jon

* insane compared to other forms of transport. Two total losses in 134 flights is a terrible record. You'd be safer flying in a Dago Air dirt-torpedo out of Timbuktu.

[dieseltaylor]

Perhaps I should have been explicit in saying "manage to colonise the oceans".

It would seem to me that it as good a trial run as we can manage and is eminently sensible for mankind to colonise the oceans if the land is possibly going to be needed for crops, becomes more inhospitable, the atmosphere is crap. etc

[-E]

I was 25 when Aldridge and Alden landed on the moon, so remember it quite well.

You remember it well do you? ROFL!

[gunnergoz]

Won't be long before the oceans are fished out and their ecosystem is blasted by current changes, salinity changes, temperature changes, etc. Not to mention invasions by imported species of algae and fish, etc and just plain pollution. Not so sure that colonizing the oceans is that attractive a prospect either, under those conditions. My money is on Mars and the moon if we can ever economically get there.

[Magpie_Oz]

Despite the gloom and doom that is peddled nightly on our TV's the world is FAR from a spent resource, the oceans are enormous as are the land masses. Venturing to Mars will not be an abandonment of the wasted Earth but merely a spreading of our wings to the next challenge.

We need to be prudent with the way that we utilise the earth but the oceans are a long way from being destroyed ecosystems, as pointed out we know very little about what goes on down there so how can we say it is destroyed.

[Michael Emrys]

As for manned space exploration, one can only assume that the ultimate goal is colonization. If so, would it be out of line to speculate that initial colonization efforts of Mars could perhaps, mirror that of Australia's convict past?

With the incredible amount of risks incurred on such a journey, let alone surviving on the planet's surface, only the most desperate would be willing to undertake such a venture. Deathrow criminals would fit that bill; allowing governments around the world to kill two birds with one stone - saving on the associated costs of housing them in their country of origin while providing a cheap and highly expendable labour force to build the foundation on what will ultimately become a major population center.

Bad idea because:

Any colonization attempt will be enormously expensive and the pressure for it to succeed will be correspondingly enormous. Therefore, and especially in the crucial early stages, you will want to send the most intelligent, most adaptive, and most dependable personnel you can find. The average criminal, let alone the average murderer does not fit that description. Most criminals are stupid. Many are sociopaths. While some can be rehabilitated, so far they have not shown themselves capable of recognizing the rules of civilized conduct, let alone remaining within them.

Granted, a careful search of prisons would likely turn up a few counter-examples to the above. My point is, prisons are not the best places to begin searching.

Oh, and BTW, even though housing criminals in prisons is very expensive, shooting them to Mars would be vastly more so.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

You remember it well do you? ROFL!

You're right and I deserved that. My humblest apologies to Messieurs Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ye gods! (headslap)

Michael

[-E]

You're right and I deserved that. My humblest apologies to Messieurs Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ye gods! (headslap)

Michael

Now you have to change your tagline!

[dieseltaylor]

Won't be long before the oceans are fished out and their ecosystem is blasted by current changes, salinity changes, temperature changes, etc. Not to mention invasions by imported species of algae and fish, etc and just plain pollution. Not so sure that colonizing the oceans is that attractive a prospect either, under those conditions

I think that rather makes my point that if we are going to master alien planets light years from our resource base then perhaps we ought to prove our technologies for " terra-forming" here on Earth first.

Anything we learn from living under the sea, or even subterraneanly, must be hugely relevant to living on a hostile planet.

[gunnergoz]

You're right and I deserved that. My humblest apologies to Messieurs Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ye gods! (headslap)

Michael

Senior moments are he//, aren't they? I earned mine so I just try to enjoy them.

[Boeman]

Indeed. There would, I suspect, be absolutely no shortage of volunteers to go to Mars. NASA has not, I believe, had any trouble recruiting people to fly the Shuttle, despite it being an insanely dangerous method of travel.* I think Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy gives a more likely picture of the make-up of early colonisation efforts than someone's politically slanted wet dream about convicts.

The contrasts between flying a shuttle and conducting menial labour on a far flung colony could not be more different; at least in terms of prestige, if nothing else.

Astronauts are and have been elevated to the status of living deities in human history. Thus, despite the dangers, there are always volunteers available to pilot shuttle missions given just how few have had that privilege.

Have miners and general labourers previously enjoyed that level of status? I don't believe so.

Something else that is worth considering is that the initial journey to Mars will be a one-way trip. Whatever vessel is used to land the first colonists will likely be cannibalized upon reaching the surface. Those who elect to go to Mars are going to stay - they're not coming back. Even shuttle pilots and astronauts aboard the international space station are not faced with the prospect of never being able to return to civilized society; barring any unforseen difficulties.

The point is, it will require more than simply appreciating the intrinsic value of being a scentified pioneer when making the decision to permanently leave Earth. I suspect that having nothing to lose is something the first batch of colonists to Mars will have in common.

I do agree with Michael Emrys that some of world's best will be needed as part of the initial effort to survey and catalogue the Martian landscape prior to any serious attempt at colonization. I can only assume that scientists will be confined to a small outpost - sending data back to Earth via satellite uplink for however long provisions are available.

Incidentally, that old saw 'we know more about Mars than we do about the oceans' is bollix.

Dr. Jon Copley, a marine biologist and oceanographer, disagrees with you. He recently took part in a learning initiative program where he responded to an elementary student who posed that very question:

Hi Adam – Daniel gave me a heads-up to comment on your question, even though I’m in another zone, because I work in the deep ocean.

The comparison that’s often made is that “we know more about the surface of the Moon / Mars / Venus than we do about the ocean floor”.

And that’s true, partly because of the budget reasons that Daniel mentions, and also because we can observe and map the surface of the Moon / Mars / Venus from spacecraft that we send to orbit them. In the case of Venus, there are dense clouds, but we can “see” through them with microwaves to map the surface below directly in great detail.

But we can’t actually map the ocean floor directly from any satellites orbiting the Earth, because we can’t “see” through all the water (microwaves won’t go through it, unlike the clouds of Venus). Instead, we can “guess” at what the ocean floor looks like, by measuing variations in the Earth’s gravitational field (which is affected by variations in how far the rocks of the Earth’s crust are from the satellite).

But the maps we get of the ocean floor from that technique are just estimates (they can be wrong, because you also get variations in gravitational field from differences in what the rocks are made of, as well as how far they are from your satellite). And the techniques can’t resolve any features smaller than a few miles across.

So the only way to survey the ocean floor is to use sonar from ships – or even better, sonar from underwater vehicles that get even closer to the ocean floor. The closer you get to the target you are surveying, the better the resolution of the map you get.

Here’s an example: last year my colleagues and I were exploring the ocean floor around Antarctica from our research ship. We found a crater, a couple of miles across and a mile deep, that wasn’t on any maps of the ocean floor produced by satellites. No-one knew it was there until we went there and turned on our sonars to survey the ocean floor beneath us. I find that amazing – there’s nowhere on land you could find a geographical feature that big that we didn’t know about before. But in the deep ocean, there are loads of them still waiting to be discovered…

Even then, having a map doesn’t tell you what is actually down there, such as the species that live there. For that, you have to actually get there with cameras on an underwater vehicle. And then you only get to see a tiny part of the ocean floor at any one time, so it will take centuries for us to survey all of it.

So it’s not that we don’t have the technology – it’s just that the unexplored area of the oceans is so vast that it will take us centuries to explore it, even working all the time with all the research ships we have. Sure, we could do it faster if we had more ships (but they cost $$$).

But another way, that I’m very interested in (and going to a conference about next week) is getting small, cheap robots to do the initial survey work for us – and then tell us when they find something “interesting”, for us to then investigate with our ships and subs. But that means teaching robots how to recognise something “interesting” – and that’s the new challenge!

So, apart from maintaining that, in fact, our knowledge on the surface of Mars exceeds what we know about the depths of the sea on Terra Firma, the above also seems to infer that we have quite a long ways to go before we can declare that we've fully mapped out the bottom of the world's oceans.

[Magpie_Oz]

Have miners and general labourers previously enjoyed that level of status? I don't believe so.

It's not what you do it's why and where you do it. In Oz the "menial" labourers who worked on the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme were considered nation builders and enjoyed a level of prestige above their peers, I think so to many of the workers of the world in similar situations. The fellow who operated the crane on the Barj Dubai is a national hero, for exploits both real and imagined.

So cleaning the "Gents" at Mar Base Alpha is likely to attract more prestige than the surgeon who does another boring ol' heart transplant back here on Terra.

I do agree with Michael Emrys that some of world's best will be needed as part of the initial effort to survey and catalogue the Martian landscape prior to any serious attempt at colonization.

OH YYEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS !!!!!!!

My bags are packed ! Magpie to enterprise 3 to beam up !