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politics2011-01-30 02:30 pm
silveradept) wrote in politics2011-01-30 02:30 pm
Opinion: If science wishes to proceed, it must be willing to take life.
The following entry is problematic. Rather than waste your time reading the whole thing, the author and moderators recommend that you jump forward to the subsequent mod post explaining why this post is problematic and soliciting suggestions for how to avoid repeating the same mistake in the future.
Twenty-five years ago, on 28 January 1986, a spacecraft lifted off of the pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seventy-one seconds later, it disintegrated in an explosion, killing the astronauts and a teacher that had won a nationwide contest on board. In a lot of ways, that was a sign of the future to come. Despite the fact that we know Richard Nixon had an alternate speech drawn up in case the Apollo mission to Luna failed in such a way that the astronauts would not be retrievable, this was the first time we got to see what can go wrong on a space mission, in phenomenally brilliant color and fire. The next great manned accomplishment in space after that point would be the International Space Station. Even then, the aging Space Shuttle fleet would create problems as pieces sometimes went missing, or worse, a break in the wrong place would result in another explosion, this time of Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
We can only garner so much information about the Sol system through the use of unmanned missions, orbiters, rovers, probes, and other robotic devices. While NASA and its partners are phenomenal at building robots, as the recent reset of a probe computer that's still transmitting and the extended time on the Mars rover missions of Spirit and Opportunity proves, they're still very gun-shy about people missions that aren't up to the ISS or a quick jaunt to Luna and back. (IKAROS, of JAXA, deserves special note for having basically managed to survive Murphy's Revenge, Murphy's Revenge: Redux, and Son of Murphy's Revenge) Challenger and Columbia are probably good reasons why. A trip to Mars requires logistics and the very large likelihood that the trip will be one-way, unless we can find some way of efficiently getting people there and back in terms of fuel cost. And nobody wants to be accused of sending their scientists out to die. Despite that, that's pretty much the voyager way - sometimes you come back loaded with riches and stories of strange lands, sometimes you never come back.
If we want to give ourselves an out in case people get really stupid on Terra and render it uninhabitable, we've got to be willing to send some people off-world to start building, colonizing, and dying while they get everything situated. Mars is a three year trip at current speeds (last I knew), so we'd need to provide supplies for that plus a bit more to get things going - fabricating the buildings, getting the gardens growing, seeing if some sort of artificial environment can be constructed so as to begin the sustainability cycle, with some occasional care packages from home. Maybe later we find a way of kickstarting the core and getting the necessary spheres generated to begin trying to make Mars habitable to Terrans. Which is going to require lots of failed experiments and data-gathering before we succeed.
If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. If nothing else, we should have enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier.
The fact that there was a teacher on board also says something about what education has been doing, too - there's a lot less emphasis on the scientific disciplines and the space program. We seem to be content to have our science fictions stay relatively close to home and focus on the development of new technologies and their interactions, rather than the science fictions of how one might go about building sustainable colonies on exoplanets, or on colony ships sent out to find places where one could build new places. Or in developing ways of communicating and propelling objects close to or past the light-speed threshold, so as to make it much easier to supply missions and colonies out in the world.
We seem to have given up on space and space travel, content to sit in our own backyard and hope that nobody explodes the nuclear devices pointed at each other. This is wrong. We should be willing to send people out with no promise of return, but only of glory and the knowledge that their work is establishing pathways and routes for others to follow, trailblazing. And how knows? Maybe they'll get lucky and we'll discover a way to set them up more permanently before the end of their lifetime.
Twenty-five years ago, on 28 January 1986, a spacecraft lifted off of the pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seventy-one seconds later, it disintegrated in an explosion, killing the astronauts and a teacher that had won a nationwide contest on board. In a lot of ways, that was a sign of the future to come. Despite the fact that we know Richard Nixon had an alternate speech drawn up in case the Apollo mission to Luna failed in such a way that the astronauts would not be retrievable, this was the first time we got to see what can go wrong on a space mission, in phenomenally brilliant color and fire. The next great manned accomplishment in space after that point would be the International Space Station. Even then, the aging Space Shuttle fleet would create problems as pieces sometimes went missing, or worse, a break in the wrong place would result in another explosion, this time of Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
We can only garner so much information about the Sol system through the use of unmanned missions, orbiters, rovers, probes, and other robotic devices. While NASA and its partners are phenomenal at building robots, as the recent reset of a probe computer that's still transmitting and the extended time on the Mars rover missions of Spirit and Opportunity proves, they're still very gun-shy about people missions that aren't up to the ISS or a quick jaunt to Luna and back. (IKAROS, of JAXA, deserves special note for having basically managed to survive Murphy's Revenge, Murphy's Revenge: Redux, and Son of Murphy's Revenge) Challenger and Columbia are probably good reasons why. A trip to Mars requires logistics and the very large likelihood that the trip will be one-way, unless we can find some way of efficiently getting people there and back in terms of fuel cost. And nobody wants to be accused of sending their scientists out to die. Despite that, that's pretty much the voyager way - sometimes you come back loaded with riches and stories of strange lands, sometimes you never come back.
If we want to give ourselves an out in case people get really stupid on Terra and render it uninhabitable, we've got to be willing to send some people off-world to start building, colonizing, and dying while they get everything situated. Mars is a three year trip at current speeds (last I knew), so we'd need to provide supplies for that plus a bit more to get things going - fabricating the buildings, getting the gardens growing, seeing if some sort of artificial environment can be constructed so as to begin the sustainability cycle, with some occasional care packages from home. Maybe later we find a way of kickstarting the core and getting the necessary spheres generated to begin trying to make Mars habitable to Terrans. Which is going to require lots of failed experiments and data-gathering before we succeed.
If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. If nothing else, we should have enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier.
The fact that there was a teacher on board also says something about what education has been doing, too - there's a lot less emphasis on the scientific disciplines and the space program. We seem to be content to have our science fictions stay relatively close to home and focus on the development of new technologies and their interactions, rather than the science fictions of how one might go about building sustainable colonies on exoplanets, or on colony ships sent out to find places where one could build new places. Or in developing ways of communicating and propelling objects close to or past the light-speed threshold, so as to make it much easier to supply missions and colonies out in the world.
We seem to have given up on space and space travel, content to sit in our own backyard and hope that nobody explodes the nuclear devices pointed at each other. This is wrong. We should be willing to send people out with no promise of return, but only of glory and the knowledge that their work is establishing pathways and routes for others to follow, trailblazing. And how knows? Maybe they'll get lucky and we'll discover a way to set them up more permanently before the end of their lifetime.