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Staying on Terra Firma
For many years, a main goal of NASA has been to send a man humans to Mars. In fact, it seemed right after the moon landings to be the next logical step in space exploration. I was a youngster when the Gemini and Apollo missions were big news. I watched the first moon landing live on television. I remember the drama of Apollo 13 (as well as the movie).
I watched the original Star Trek series when it first aired, and went to the movie theater twice to watch Star Wars when it was first released. It seemed like anything was possible. We were going to invent Warp Drive and go faster than the speed of light! The universe was ours to explore!
But it’s not. We are not going to the stars. The distances are much too great. We might be able to send people to Mars, but the other planets are very unlikely destinations. They are too far and if we could get to them we would find that the environments we would encounter would make it impossible for us to visit much less live – even with technology we could possibly develop.
We have picked Mars because it is one of two “close” planets. Venus has a poisonous atmosphere so that is out of the question. And we have always had a much greater fascination with Mars (the god of war) than with Venus even though Venus is ‘hotter’. (Pun intended.) But Mars is not that hospitable either. It has little or no atmosphere and its gravity is too small to hold any kind of atmosphere we could live on much less to grow crops on. So we would have to take both air and food to Mars, enough to sustain the crew through the trip. (Building some kind of colony seems impossible.) That would take an enormous payload. The rocket ship would be huge and extremely expensive.
There is another possibility, I am told, and that is to grow the food on the ship. What else does the crew have to do but grow stuff during a months-long trip? This is not a quick trip to the moon. It would be a huge, extremely expensive expedition. And it would be far too dangerous for anyone to make. It would be unwise for the bravest, even the ones with “the right stuff”. There are risks worth taking and there are foolish risks. This falls into the latter category.
I know that NASA scientists know all about the dangers. The reason that I know is that I personally know a few of them myself. There is a NASA base about five miles from here. Two of them have done work for the Space Station. They all seemed convinced that people will make it to Mars someday. But what they cannot tell me is why we would want to go. Some speak of the fact that we would gain scientific knowledge. Others say that we would benefit greatly from the technology developed to make the trip. About the former, I would agree, but would the expense outweigh the possible gains?
I think that whatever gains we might get from persons traveling to Mars would be much less than even just the financial outlay. I especially do not think that the gains would be worth the risk to human life. I am not a snowflake. I know that great progress comes at great expense and often the cost of many human lives. I am not completely risk-averse. But the cost must not outweigh the gains. In other words, the cost/benefit analysis, if it can be done, seems to tell us that there is no good reason for humans to go to Mars. A lot of the knowledge that might be gained we can get by sending instruments and robots to Mars to find out what we can. And I am not saying that we shouldn’t do that.
Additionally, there is the opportunity cost of such a quest. We really need our best scientists to work on other things at home to make life on earth better. I would rather have them in other research or private industry to increase the living standards not only for us but for the developing world. Science has given us a tremendous amount already, but this pandemic has shown us that there is much more to do. Let’s concentrate on continuing our progress here on earth and not waste resources on a not-very-fruitful but fascinating goal. I think we ought to get our heads out of the clouds and realize that science fiction can be entertaining, but it is not realistic. We are here on earth and we are staying here. I have not mentioned religion yet, but I must. As a Christian, I know that God made this earth for us to live on and to have dominion over. He did not give us Mars to live on. He did not give us the moon to live on. He gave us the earth. Let’s stay on it.
[I am sure that my Ricochet friends will correct any errors of scientific fact, but I do not think that it will change my thesis.]
Published in Technology
I’m not sure where I fall on this topic, but I really appreciated reading what you had to say!
I presume you don’t need evidence that the feds started pouring money into the nation’s universities for research, do you? I’ve seen some of the archives at my university regarding the huge increase in funding that was coming in after Sputnik. It was surprising to me, considering how slowly bureaucratic wheels usually turn, as to just how quickly it responded, almost as if it had been prepared. And in a way it was prepared, because there had already been new research funding with the establishment of the National Science Foundation soon after WWII ended. But after Sputnik the university did some major reorganizations to accommodate the new funding.
One of the vice presidents, in his private memoirs, explained that all of a sudden there were problems in the College of Arts and Sciences, because all the new funding for the Sciences created a whole new pay scale and budget scale (for labs and equipment if nothing else) and it was difficult to tell the Arts and Humanities people that they were now second class citizens in the same college. So the College of Natural Sciences was formed, and the two worlds went their separate ways. It took a while but over the years there was pressure for more federal funding for Social Sciences, too, and for everybody else.
Lots of good was done with the funding for science (such as providing me with employment for over 30 years) but the nationalization of our universities has had some pretty bad effects, too, which have been playing out in the current levels of wokeness.
We just need the Thermians to build it for us.
Now that they know what the pretty lights look it, it’ll be easy.
I think the leftward march began before that, and would have continued regardless of federal funding etc. Indeed if it was the “liberal arts” that became second-class as you describe, arguably the increased funding for hard science may have slowed them down more than would have been the case otherwise.
People forget that in addition to warning about the “military-Industrial Complex”, Eisenhower also warned about the dangers of a “Scientific/Technological Elite”.
The leftward march began a couple centuries before that, but the nationalization of higher education baked it in at all colleges that take federal funding. Which is all except for Hillsdale and maybe one other. There would be more diversity of thought and viewpoint if it wasn’t for federal enforcement. Federal funding has gradually been putting the squeeze on smaller colleges, making it hard for them to exist as independent entities. More centralization = more thought control. I have seen zero evidence that increased funding for science slowed anyone else down one iota. Federal funding for science meant that federal funding for everything else would follow in its wake, just as with any other government program. The others just needed a little time to organize their constituencies and lobbies to get in on it, saying, “If we’re funding X, we should be funding Y, too.” Federal funding for science was a camel’s nose under the tent.
We have them, they are called Ion Drives, The issue is you need sufficient mass to keep throwing out the back, so until you start collecting your materials that are already in orbit you are paying a huge penalty to get it out of the Earth’s gravity well.
If Musk is successful with his BFR system it will be the boot strap required to commercially afford a system that can mine the requisite material already floating around in our solar system. This stuff is no longer esoteric “Rocket Science” technology, it now requires big egos, and the huevos to push thru the commercialization reward.
Unfortunately history is replete with example of guys who had the correct vision, but could not pull it off in a financially viable time horizon.
Once some people can get established in space, seems like things can move pretty quickly. But entrepreneurship in space is going to be pretty different, considering things like you can’t even BREATHE in space without pretty advanced technology.
Hurumph, I still cannot get anyone to buy me a beer… And my kids still mock my with “Sure Boomer”.
Could be time to write a post on Destination: Moon. This….
…led to this…
…winning the public and political support that eventually got us…
I think the wording often went more like this: “If we can send a man to the moon, we can [cure poverty].” Substitute whatever phrase you want for “cure poverty.”
I saw Aldrin’s video The Case For Mars at an astronaut reunion in 2009. Afterwards, I spoke with Jim McDivitt about it. Jim said that Buzz was glossing over about 30 problems which needed to be solved before we sent people to Mars. I don’t know how many of them have been solved by now. Certainly, there’s the long term question of how well people will function in low gravity environments.
They might be okay as long as they stay there, but once having spent much time there they probably couldn’t return to Earth even if the technology allowed for it, and children born on Mars could probably never live on Earth. At least not without a lot of assistance.
How long would the trip be? A couple of years? In free-fall the whole way?
Mars might be reachable with more-or-less current technology, with a ship having at least some rotating areas for gravity. Maybe a Mars-level gravity, which would be less of a technical problem – structural issues would be less for a gravity less than half that of Earth – and also help get the people ready for their upcoming environment. In that situation it might take the better part of a year, with launch taking place at a favorable point in the orbits of both Earth and Mars.
But no matter how it’s done, any time in the near future, it’s pretty much 100% going to be a one-way trip. It may be important to select volunteers with no family members left behind to sue “on their behalf” or what-not, should things go wrong, or just because they claim the volunteers were “baited” or whatever. With courts these days, who can tell? And I would suggest no POC either, even without living relatives, because I think we can expect Jesse Jackson et al to go to court regardless. It’s all racist, because it’s too awful on Earth so they were “forced” to leave, or whatever.
Don’t know about children, but we’ve had people spend more than a year in zero-G on the space stations, and then return to full gravity with no apparent ill effects.
Problem is going to the moon was a definable technical problem with a technical solution. Going to Mars is a similar problem with probably an order of magnitude different set of technical solutions required. “Curing Poverty” isn’t a technical problem at all and probably isn’t really definable, nor in my experience is any other Y that is discussed. Mars is interesting because we haven’t had a frontier in a while. The frontiers call to a certain type of person who needs that kind of challenge, so there is a fuzzy non technological reason to go to Mars as well.
We’re talking about maybe a year or more there, plus however long at less than 40% Earth gravity, and then maybe a year coming back… If they weren’t on Mars for very long, and the gravity on the return trip was adjusted up to get the acclimated, some might be able to make it work. But I suspect loss of bone strength and loss of muscle/strength (atrophy) might easily be permanent.
Even if someone got to Mars, decided they didn’t like it, and wanted to come right back – and the technology was available – it’s not that simple. Earth and Mars are very far apart, most of the time. Most likely the time between each trip going there would be about 2 years, and probably the same coming back.
True, but 40% gravity is a lot more than zero gravity.
It’s been a while since my lectures on health effects of zero-G when I went o space camp 30 years ago. Don’t recall if exercise stopped bone density loss or merely slowed it. I do know shuttle and space station astronauts spend a lot of time every day exercising.
I know a lot of Heinlein novels posited that anyone who spent more than a few weeks on the moon was never going to be able to return to Earth. But he also wrote about swamp creatures on Venus, and ice skating on Martian canals, so…
I never base science or analysis on what someone wrote as fiction in the 1920s-70s. Although it is still BS, a much more entertaining version of conditions on other planets can be found in Donald Wollheim’s “Secret Of The Ninth Planet.”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33644/33644-h/33644-h.htm
Ah but physicists like Nick Herbert and Miguel Alcubierre among others have been imagining what the technology could be. We simply have no idea how many steps were are missing between the kinds of materials needed to build say a functioning Alcubierre Warp Drive and said end product. There are already materials problems we can see and not solve. Yet. What other difficulties could there be? We have no idea.
How amazing did you find it to see the Space-X crew just drift from the Dragon into the ISS for the first time wearing…khakis and polo shirts, like they’d just come from the golf course? I could not stop geeking about that. Annoyed my wife.
Gravity…a problem. I am surprised no one has mentioned radiation yet.
But there are still plenty of risks. See #39.
Actually “Secret Of The Ninth Planet” does.
Primitive people believed they had the technology to reach the Moon, and it kind-of made sense: climb a higher tree. After all, from here on the ground, the top of the tree just about touches the Moon. But when you make the climb, the Moon is still bafflingly not in reach. How about climbing a tall tree on top of a tall hill? Still no good. A mystery.
They were wrong, but not crazy, given how little they knew. In fact, if you had a tree that was 238,000 miles tall, you could do it. Of course, we know that’s impossible.
I’m suggesting that when it comes to light speed travel, we’re roughly where those cavemen were, staring at the Moon.
But if you stand on the other side of the tree, it DOESN’T reach the moon! Witchcraft!
Curing poverty isn’t even possible anymore, since they defined the poverty-stricken as (I think) people earning in the bottom quintile. Talk about poverty being always with us.
Same as when Hillary Clinton and others say things like “below-average schools should be closed.”