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Do you care about space exploration / colonization


uhtred

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When I was growing up (ages ago),  moving humans into outer space was considered to be our obvious future.   I still find things like the New Horizons Pluto images, and the Titan lander to be among mankind's greatest achievements.

 

Do younger people care about this anymore, or have people moved on to other concerns.   What great grand goals are there now? 

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Anthracite_Impreza

I think most people now are just trying to survive in this shitty economy forced upon us.

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19 minutes ago, Anthracite_Impreza said:

I think most people now are just trying to survive in this shitty economy forced upon us.

Haha well put.

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I couldn't give less of a shit. Spending billions of dollars/Euros/Rubles to send a robo to some other planet for a few pictures always seemed like a huge waste of resources to me. We have waaaay more important things to spend that money on.

 

So someone took a picture of a black hole. Cool, now what? To me, it's the ultimate shrug-inducing part of science.

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15 minutes ago, Homer said:

I couldn't give less of a shit. Spending billions of dollars/Euros/Rubles to send a robo to some other planet for a few pictures always seemed like a huge waste of resources to me. We have waaaay more important things to spend that money on.

 

So someone took a picture of a black hole. Cool, now what? To me, it's the ultimate shrug-inducing part of science.

So what do you care about? 

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13 minutes ago, uhtred said:

So what do you care about?  

Real life issues. Food. Water. Shelter. Finding and implementing a suitable source of energy to replace fossil fuels. Once that's set, we can go take pictures of red dust on some random floating rock.

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I'm an older person who grew up during the heyday of things like the Apollo program, so maybe my opinion doesn't count. But I am still a big fan of space exploration. There are plenty of tangible benefits, such as advancements in science and technology. As well as less tangible benefits, such as the thrill of exploration and discovery, something grander to aspire to and projects that tend to unite people and countries in common goals. And it's not like we have to choose between space exploration and other things. We do have big things we should be addressing, such as climate change. We could do that and continue to explore space and do other things as well. 

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I have been privileged to witness many remarkable things during my lifetime. The most important was when man set foot on something other than the earth for the first time in history. This dwarfs what Columbus accomplished. Probably the greatest human achievement since agriculture was invented. However, my country always seems to do all the right things for the wrong reasons. To me, the Apollo program was how this country perfected intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russians had already demonstrated they could launch a satellite into space. It could just as easily have been a nuclear warhead. So, to catch up with our competitor we improved our technology but like the Russians we put men into space instead of bombs. We were waging a very unpopular war at the time and our politicians realized it would look bad to development weapons of mass destruction. Well, that's what they were doing but they wanted it to look good.  The scientists were just along for the ride. The military industrial complex was  really the star of the show. I believe this was really what happened because after a few moon missions, NASA's budget was cut. No more space exploration, at least anything beyond telecommunication satellites and the occasional probe. It appears the government's advertising campaign worked a bit too well. People demanded further exploration, so the plans for an old space station designed for spying was taken out of some forgotten cabinet. Thus, the space shuttle. However with just a shoe string budget, NASA had to cut many corners. No more exacting quality control. Thus, the two shuttle disasters. Maybe a visit to the international space station several times since then but space exploration is dead, at least in this country. 

 

Why anybody would want to live on another planet seems a mystery to me. Humans are like goldfish in a bowl. We can't manage very well out of the bowl. We know of no other place in the universe like earth and living anywhere else would probably amount to the creation of a giant ant's nest we could never hope to leave. If we do make our way back out into the cosmos it will probably spring from the creation of the asteroid mining industry. It would be nice to have platinum the same price as aluminum which in turn was once more expensive than gold before commercial refining was invented. Once again, we would be confined to an orbiting ant's nest and robots would do the majority of the work. Things might change in the distant future. As I've mentioned before, humanity as we know it may end when we merge with our own technology. Each new person would be their own species. I can imagine our descendants basking in gamma ray bursts around a black hole or swimming in seas of liquid methane. I think Venus is over 500 degrees, has a barometric pressure of several tons per square inch and it rains battery acid. Who knows, though? It might become a very popular vacation destination for those adapted to it.  The final irony is that we know more about outer space than the bottom of our own ocean. This will probably be the first alien environment we seriously colonize - our own planet.

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Guest Jetsun Milarepa

Being of the space race generation like @daveb and having gone to visit Cape Kennedy I really understand the advances in sister technologies thanks to space exploration.

I don't think it would be worthwhile looking at colonising other planets. Firstly, they're inhospitable, soulless places and secondly, if we ever find a beautiful one, like earth, there's an evens bet we'd just wreck it like we've already done here.

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2 hours ago, Homer said:

Real life issues. Food. Water. Shelter. Finding and implementing a suitable source of energy to replace fossil fuels. Once that's set, we can go take pictures of red dust on some random floating rock.

The problem is that those issues never end. Either we move the goalposts on poverty, or malthus takes over and the population grows until we run out of resources.  The world is a far better place than it was 50 years ago - but these sorts of problems will never be fixed.  

 

I understand what you are saying though, and I think it is a very common feeling among younger people. 

 

For old folks like me, its very sad. We saw the end of exploration. Saw humanity poised at the brink of expanding into space, and then giving up. 

 

Why go? Because to an almost perfect approximation *everything* is in space, not on earth.    Its time to climb down out of the trees again, even if there are lions on the planes. 

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I worry more about what happening here and honestly space does not want our crap either. We destroyed one planet who says they want a repeat. Humans have bigger concerns then whats on the other side of a star. 

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Ace of Mind

I find the pursuit of knowledge in general to be worthwhile. I'm not sure if actually moving civilization into space will end up being the solution, but for me the technology and sub-problems solved along the way to any space-related endeavors is completely worthwhile for what it adds to the knowledge and experience of civilizations. The value of all the time, money, and brain power spent on, for example, the recent black hole imagery goes far beyond the little blurry pixels of a glowing ring. The value is in the fact that the image was able to be produced, and the advances in photon capture, noise cancellation, data aggregation, and AI-assisted data processing that went into the image are what we've really learned here. Whenever I read someone scoffing at the images and calling the project a waste of money I just get this internal vision of myself in cartoon-style anger where my face gradients to solid red and steam comes out my ears 😡

I'm often bothered when people suggest that resource expenditure on space science should be abandoned in favor of more immediate worldly problems. For one thing, not all science is the same transferable contribution to this nebulous progress pool that can be allocated at will. People spend their lives developing skills and experience according to their passions, and closing down the mars rover team and pointing at the engineers going "okay now instead of rovers, solve renewable energy, k thx bye". There are already teams working on this, and teams working on solutions to hunger, and shelter, and resource distribution. The fact that we are simultaneously exploring space does not detract from those efforts. Even more upsetting is how fractional the funding is towards science in general. Some believe that for every 100 million dollar rocket launched, that launch should have never have been planned and the money would be better given to a number of other causes, but realistically, for one, many those causes already have more funding than space, and two, the funding to those causes and space research combined is the smallest fraction compared to, say, military spending, or possibly even compared to money spent simply in waste and error, lost to the machinations of government. 

 

One of the things that I've come across that I think does a fantastic job at capturing my attitude towards why it is important that we continue activities such as space exploration is this quote from a character written by Patrick Rothfuss:

 

"It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. That way, when he finds the answers, they’ll be precious to him. The harder the question, the harder we hunt. The harder we hunt, the more we learn. And given an impossible question . . ."

 

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I love space exploration but I'm terrified of space...😱

I'll just wait until they get star trek technology so it feels like it's Earth inside a spaceship. 

As for my opinion otherwise...

Spoiler

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Alawyn-Aebt
4 hours ago, uhtred said:

Do younger people care about this anymore, or have people moved on to other concerns.   What great grand goals are there now?

Yes, at least some of us younger people care. Immediate goals would be to either develop a good successor to the Space Shuttle or develop a new launching system. Rockets are horribly inefficient, the Space Shuttle was not much more efficient and still relied on rockets, but it had a larger payload and slightly more efficient. Longer term would be to regain the capability to go to the Moon, the later Mars (probably not Mars within my lifetime though). I do not think we can really colonize Mars though, at least probably not within this century. We would need to do test-colonization on the Moon before attempting colonization of anywhere else.

 

This ties into Space Exploration but is a problem in general. Even with (at least in the USA) a major push for STEM studies since long before my birth the interest in the long-term Capital engineering projects has declined. Think about the Concorde, Missions to the Moon, Space Shuttles, etc. All the major capital era-defining projects seem to be lacking in the first twenty years of the 21st century. I know people can look to smartphones, internet, and all sorts of other consumer goods, but while we may be making improvements in consumer goods, capital goods appear lacking. Why this exists? I do not know. Part of me thinks the collapse of wind-tunnel testings, moldings, etc. in favor of computer-generated tests has diminished interest in those sort of large-scale epoch defining engineering schemes. Most people I know in my college for engineering really are just in it for the computers and in a way are more IT people than engineering people. Not saying we do not need those tech-savvy people, but we need people to physically make things, make big things, make things that effect us so much we do no even realize it. However I doubt that is the whole reason, and without knowing the reason it is impossible to truly rectify.

 

I will also say to anyone who complains about the cost, the rewards the world reaped from the Mission to the Moon was enormous. The extra spending on Research instigated so many wonderful advancements that we rarely even think about. Although research can be a hard sell because you have to front the costs, the benefits are stunning and play out over decades.

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1 hour ago, AwkwardSquid said:

I worry more about what happening here and honestly space does not want our crap either. We destroyed one planet who says they want a repeat. Humans have bigger concerns then whats on the other side of a star. 

Space is big.  Really big.  We aren't going to break it. 

 

Humans have bigger short term concerns, but if we always worry about short term we never get to long term. The primates that didn't go out and explore are mostly extinct or in zoos now. 

 

Space takes a lot of resources, and like  a chick breaking out of the egg, you don't get many chances. 

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I care about space exploration. Knowledge is power.

 

We may be on this little earth, but this little earth is also in the big universe. Nothing wrong with figuring out how this universe we’re all in works.

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SorryNotSorry

To be blunt, I think we need to wipe out classism, elitism, and control freaks before we can even THINK of colonizing space.

 

As previous posters have already pointed out, we have enough problems to solve here on Earth. But I think that to take inequality into space is to set ourselves up for a spectacular fiasco, because too much wealth or technical know-how in too few hands won't work in space. Those who can't or won't work together in the harsh environment of space won't make it.

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7 hours ago, uhtred said:

Space is big.  Really big.  We aren't going to break it. 

 

Humans have bigger short term concerns, but if we always worry about short term we never get to long term. The primates that didn't go out and explore are mostly extinct or in zoos now. 

 

Space takes a lot of resources, and like  a chick breaking out of the egg, you don't get many chances. 

And that thinking is what got us in the mess because people always need to look towards the future and not the present. Those primates went extinct because we did it. They had their homes and then we built and put them in zoos. And it is not worrying about short term concerns but long term, once something is dead that is it. Gone. 

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Space exploration yes, colonisation I wouldn't say no to, but it would need a massive leap in propulsion technology for one. 

 

Whilst, as others have said, the vast majority of space technology has come from the military in general, and the nuclear weapons arena in particular, it has helped the development of many technologies useful to humanity in general. 

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I'm also of the space race generation, and I do not and never have given a sh*t about it.   From my admittedly-little knowledge about such matters, it will take a huge amount of time and effort to possibly colonize/control other planets.  Meanwhile, we have this beatiful earth filled with lovely fauna and flora, and we are trashing it.  What a true shame.  

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Even if we do want to stay on this earth and take care of it, there are many threats from space that we could learn to protect ourselves from if we study them. Asteroids, solar flares, gama ray bursts, etc. As I said earlier we’re not just on this earth, we’re in this universe as well.

 

I’m also glad that astronomers have been able to observe evidence of the Big Bang by looking at space and observing the “echos”. Studying space helps us understand not only the universe, but our own planet and how it came to be as well. How life came to be. Instead of relying on religious texts written thousands of years ago.

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4 hours ago, Gloomy said:

Studying space helps us understand not only the universe, but our own planet and how it came to be as well. How life came to be. Instead of relying on religious texts written thousands of years ago.

True, but cosmology does not touch on morality, which is covered by religion (or the study of ethics).   

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Calligraphette_Coe

I think we have to, if not outer space, then the difficult colonization of this world's oceans. Sooner of later we are going to run out of room and resources, and they are out there (or down there) waiting for us to find an efficient and economical way of not only harvesting them, but regenerating them. I think to engineer is human, and I can't stop thinking of ways to do such things. That's why I became an engineer.

 

And it may not be all Buck Rodgersry in the way we eventually go about it. Though it is only a theory, look at the concept of the Dyson Sphere. The concept only came about by someone's thinking outside the box, or in this case, outside of the oyster shell that is out present home. Sure, it would take a huge amount of resources to do this, but again, it's waiting out there for the taking.

 

We only survived and became the pre-eminent speices on earth because we were smaller and had rely on each other and the societies we created to keep the sabertoothed tigers from eating us alive wholesale. Maybe out drive to unite and expand be a similar way to make us come together and work with each other against a common enemy-- the exhausting of resources and habitable space.

 

Even when you're home, you can't go home again  in a technological sense-- you have to keep growing or you risk the fate of dying as a race when everything burns out.

 

And who knows what shortcuts in spacetime are out there waiting for us to discover?

 

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I care a lot about space exploration, and I think that finding out more about the solar system and galaxy that we live in is important. Scientific discovery is valuable on its own; I consider the pursuit of knowledge to be worthwhile in and of itself. We do have finite resources, yes, but there's plenty of room to continue to study and explore space while working on solving things like climate change here on Earth. There are things I feel that we're wasting resources and money on. Space exploration is decidedly not one of them. I would hate to see us stop trying to discover more about the universe.

 

Colonization, though... I'm not so wild about that. It's a cool idea in theory, but there are a lot of problems still to be overcome before we can think about even going to Mars, and people have used and are using the possibility as an excuse to care less about our own planet. Saving our own planet needs to be priority #1. Until we've got that done, any other goal has the "assuming we're still around" looming over it. Do I think it would be cool to go out among the stars someday? Yes, certainly, and if it ever becomes practical I'd love to see permanently inhabited, large space stations and such. But the idea of going off and terraforming and colonizing another world to escape the problems we created on this one does not appeal to me.

 

For what it's worth, I'm more on the younger side of things; I grew up watching shuttle launches on TV, and I was really excited as a kid when the first rover landed on Mars and when the International Space Station got going. Apollo 11, however, was 20 years before I was born.

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nineGardens

I am totally for space exploration.   ... possibly to the point where I kind of just don't UNDERSTAND the idea of not being excited by it.

I grew up watching documentaries such as "the planets", and being fed a steady supply of wonder by all the cool things we have discovered, spread across the ages. To me... space is the closest thing I have to a spirituality. It is my primary source of wonder, and... in many cases hope.

"Pale blue dot" is, in my mind one of humanities greatest achievements. A simple photo of the earth take from a long way away.

 

I understand it isn't for everyone, and I understand that there are resources used, but... Look, the US defense budget in 2015 alone was 637 billion dollars.

The cost of the entire Apollo program was 25 billion at the time, or 136 billion accounting for inflation.  [numbers from Wikipedia... which also mentions that Nasa spending is generally net positive economically for the US]

If you want to cut unneeded funding because "We have Real world problems to solve, and I don't give a shit about space"... well okay, sure, but like, lets cut military instead.

Or do we think we should spend less on religion? Do religions deserve to have temples built to them and lives dedicated to them? How about advertising, or sports teams? Is this really the MOST justifiable spending cut?

 

Space exploration, like many scientific endevours is associated with international cooperation. To what extent did excitement and competition during the spacerace allow both Russia and the US to sort of... redirect public attention towards a less destructive path (even if ultimately the missiles were the true justification behind it, being able to redirect and soften public sentiment still matters)

 

And well... Yeah, I actually DO want humans to go to the stars. Or at least to other planets.

And it will take a long time, and be a madness, and it isn't economically sensible, and  people might go "Oh, but we might wreck those other planets" ... but like... wreck compared to WHAT?

 

If we wreck a jungle here on earth, a bunch of animals (and maybe some people) pay a price for that. If we go and stir up rocks on mars and people go "we wrecked it".... well no living thing has paid a price here. Bluntly put, I like plants more than rocks. I want plants to be on more planets. If people go "We might wreck mars," or whatever I go "There are billions of other tiny dead balls of rock! they are not an endangered species. If we change one, then so be it." Simply put, I do not want all known life to only exist on one planet. Eventually something bad will happen, having all your eggs in one basket it bad.  ... that's a very long term concern, but it isn't one I'm going to ignore either.

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I'm pro space exploration, colonization, etc. I used to be almost aggressively into it not even a few years ago... I've chilled out a bit, but it still has a soft spot with me. So take my opinion as a fairly biased one, I guess. 

 

A lot of the scientific and engineering related advancements made as a result of space exploration find their way into practical applications. It's not a waste of money. You could consider it something like an investment; maybe it's not immediately rendered useful, but it tends to pay off somewhere down the road. I've never understood the "we have [insert random problem(s)] on Earth that we need to fix before we do space stuff" argument. Many of those problems are never fully going away and it's not like a lack of space exploration will alleviate them. 

 

It creates high paying jobs, it gives us useful info, it makes cool gadgets, many of which likely make it into homes and daily use. What's not to like? 

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QuantumEcho

I am pro space exploration and colonization. But first off we need to get our shit together on earth first before we leave out planet. 

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Don't really care, nothing significant in this regard will happen in my lifetime anyway.

 

But if I had to have some kind of opinion, I do think we need to learn to take care of our own backyard better before we go throwing too many of our chips into this pile.

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