11 Comments

I am curious about the correlation between Americans enthusiastic about crewed space exploration and space science fiction and those who travel and enjoy outdoor activities.

If you really want to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and different civilizations you could just fly to another country or continent for a lot cheaper than going to space or Mars. But I suspect the people who are excited about a moon base wouldn't last that long or enjoy themselves even on a well-supported expedition to the Canadian wilderness or outback Australia or a hut in Antarctica. I suspect that many of the Star Wars/Trek fans who dream of hanging out in bars on other planets with entities speaking 'strange' languages would in fact not personally enjoy a cantina in rural Mexico or a truck stop in some remote part of Southeast Asia.

To anyone who says they would happily go on a one-way or long-term trip to space and abandon Earth to its problems, please be aware that for the cost of a ticket on a rocket ride to "space" you could by a decent sailboat and still have enough money to sail the world for the rest of your life. If you fancy yourself a rugged explorer, maybe try walking/bicycling/driving from your house to Tierra Del Fuego or from Cape Town to Vladivostok instead of eating potatoes in your storage container sized house on Mars until the radiation and perchlorates get you.

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These are very perceptive points. I take notice. I'll write about this.

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Any space colonization effort would be under incredible pressure to be good at recycling. Any terraforming effort will require superb understanding of biospheres. Anyone serious about space colonization should be more focused on moving Earth's economy toward cradle-to-cradle design and preserving biodiversity than on big rockets.

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The Stars My Destination is one of my all-time favourite books (although I prefer it's other title, Tiger Tiger) so I'm really pleased it gets a look-in!

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I've been hearing about it for years, as well as noticing allusions to it (e.g. the "Alfred Bester" character played by Walter Koenig on "Babylon 5"). It's been on my must-read list for a while ... maybe I should read it! 8-)

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I thought I had lucked out when I landed a job 1 BC ("Before Covid") at the same lab responsible for writing the Apollo 11 lunar landing code over fifty years ago (check out "wehackthemoon.com"). I was inspired to go into STEM work as an elementary school age kid watching the Apollo program news in the 60s - still not a bad thing to consider work in science & tech. But the experience at the famous GNC (guidance & control) lab 50 years later was extremely disillusioning - there's so much to discuss that perhaps I should consider starting my own 'stack (;-}). Topics of interest: 1. the lab fields many teams, supposedly "fenced off" from each other, to support many competing efforts for space launch capability. Why so many teams, and who gets to oversee the mess? 2. Favoritism towards PhDs/PhD candidates. Is a $50,000/semester education truly worth it? When I look at through the Apollo history, technical leaders are cited by their accomplishments, not the schools they attended. Somehow, the ability to interview for competence has been lost, and has been replaced by credentialism.

Anyways, enjoyed your 'stack - looking forward to more!

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I can't help but feel that there's a massive, oh, call it an energy barrier, here. Traditional colonisation allows you to send some stuff home and receive trade, maybe against some investment costs, with the assumption that sunk costs will pay off eventually. With interplanetary colonisation, those sunk costs to be overcome increase enormously. The chances of any investment paying off and so any investor remaining interested in maintaining the colonial links, are tiny. Any scrabble to escape our gravity well would require a concerted and coordinated global effort over many decades to have the barest chance of success, and maybe our hypothetical advocate is more optimistic about that global cooperation than I am, but I'm not seeing it. There's more chance of cooperation in protecting the one planet we know that does support life, and we should put energy into that.

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Rich,

I wholeheartedly agree. So the question is: why the obsession with "going to the stars" etc. It's particularly bizarre - and incidentally, the theme of the book project. To be fair I am still struggling with the best way to arrange the whole argument over 250 pages: one way to do it is how you suggest, roughly:

Part One: It's technically and economically nonsensical, here's why etc...

Part Two: So why the rush then? here's why etc...

I may have devised another rhetorical angle to make the case, to be revealed as we go along

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I'm looking forward to the book!

I think there are both push factors and pull factors. The pull factors are that it's a Grand Dream, where the technical obstacles are not well publicly appreciated and lack of progress can readily be blamed on Lack of Will/Optimism/Faith in Humanity (see also Brexit and fusion (my own area!)). This makes it a fertile ground for both raising interest and money, and deflecting criticism. Push factors are the increasing environmental urgency and space travel being an obvious sidestep of Malthusianism - it seems like a simple out-of-the-box answer that solves all the current problems in one fell swoop. Reality is, of course, messier than that and there almost never is one easy answer to any grand existential question.

Then there's the role that 70 years of science fiction has played in prepping people to believe that space colonisation is natural and inevitable...

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Regarding the role of science-fiction, I am currently lining up an interview/discussion with someone you might know of. It will be a big surprise.

As for the Malthusianism that suffuses the entire field, it is very much on my mind. It's a chapter I have not written yet: I need to make it absolutely airtight.

As for grand promises and the frustratingly slow grind of research, you must know of it better than anyone since you work in fusion.

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The Grand Dream could otherwise be an earthbound planetary union of nations to address the critical crises of our time.

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