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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.