Why do we need manned spaceflight? May I present a quote from Babylon 5:

"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes… all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars" -- Jeffery Sinclair

:silly:

TV can still make good points.

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."
Carl Sagan

Science fiction has brought you everything you enjoy about modern civilization. Think about it.

I doubt anyone is attempting to base a decision on a television program, merely attempting to better explain and thus better forward an idea.

I thought that much was obvious... :shrug:

and so has Stephen Hawkin... now perhaps I missed it, but those two ARE scientists.

Do you have any idea how many discoveries and inventions owe their origins to SF writers?

As enchanting as space flight is , and I admit it is ... their is something very infantile about it in my opinion. As if a galaxy 2 million light years away is somehow more awe inspiring than a drop of condensation on a leaf.

Maybe humanity needs the 12 year old in them to survive ... Have fun .

Think about it.

will have evolved into something else or given way to the next wave of dominant life-forms.

sort of like the Americas after Columbus but on a global scale, with the dominant life form either being humanoid or not?

exploring deep seas as we have outer space :)

As far as we know we're the only critters intelligent enough to go there.

Either
a) we were made for a purpose
b) the cosmic stew created us by a happy accident

It is either our destiny to expand or we're simply riding the random cosmic surf, and best to learn as much as we can while we're here.

I don't really interpret long-term survival as narcissism.

I know how a drop of condensation on a leaf works. I know how it got there, I know what it's made of.

I cant say the same about a galaxy 2 million light years away...and I wish to know.

Sorry , didn't mean to laugh. That is fine , interest guides where we point our focus , and it is a matter of personal choice. But in no way whatsoever do we no more about drops of water than distant galaxies. And that is being somewhat pedestrian , not even touching Abstract places.

See , there is an Abstract conceptual universe out there (we think ) , and it is quite mesmerizing .

Exploration is necessary , but it is the tip of the iceberg , tiny tip of the iceberg of the wonder inherit in Natural Philosophy , Science and Mathematics.

Oh , what a joy it is to be human.

We know plenty about drops of water. We know their composition. We know a great bit about the properties of water. We know water's freezing point, boiling point. We know its viscosity. We may know a tiny bit regarding the composition of a galaxy millions of light years away, but what we don't know is far, far greater. How can you possibly say there is more unknown about water than there is about a distant galaxy?

No one had to go into spaceships to travel to different worlds. The knife 'cut' into the parallel universes.

That is only one of Sci-Fi and Fantasy's many many conceptions of door to door space travel.

Any civilization that doesn't take steps to preserve what it's learned, and to seek out new knowledge, isn't a civilization at all.

in a sky god.

god needed.

Many of the world's most brilliant minds are "into space colonization". It has nothing to do with dogma and everything to do with the betterment of mankind. I don't know why you're so bitterly opposed to this, but your snark does nothing to further your cause.

of whether we continue to fund projects for manned space flight is up for serious debate right now. Whether Obama changes NASA short term/long term goals or not, manned space flight isn't going anywhere. My personal opinion on it is that it should be included as part of our space exploration program.

Basically galactic bar hopping.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution

It's far enough in the future that it doesn't have to be in the next decade's budget.

It would be useful to try to solve some of the problems of a sustainable human society on earth. One that would last a 100,000 years or so -- maybe 0.01% of the time until the red giant stage.

problems.

I'm sure a lot of those who would follow the OP'ers line of thinking are more inclined to read Philip Dick.

Early fiction by writers like Heinlein described somewhat scientifically plausible stories of space exploration. An example would be his first novel "Rocket Ship Galileo", which was made into the film "Destination Moon".

After Apollo, when it had become apparent how difficult and costly space travel was, and as people became more familiar with astonomy and physics and the practical limitations of foreseeable technologies, science fiction changed to deal more with psychological and sociological problems. These were depicted in a setting that could be described more as "science fantasy" with respect to the astronomy and physics. An example would be Star Trek, where interstellar travel is wished into being with the "warp drive".

WTF?

The point is still the same. Human history shouldn't be tied to one planet.

to start anew.... hmmm. Here's a hint, the space ship will be called The Ark.

Human culture is driven by a need to understand the world, and later, the universe.

Just as we don't care overmuch what happens at Olduvai, someday people won't care all that much about what happens on Earth - unless we're stuck here because we're cheap.

in our own solar system and others. Journey starts with a single step and all that. It would take an effort right now even to do what we did 40 years ago - visit the moon.

But you're not very good at it.

Carrying pictures and sounds of our civilization long after there are no other remnants of us in the universe.

Except the entire human race is riding on the same plane.

If we don't eventually get off this rock we will go extinct. It is just a matter of time.

There were 27 extinction events in earths history in which 50%+ of species died in a short period of time. The largest one resulted in extinction of 95% of life on the planet.

There is no prospect that more than a very small percentage of the 7 billion or so people can be sent into space.

Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that any colony on any other body in the solar system would survive the collapse of the home base on earth. They would not be self sustainable any time in the foreseeable future.

Lastly, interstellar space flight by humans is essentially impossible, due to their short life spans.

Colonization of mars in 300 years is certainly possible but you don't get there by waiting 299 years and then say "hey lets try that Mars thing".

Interstellar travel would be incredibly slow. Colony ship could someday (maybe in thousand or couple thousand years) achieve 0.15% of speed of light. We could reach another planet in decades.

Nobody is saying Obama should put money in the budget to colonize Mars and Alpha Centauri this year. However we will never get there if we don't even take the most basic steps out of the cradle.

If you don't want to ever colonize another planet or star that is fine just realize eventually mankind will be extinct. Everything we have ever accomplished, everything we ever will accomplish will be for nothing. Our species will end and maybe another species on another star will be more progressive thinking.

escaping Earth's total destruction. All you do is substitute a sky-god with a man-god.

The Earth is here one way or other for millions of years and Life will continue to Evolve. The idea that Humans somehow deserve some special dispensation from Evolution is noted.

A very small slice of our budget spent on science and technology which might, in the long term, save human life as a species, or even lots of other life here on this planet (detecting asteroids and comets that might impact the Earth, and developing the technology to deflect them), doesn't require any more of a "special dispensation" than spending money now on human health care and human-used roads.

How does the time horizon of the benefits to mankind change whether we're talking about a "special dispensation" or not? If your point is that you want to stop spending on all things that particularly benefit humanity, now or in the future, I don't think you'll find much political traction there.

and evolution doesn't have any attention to give.

Including eventually humans.

But there are all these "endangered species" laws, etc.

According to the geological record and studies of the ecological landscape, species go extince all the time. Sometimes in big batches, sometimes indifividually.

Of course, other species evolve all the time as well.

The somewhat arbitrary (because it is built using the rules of cladistics) list of species living on earth at any given time is temporary.

It's not that I want to see endangered species go extinct -- it's just that there is no basis for getting emotional or morally outraged when they do. It just happens.

by she, I mean Sarah Palin.

Human beings can adapt to pretty much any conditions. Ice, desert, jungle. So some small pockets will survive... and possibly not just adapt but Evolve.

And it's hilarious that you seem to exalt homo sapien sapien to the point that we somehow need to exclude ourselves from Evolution.

Humans had never had to live through an extinction event.



This is the % of species on the planet that went extinct at various periods of time.

Evolution and adaption takes a long time. If something like K-T impact event happens and mankind is limited to a single biosphere the human race is over. Period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Tertiary_extinction_event



This isn't science fiction. There have been about 11 major extinctions in this history of our planet where 20% of more of species died off. They didn't adapt or evolve they simple ceased to exist.

It isn't a question of will this happen again. It is simply a question of When? A billion years from now, a 100 million, a million, a thousand? No way to predict it but it WILL happen again.

When hopefully some future generation was more progressive than the luddites on DU and spent the hundreds of years of manned space flight to get the knowledge on how to make colonies on other planets or stars.

Manned spaceflight is important, but robotic scientific missions are more important, so if we have to choose, the priority should be on the latter.

We left the caves and fanned out across the land. We learned to ride the seas, and then the air. Space is what's next.

That's a great quote.

We didn't escape our problems before, and we won't escape them in space either.

We love socializing those costs to the rest of life, while we privatize the profits. Like any good corporation.

And one man's destruction is another man's creation. I mean, since we're trading little more than bumper sticker slogans now...

You get to the point where you have to carry fuel just to carry your fuel and that grows exponentially. Manned space flight simply is not realistic.

The Flux Capacitor will take us anywhere in time, and that was delveloped with 80's technology.

:rofl:

was also such narrowsighted view, with the cost inflation, anything less than "Treeleons and Treeleons" of stars isn't even worth a second look. How can science trust someone who couldn't even cout past Won Beeleon.

Take care ;)

I think the point is to work on other ways to accomplish the goal through research and development.

which require far, far less fuel. Solar sails, ion thrusters. These technologies require little or no fuel and will change the way we think about space travel. Even using land based lasers to propel rockets to beyond our atmosphere. Technology will continue to progress and manned space flight will become more and more realistic.

While you need fuel the amount is reduced significantly.

Rather than a single large burst of acceleration a conventional rocket provides, an ion drive provides a small amount of acceleration the entire trip.

Ship accelerates slightly more than halfway to mars then flips around and slowly decelerated until it reaches Martian orbit.

If we are going to spend extended periods up there, let's improve the technology. Otherwise, Robots do the job just fine and nobody gets hurt.

stopping everything short of a solar particle event.

It really isn't that complicated.

so far--they may be small, but they accumulate.

Gamma rays can do damage, but there aren't any large sources nearby and the aluminum skin of most spacecraft handle most them pretty well.

The dangerous things are the charged heavy ions, which come from deep space in the form of cosmic rays and from the sun in the form of the solar wind. It only gets hairy during a solar particle event, like a flareup, when the radiation counts go way up and you have a good chance of getting an acute dose. A bunker could conceivably be built for those situations since the light from the eruption has a substantial head start, giving plenty of visual warning for the astronauts to button down and take cover. The charged particles tend to leave lots of reactive oxygen species in their wake within the body, which in turn chew on DNA and cause cell damage, including cell death and somatic cell mutations.

Missions are designed to keep astronauts underneath their career dosage limits, which vary by age and sex. These limits are estimated such that a total career limit dose would increase an astronaut's chances of contracting a fatal hard-tumor cancer by 3% over that of the rest of the population. That's the risk one accepts to walk on an alien world.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I worked on space radiation shielding problems for my masters thesis.

I too loved the romance of space travel as a kid and wished for nothing more than an active program of exploration and experimentation. I've been so disappointed to see that passion get turned into just another Reaganistic boondoggle for the accountants in the space/defense industry.

Your words are reassuring. How about the problem of space trash? Any solutions for avoiding a quarter inch shard of white paint (and the like or larger) moving at 30,000 mph straight at your outer membranes? that's my other worry.

Not sure what they'll do about space trash. There's talk of shooting stuff down with lasers, vaporizing chunks of space trash individually so that they slow down, deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Trash will be a real problem if someone gets shooty up there during a war, too!

At least it's only a problem in low earth orbit. :p

and how a trip to Mars would take 39 days.

Ion engine could one day power 39-day trips to Mars


A manned trip may not be as far-fetched, or difficult as it is often made out to be.

Sid

The sun has about 5 billion more years. The sun burns hotter as is gets older. Estimates say with any CO2 in the atmosphere within 500 million years surface temperatures could get too high for surface water. So lets say conservatively your have 500 million years to build manned space craft. That's a looooooooooooooooong time. By the time you can travel to other stars, you are likely to have a lot of other technology. The cheapest future interstellar travel will always be to send a robot. In say 500 million years technology might build your space traveler in situ as needed. Frankly for the near future there is no place to go that we can't go for cheaper and better with our machines. It's unlikely to change as our technology gets better. The future of space is the same as the past. Space exploration with our machines and we staying where we live on Earth. (There's a lot of work to do to even make it anywhere close to the End of Earth's time to really use this rational for any program).

in regards to adapting to space travel and more variant conditions.

If the universe is a closed system and doomed to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, wouldn't being trapped on one planet be even more so?

nt.