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silveradeptTwenty-five years ago, on 28 January 1986, a spacecraft lifted off of the pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seventy-one seconds later, it disintegrated in an explosion, killing the astronauts and a teacher that had won a nationwide contest onboard. In a lot of ways, that was a sign of the future to come. Despite the fact that we know Richard Nixon had an alternate speech drawn up in case the Apollo mission to Luna failed in such a way that the astronauts would not be retrievable, this was the first time we got to see what can go wrong on a space mission, in phenomenally brilliant color and fire. The next great manned accopmlishment in space after that point would be the International Space Station. Even then, the aging Space Shuttle fleet would create problems as pieces sometimes went missing, or worse, a break in the wrong place would result in another explosion, this time of Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
We can only garner so much information about the Sol system through the use of unmanned missions, orbiters, rovers, probes, and other robotic devices. While NASA and its partners are phenomenal at building robots, as the recent reset of a probe computer that's still transmitting and the extended time on the Mars rover missions of Spirit and Opportunity proves, they're still very gun-shy about people missions that aren't up to the ISS or a quick jaunt to Luna and back. (IKAROS, of JAXA, deserves special note for having basically managed to survive Murphy's Revenge, Murphy's Revenge: Redux, and Son of Murphy's Revenge) Challenger and Columbia are probably good reasons why. A trip to Mars requires logistics and the very large likelihood that the trip will be one-way, unless we can find some way of efficiently getting people there and back in terms of fuel cost. And nobody wants to be accused of sending their scientists out to die. Despite that, that's pretty much the voyager way - sometimes you come back loaded with riches and stories of strange lands, sometimes you never come back.
If we want to give ourselves an out in case people get really stupid on Terra and render it uninhabitable, we've got to be willing to send some people off-world to start building, colonizing, and dying while they get everything situated. Mars is a three year trip at current speeds (last I knew), so we'd need to provide supplies for that plus a bit more to get things going - fabricating the buildings, getting the gardens growing, seeing if some sort of artificial environment can be constructed so as to begin the sustainability cycle, with some occasional care packages from home. Maybe later we find a way of kickstarting the core and getting the necessary spheres generated to begin trying to make Mars habitable to Terrans. Which is going to require lots of failed experiments and data-gathering before we succeed.
If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. Their governments will likely endorse this idea because it has a bonus benefit for them - it's a winning, not-too-much-brains-needed solution to their overcrowding problem - load them all up on a colony ship and send 'em away! Later on, there will be enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier. [Edited to attempt to clarify - I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, or that the methods used to select those who go will be fair, or take volunteers, or anything of the nature. I'm saying that the people most likely to start building ships and throwing people out to colonize are the places that have a space program and are starting to feel the pressure of population density. That's also in no way saying that those people have less worth than others or are somehow more expendable. The point is that we shouldn't be sending people out on missions with low chances of success without damn compelling reasons, of which "shedding excess population" isn't one.)
The fact that there was a teacher on board also says something about what education has been doing, too - there's a lot less emphasis on the scientific disciplines and the space program. We seem to be content to have our science fictions stay relatively close to home and focus on the development of new technologies and their interactions, rather than the science fictions of how one might go about building sustainable colonies on exoplanets, or on colony ships sent out to find places where one could build new places. Or in developing ways of communicating and propelling objects close to or past the light-speed threshold, so as to make it much easier to supply missions and colonies out in the world.
We seem to have given up on space and space travel, content to sit in our own backyard and hope that nobody explodes the nuclear devices pointed at each other. This is wrong. We should be willing to send people out with no promise of return, but only of glory and the knowledge that their work is establishing pathways and routes for others to follow, trailblazing. But we should be sending them out for noble reasons, not crass ones. And how knows? Maybe they'll get lucky and we'll discover a way to set them up more permanently before the end of their lifetime.
We can only garner so much information about the Sol system through the use of unmanned missions, orbiters, rovers, probes, and other robotic devices. While NASA and its partners are phenomenal at building robots, as the recent reset of a probe computer that's still transmitting and the extended time on the Mars rover missions of Spirit and Opportunity proves, they're still very gun-shy about people missions that aren't up to the ISS or a quick jaunt to Luna and back. (IKAROS, of JAXA, deserves special note for having basically managed to survive Murphy's Revenge, Murphy's Revenge: Redux, and Son of Murphy's Revenge) Challenger and Columbia are probably good reasons why. A trip to Mars requires logistics and the very large likelihood that the trip will be one-way, unless we can find some way of efficiently getting people there and back in terms of fuel cost. And nobody wants to be accused of sending their scientists out to die. Despite that, that's pretty much the voyager way - sometimes you come back loaded with riches and stories of strange lands, sometimes you never come back.
If we want to give ourselves an out in case people get really stupid on Terra and render it uninhabitable, we've got to be willing to send some people off-world to start building, colonizing, and dying while they get everything situated. Mars is a three year trip at current speeds (last I knew), so we'd need to provide supplies for that plus a bit more to get things going - fabricating the buildings, getting the gardens growing, seeing if some sort of artificial environment can be constructed so as to begin the sustainability cycle, with some occasional care packages from home. Maybe later we find a way of kickstarting the core and getting the necessary spheres generated to begin trying to make Mars habitable to Terrans. Which is going to require lots of failed experiments and data-gathering before we succeed.
If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. Their governments will likely endorse this idea because it has a bonus benefit for them - it's a winning, not-too-much-brains-needed solution to their overcrowding problem - load them all up on a colony ship and send 'em away! Later on, there will be enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier. [Edited to attempt to clarify - I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, or that the methods used to select those who go will be fair, or take volunteers, or anything of the nature. I'm saying that the people most likely to start building ships and throwing people out to colonize are the places that have a space program and are starting to feel the pressure of population density. That's also in no way saying that those people have less worth than others or are somehow more expendable. The point is that we shouldn't be sending people out on missions with low chances of success without damn compelling reasons, of which "shedding excess population" isn't one.)
The fact that there was a teacher on board also says something about what education has been doing, too - there's a lot less emphasis on the scientific disciplines and the space program. We seem to be content to have our science fictions stay relatively close to home and focus on the development of new technologies and their interactions, rather than the science fictions of how one might go about building sustainable colonies on exoplanets, or on colony ships sent out to find places where one could build new places. Or in developing ways of communicating and propelling objects close to or past the light-speed threshold, so as to make it much easier to supply missions and colonies out in the world.
We seem to have given up on space and space travel, content to sit in our own backyard and hope that nobody explodes the nuclear devices pointed at each other. This is wrong. We should be willing to send people out with no promise of return, but only of glory and the knowledge that their work is establishing pathways and routes for others to follow, trailblazing. But we should be sending them out for noble reasons, not crass ones. And how knows? Maybe they'll get lucky and we'll discover a way to set them up more permanently before the end of their lifetime.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 05:52 am (UTC)I understand the passion that underlies your concept, but I think it's highly problematic, even with your caveat. (Disclosure: I read you directly on my reading list, but I saw the discussion at .)
We did the Moon without deliberately killing people. We can do Mars, too.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 06:10 am (UTC)Maybe deliberately was the wrong word to choose. I was shooting for a word that suggested if we're going to make the fateful decision to send people out on one-way trips, that we do so after having weighed the consequences, the alternatives, and come to the conclusion that such a decision really is the best option. After deliberation. But I forgot that most words in English have more than one meaning, and that speculating as to who might be doing it for the wrong reasons can make it sound like you endorse those kinds of things. Mea culpa. Lessons to be learned.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 07:13 am (UTC)Even Australia, founded in part as a penal colony, was not designed as a death sentence. No good science is likely to come from the involuntarily condemned.
The path you're suggesting is validation of Mengele, and the Tuskegee atrocity, and countless other instances where the privileged callously exploited the disempowered.
The reason the U.S. stopped having a successful space program has much, much more to do with the fact that it was strongly associated with JFK and the Democratic Party, and science over religion, than it has to do with any lack of will to explore. At this point, our national infrastructure is so degraded that a strong push toward space is going to face a huge resistance. (Note that the space race came at the end of the 50's, a period of relative prosperity in the U.S., and after the U.S. highway system was well in place/in progress. And that like the highway system, it was built with a sense of competition.)
We as a global culture need to change course away from the once-again widening gap between the ultra rich and the rest. In the "developed" world, freeing ourselves from the task of enriching the petrocrats and their partners, the consolidated media powers, would go a long way toward that.
I don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg when it comes to funding American schools with sufficient money in a socially just manner. For most of my adulthood (I am 40 now), the pattern has been back toward more and more de facto covert defunding of schools for disprivileged populations, as well as falling further and further away from international standards for education. I am a Californian by birth, and what was during my childhood one of the premier educational systems in the country (although alas, not quite as good as some others internationally) has fallen far in the rankings due to a toxic entitlement regime called "Prop. 13". I see a system that primarily functions to produce mindless consumers. My online friends and a few select offline ones seem to be the few exceptions to that.
I don't have a clear or easy answer. But I do think that the one you proposed isn't mitigated by its goal.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 03:23 pm (UTC)As for schools that don't educate, infrastructure that crumbled to the touch, and the growing gap between the superwealthy and the poor, you're right - all of those things are definitely contributing to the lack of space exploration. I would have thought our strong religious background would have encouraged us to explore the heavens, if only to prove that God made us unique in this universe, but we're not spending enough money at each step of the way to be able to do it, at the very least.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 11:12 pm (UTC)I don't understand why you think that the *Christianity* of the U.S.[1] would lead to more science. Strong religion in the West has usually gone hand-in-hand with Luddism. And if truly working from the heart of Christian values was important in U.S. politics, we would have less of a gap between the wealthy and the poor. Instead, we have the Prosperity Gospel and neo-Calvinism, neither of which are pro-science.
There is currently a strong association between atheism and science, as well. Especially in the minds of the very religious, and the very ardently atheist.
[1](I don't think you can speak for Jews and Muslims in this, much less for Buddhists or Hindus or other religions that don't view a relationship between deity and humanity in a "Religions of the Book" manner.)
In short, as much as I appreciate your linkspam, and share your dreams of space exploration, I think your fundamental premises are so flawed that you're not going to be able to build anything sound on them.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 03:44 am (UTC)(Certainly not speaking for anyone not professing to be Christian, and I was dreaming of what may be rather than what is.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 04:00 am (UTC)(Please do note that your using "religious" to mean "[Protestant] Christian" was another one of those steeped in privilege things.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 04:52 am (UTC)Yeah, you're stomping with privilege, but you can either decide to shut up forever, or you can keep trying, and learning from your mistakes. In *my* book (and I'm not speaking for anyone else), in *your* space, as long as you're willing to be called out on it, and to really look at what's being critiqued, and not getting defensive about it (which you haven't)...you're doing okay. This is like any other unfamiliar skill. You've grown up immersed in a worldview and culture and vocabulary that renders these missteps invisible. It's like learning a whole new musical scale, if that comparison makes sense to you.
I'm sorry this ended up with you getting rained on and upsetting people (because of a bad clash of your headspace and the expectations of the members of the group that you were invited to repost to).
I know from your linkspam choices and commentary that you've got a keen eye for the kind of issues that interest me. And I also know that when I've done link roundups for controversial issues, I've had a hard time coming up with a good way to introduce those links myself. I'm betting that's a skill you learned, that I haven't yet. Y'know?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 06:56 am (UTC)The comparison to a new scale does make sense - although in this case it seems more like playing in an unfamiliar key with lots of accidentals strewn about. (And, depending, a persnickety conductor/instructor that makes you start back at the beginning of the piece should you miss one.)
It is very frustrating to find out that for all the skill you think you have with trying, communication did not happen, and furthermore, is not going to happen because things have gone so magnificently pear-shaped based on the attempt you made. It's doubly frustrating because of a defect in my personality that provides only two options to most outcomes - acceptably flawless, or useless and worthless. I'm working on trying not to see things like that. Kind of like learning a new instrument.
I'll keep writing and posting, and failing to notice things, until hopefully there's a time where I can see it and avoid it. I may come to the conclusion that language is simply inadequate for communication in the process, though. I eagerly await the day when we can transmit all the metadata we need to truly communicate without the possibility of mistakes in delivery or in interpretation.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-02 02:16 am (UTC)Yeah, I recognize that sort of perfectionism. Perfect is the enemy of the good, here.
My badly written analogy was supposed to convey more of the "completely changing from a Western tuning to a non-Western musical system" such that all of the concepts you've grown up with, of "in key", sharp and flat, and harmony and dissonance, are all not the thing to use anymore. And there are other people who've grown up with this system that's new to you, or with both systems, but since you're not practiced in it yet...hooboy. (I should have realized that a music metaphor would work well for you!)
I wouldn't hold my breath for perfect-metadata day.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-02 02:34 am (UTC)So it's kind of like trying to get a Western audience to appreciate Beijing opera, you say? (Yeah, those metaphors work well, despite the fact that I have almost zero formal musical theory in my background.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-02 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-02 04:39 am (UTC)