Too Few Astronauts Have Died

http://toph.me/2013/01/29/too-few-astronauts-have-died/

by hartleybrody • 13 years ago

15 9 13 years ago

Petrushka• 13 years ago

Looking at it through the economic lens that the author does, I think what he fails to recognize is the payoffs. War has immediate and substantial payoffs. Whether that is material gain, new energy or food sources, pillage, prestige, etc., or moral gain, in the destruction of a regime that commits heinous acts, war has benefits which can be easily seen in the short term, and so it is easier for the governors and governed of a state which chooses to undertake war to make that decision.

Space exploration is significantly more long-term. You're spending billions of dollars (not just lives) for what in the short-term does not seem like much benefit. Although landing on the moon and other such projects are incredible achievements, and although the development of the technologies that have allowed such achievements has dramatically impacted daily life, it's much harder to make clear to people the benefits of exploration in both a human or a economic cost.

If the benefit is defeating Nazi Germany, or Assad's Syria, or Osama Bin Laden, we're able to accept the costs. If the benefit is Tupperware, GPS, and some cool pictures of the lunar surface, then we will most likely not (not that I agree with that, it's just how most people see it).

mturmon• 13 years ago

The author has failed to say what we would have achieved by sending more people into risky space missions. For example, if our next goal is to get to Mars, we learn a lot about how to get the risks down by sending unmanned craft there.

The excited group of engineers when MSL touched down last year is testament to the fact that this landing is still very hard. (And the difficulty is not entirely due to not having a pilot in the craft.)

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

I think the author is articulating (perhaps not as clearly as they could) a simple concern that many feel. We had on this planet a one time gift of crazy amounts of resources in terms of things like fossil fuels, but also things like high percentage metal ores that could be extracted at low energy costs. At some point humanity must become a multi planetary species or be doomed to extinction. The best time to go this would be when we had the resources to do so and the complex societal structures necessary to undertake this highly complicated and resource intensive endeavor.

However we are running - increasingly rapidly - into significant barriers of resource depletion. This is compounded by the fact that resource depletion itself can interfere with the capacity if society to solve big challenges.

Therefore if we don't get focused on getting a sustainable space presence now we may find we never do, having squandered our one time bounty of resources and society having peaked on its ability to deliver on grand programs.

It is an argument I have a lot of sympathy with. There are utopians out there who mistake technology for energy and believe smarts will necessarily overcome the coming energy crunch and its allied problems of resource depletion and overpopulation, as well as the relevant but slightly tangential issue if global climate change. I am not convinced.

smsm422• 13 years ago

I think concerns of resource depletion are - and were proven numerous times in the past - very premature. We've had all kinds of Erlich-like extrapolations by which by now the society should have been disintegrated and we should be scavenging rotting ruins of our civilization looking for scraps of food. Instead, we spend our time liking pictures of cats on facebook, more resource-rich than ever, and that includes not only the golden billion but more remote locations too. Obviously, naive extrapolations don't work and haven't worked ever. Resource depletion is not a thing that is on immediate agenda. Of course, "sooner or later" our sun would explode or implode or whatever should happen to it and we'd better get off this planet by then. But given we're talking about timeframe much bigger than any experience of any civilization, we have no slightest idea what "we" would mean by then, if anything, so concerning about it seems useless now. While all these finiteness arguments are correct in principle, their practicality as for immediate agenda is not obvious, and rarely proven - usually it goes as "resources are limited, population is growing, so we'll be out of resources eventually, so we better start making laws right now that do whatever my political persuasion instructs me to do". It seems to me, the transition from theoretical limit to practical urgency needs to be proven first.

That doesn't mean simple efficiency of using resources - doing more with the same or less - shouldn't be on the agenda. On the contrary, this is the primary way of staying ahead of the game. But let's not panic and get into "our golden age has passed, we're all screwed now". We're not and we did not offend our Mother Nature and it has not doomed us to eternal Hell of resourcelessness. We just need to keep being smart and inventive and work hard at using available resources with maximal efficiency.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

I think this argument, with respect, falls into the fallacy of we've got by so far so we always will.

Look at the population crunch arguments - saved by the Green Revolution right? Well that was just pouring fossil fuels on fields... we've burned through a lot of those and topsoil since. The sustainable carrying capacity of the planet is nothing like 7 billion by most sensible studies I've seen.

95% of the world's food production is dependent on fossil fuel inputs. As we pass peak flow - and we are clearly at peak oil flow rates right now (I feel confident saying as someone who worked in the oil industry and studies this stuff) pressures on those inputs will rise.

We used to mine 70% ores we now mine 5% ores of many key metals. We can do this, it's just more energy intensive. But eventually we've used all of the easy to access natural state resources and we are in a very different world.

Smarts don't replace atoms. Nor do they replace joules.

Most of the alternatives that folks have in the backs of their minds as "don't worry we have X" are net energy return on energy investment negative.

Then don't get me started on NPK inputs - cast an eye over Potash or Phosphate stocks recently? Nope most people haven't. But there's a reason the Russians are using their oil wealth to corner the market there.

Just because we have overcome serious problems before doesn't mean we always must. After the Great Depression we had vast stores of oil and most of these resources were barely touched. We don't have that get-out-of-jail-free card again. Just more mouths to feed and a world where climate change is increasing conflict and dislocation of populations.

Economic growth which gives us confidence in buying our way out of problems (which is a very utopian view given that you cannee change the laws of Physics as a great Scotsman once said) is not a given either. For all the economic theories out there, none have been tested in sustained periods of declining resource availability. Indeed nothing correlates more closely with economic growth than energy resource access - it's almost one to one if you plot them together over the centuries. So it's highly likely there's a causal relationship there that will have negative consequences as we slide down the other side of the energy resource curve.

philwelch• 13 years ago

Humanity is doomed to extinction no matter how many planets we are on. It really doesn't matter. And we're limited to a tiny region of space anyway barring some very surprising developments in physics. Besides, extraterrestrial colonists would probably become an entirely different species.

zem• 13 years ago

    As a people and a nation we have paid a price to learn  
    That in any exploration, there are some who don't return.  
    We are neither fools nor cowards, to be shaken now to know  
    What our founders could have told us, twice a hundred years ago.

    -- Echo's Children, "Columbia"

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

If the point is to address the subject rationally and dispassionately, then this language is out of place:

> But how much harder will it be to spare the resources when our cities are sinking, crops dying, population stagnating? It is cheaper now than it will ever again be. Debt, healthcare, war — these problems won’t be solved, leaving us free to tackle space, any time soon. They’ll probably get worse. And the best thing we can do for the Earth is get off of it.

An objective look at the data shows that the global state of human society is better now than it has ever been in history. There is no evidence that human civilization is at its peak.

Faking a sense of urgency is not a sustainable way to make the case for space exploration.

Too Few Astronauts Have Died

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