Ghostrider, I'm not going to engage in a quote war with you any more. You don't know what I'm saying
at all. I'm not suggesting that manned space programs should be killed off to "feed the hungry", nor am I suggesting that public opinion, or government opinion, or private opinion, should dicatate research. Logic should dictate research. And manned spaceflight research is extremely expensive and has no known use.
I know the world-view of the average space enthusiast out there is that space is the ultimate manifest destiny for humanity and that our future has been stolen from us by morons. Now, that's nice. And maybe that's the truth. But our Manifest! Destiny! In! Space! has also been stolen from us by
reality.
Manned spaceflight is currently extremely difficult and essentially useless to human civilisation at large. This isn't public opinion, it isn't my opinion, it isn't your opinion, this is the cold, hard, universal truth, and no amount of talking or Fancy Professor-ing on the internet is going to fix that.
If you want to propose an actual reason to go to space, an actual reason why it can be a venture that produces actual gains, then please say so. "It will happen because I think it will happen because of things I think are extremely ideologically important" is
not a reason. Nobody is going to spend billions of dollars on something that you
think is important for reasons you
think are relevant.
The only thing that is driving the interest in space colonisation in the minds of people like us, is a 50 year old idea from an era before there was any knowledge of the actual reality of spaceflight. Extraordinary effort requires extraordinary explanation. Currently we have little to no explanation.
You might think we do,
I might think we do, but we don't. It doesn't exist. The only solution is to come up with some reason so
extraordinary that it motivates people to take huge risk and huge investments. Currently there isn't one, and that is wrong.
What is the difference, if you don't mind my asking?
Fair point.
That's why I said that human expansion into space will be gradual and much slower (at least initially) than many people hope. You seem to imply that humanity must suddenly decide "OK, now we're going to colonize space, let's get on with it" or it won't happen.
From my point of view I'm seeing the 'gradual and much slower' (than many people hope) approach as "OK, now we're going to colonize space, let's get on with it", in the sense of "Ok, now we're just going to do this for no particular reason other than cause we like it".
In addition everyone who has posited a 'Manifest Destiny In SPACE' scenario here has depicted spaceflight as exploding into usefulness. A gradual expansion would most likely mean shifting into space over hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of years. In that case, even if we are progressing towards a 'Manifest Destiny In SPACE', we wouldn't see many advances within the next 100 years.
and later perhaps also small manufacturing modules producing expensive things that can only be made in zero-g environment.
That would be a very interesting area of development... but why does even that need human supervision? One could argue that such a facility would be entirely or almost entirely automated, which, while leading to a use of the space environment, would not necessarily lead to large amounts of people in space.
I guess greater automation is a sign of development... we are slowly making ourselves useless for anything other than having fun.
People are people, they will want to go there just to be there and see the place, even if it makes no sense to you.
It does and does not make sense to me. Firstly because there are millions of people who would want to set foot on the Moon, and secondly because there are millions of other people who aren't going to bother expending billions of dollars to get them there.
Once the danger and cost become reasonable, there will be plenty of bored millionaires who will want to go and billionaires with a vision who will invest in this enterprise.
Yeah, that is the other major problem. The blind optimist can state that the danger and cost will somehow magically disappear, but they won't. Space travel is very dangerous and very costly (and part of that cost is in the interest of lessening the chance of a failure).
If we assume a very simplistic curve, where launch systems are replaced every 30 years and cost/kg to LEO decreases by 25% with every new launch system, starting with $5000/kg we only get $1000/kg 150-180 years from the start, and $100/kg roughly 400 years from the start. Even that sounds far more plausible to me.
In addition, how many millionaires are going to go to space? There have been seven paid spaceflight participants so far, out of apparently around 10 million USD millionaires, which is a tiny fraction. Of course, more people have paid than have flown, but even then, if we assume that there have been a full hundred paid spaceflight participants who... er...
somehow didn't get to fly, that is still a fraction of the number of millionaires around. Considering that a circumlunar flight might cost in the region of $100 million and the cost for a flight to LEO is what, $10-20 million, then the number of people with that sort of money to spend, let alone those with the money who want to spend it on being a spaceflight participant, is far lower.
In addition, while there might be ~1200 billionaires in the world (if a third of which pitched in only a billion dollars each, they could likely start their own small space program), a lesser amount would actually be bothered with being benefactors to some sort of space program, and considering that only high paying passengers could possibly sustain such a program (since there is no profit to be made, the billionaires will eventually get tired of it and quit, or go broke) and that such passengers are relatively rare, flight-rates, and thus presence in space, would likely be low.
But sub-orbital flights, such as those being proposed from Virgin Galactic, if reasonably priced (the supposed price is $200 000), could prove far more popular, and within the range of many people willing to spend that money. That could end up being a viable operation, but it is still only spaceflight on the technicality of going above 100km, as it does not even reach orbit, and the vehicle needed to reach orbit does not have to be as capable as an orbital vehicle.
Another issue is that space tourism- orbital, cislunar space tourism, will be available only to the super-rich, a small percentage of the population, which might lead not to indifference, but downright disdain for spaceflight, as an "exploit of the rich" in the view of most people.
It makes no sense today, when the cost of transporting materials from the asteroid belt back to Earth is astronomical. In the future, things may change for a number of reasons, one of which I mentioned.
And it will always make sense, because of cold, hard, physics (or I suppose, hot gaseous physics, as this is what is occuring within a rocket engine). The reason we mine concentrated ores, is because they are concentrated. If concentrated resource deposits run out, it will always be more advantageous to utilise lower-concentration resources in places that are easier to reach, than in places that are more difficult to reach.
Granted,
if, for whatever reason that is-as-yet-unknown, you have people living in space, then everything is turned around, because getting resources from Earth is a pain.
Not nearly as much as you imply. As I said - as costs go down, overall interest will grow. We haven't seen large investment yet because the era of governmental programmes conditioned us to believe that you need hundreds of billions of dollars/euros/roubles to do anything in space. Once this mental block goes away, we'll see significant rise in private investment that will trigger the sort of a snowball effect I am talking about here.
There's a difference between "the way governments do stuff", and "the way stuff has to be done for it to work". You can make the unecessary spending go away, but you can't just magic away the necessary spending. There are limits, there are barriers.
One difference between a government program and a private program is that the government program can spend a huge amount of money while politics are in favour of it, while the private program has to make a profit to be sustainable. In this case, this can even make a government program spending 300 billion dollars, better than a private program spending 30 billion.
+- 90% of human economy is based on producing the 'warm fuzzy feeling'. If it wasn't, we'd all be happy farmers working our land, utterly disinterested in material wealth, entertainment and other non-necessities.
Not wanting to be destitute farm workers has nothing to do with a "warm fuzzy feeling", it has everything to do with not heavily exerting oneself physically in the elements for their entire lives with little to show for it.
And material wealth, and entertainment, are things you can sell to the masses. Spaceflight isn't. You can sell that to the rich, maybe, but that might only make things worse, when most people start to truely deride spaceflight (due to their inability to attain it and/or general annoyance with economic disparity).
(BTW, I went to the BBC news homepage this morning. The most read articles today are:
Most popular videos:
Interesting, I thought nobody was interested in space, especially in something so mundane as the ATV filled with rubbish plunging into Earth's atmosphere )
Oh come on, if I read "Space truck dives to destruction", I'd click on it. Disregarding ATVs and rubbish and reentries, "Space Truck Dives To Destruction" just sounds so cool. You can almost hear some kind of sports presenter-esque voice booming it out loud.
I think more research is necessary- i.e. various news services from various nations, on various dates.
Already behind "A look inside Nasa's space shuttle" is "the science of hangovers". I wonder how many views it took the former to beat the latter.
I won't hold my breath. Kurzweil is 63 now. I don't know if it was A.C. Clarke or someone else who said it, but scientists (and sci-fi writers), when asked to predict when some major breakthrough in their field is likely to happen, usually give a date that falls within their projected lifetime. So, I am sceptical about any prediction Kurzweil makes that is conveniently set to happen just as he approaches the end of his natural life
And isn't that what we're basically doing, suggesting all sorts of advancements in spaceflight that fall roughly within our own lifetimes?
For example your suggestion of the solar system of 2060 is pretty radical, and a person who is 30 today could easily see the year 2060.
I don't think humans will crack immortality in this century. It would be nice though
Immortality terrifies me. On the one hand, I (like most humans, I am sure) would like to have an indefinite life expectancy, but I realise on the other hand that the introduction of immortality would be extremely disruptive (and therefore very dangerous) to human civilisation.
The key thing to keep in mind is that genetics and biochemistry are advancing at an accelerating, Kurzweil likes to say exponential, pace, the same as are electronics and information technology.
Consider the pace at which IT is advancing taking into account Moore's law and the like. Now imagine how advanced IT will be 100 years from now taking this into account. Now imagine that same degree of advancement in genetics and biochemistry. Then I think you'll can see looking at the question from that viewpoint, that you can well imagine the problem of aging could be solved well before then.
Moore's law doesn't take into account physical, technological, or useful limits. Many technologies advanced rapidly when they first arrived, but then stopped at a certain point (see airliners, which have apparently hit a sweet-spot, and cars, which are arguably far more efficient today, but are similar in concept and capability to those that predated them 30-40 years ago).
Why I find Kurzweil silly is not necessarily his technological predictions, but the general absurdity of his ideas. Generally what tends to happen in predictions of the future is that absurd things never happen, and unforseen advances tend to alter the outcome of the mundane things (the house of 2011 isn't waterproof, but the communications stations proposed by Clarke exist, though they are unmanned and compact due to the existence of the integrated circuit).
Kurzweil suggests we use genetic engineering to solve the problem of obesity. But apparently we can't live healthy, and use genetic studies to do other things, which are far more important- like treat, cure, and prevent bad diseases such as Alzheimers or cancer.
His predictions just end out too much like some sort of religious prophecy to fulfill his own ideal world-view.
