Mark Fergerson wrote:
L. Merk wrote:

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.


Kindly keep your personal problems to yourself.

Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need.


That's part of your problem, listening to psychologists. The drive to
explore is a need common to _all_ life, as you cite below.

Most
adult explorers throughout time -- including many famous ones like
Meriwether Lewis and Marco Polo -- were motivated substantially by
these urges. Like Holocaust Denial, to deny these truths is not
"revisionism" -- it is outright Denial.


Careful, you're skirting Godwin's Law here.

The following is a great article from great minds -- real explorers. It
affirms the truths that the bigoted Dietzes and Cloughs of the world so
hatefully deny.

"Living systems cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They
explore or expire. The inner experience of this drive is curiosity and
awe-the sense of wonder. Exploration, evolution, and
self-transcendence are only different perspectives on the same
process."


First two sentences, fine. Remainder, philosophical beard-mumbling.

snip

What you absolutely refuse to accept is that for the exploring
organism to continue to survive, there must be a return on the effort
invested in the exploration _greater than the investment_. Exploration
occurs to acquire resources. If an organism expends more resources than
it gets back in any situation including exploration, the organism dies.

At our current level of technology, any conceivable effort expended in
human-presence space exploration simply won't return more than the
investment because humans have to carry along with them bulky, complex,
_expensive_ life-support hardware. Meanwhile, we look through bigger and
better telescopes, send robotic avatars, etc. _because they don't need
life-support hardware_.

There's an old SF short story along these lines; _The Cold Equations_.
Read it.

If you don't like that, fine, neither do I, but what I like and don't
like doesn't affect reality. But whining about being denied a "sense of
wonder" changes nothing until the technology advances.

There's another factor, too - not cost compared with return, but cost
compared to collective income. If it cost $1000, almost every space
enthusiast could and probably would finance an expedition. If it cost
$1000000, a few wealthy idealists would do it. If it cost 100 million,
there might be a mad billionaire with more money than sense who does
it - but since it costs many billions, it would need a collective
effort. And collective efforts only happen if there is some hope of
a nice return. That return need not be money, but the public must be
convinced it's worth it.

There have been idealists, dreamers, enthusiasts of any kind in the
past who followed their curiosity to unknown places, although most
expeditions in the age of exploration were motivated by a desire for
gold that was quite unhealthy in its obsessiveness, and not at all
spiritual or even revitalizing.
In the age of exploration, idealism might have been enough. These
days, it's not. Things are, as yet, too expensive. Kepler was one
of the first who proposed building spaceships - that was in the late
16th century. 400+x years later we still can't live in space for
extended periods of time, or even travel about it with a reasonable
level of discomfort, which would be a prerequisite for the drive to
explore to take hold. I'm convinced it will happen, eventually, if
humanity survives - there's no other chance for long-term survival IMO.
But I'm not convinced it will happen in my lifetime.

Werner




Mark L. Fergerson