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.


Mark L. Fergerson