Martha Adams wrote:
I was just looking at "The Future of Human Spaceflight" by David Mindell
et al at MIT, and I think it illustrates a fundamental error in how
people are thinking about space. What is space for? We can skip right
over a lot of abstract stuff by using an analogy out of Europe in the
early 1500's, "What is America for?" Our history answers that one
easily: it's for people. Likewise, space is for people, and Frederick
Jackson Turner's paper (thanks, Robert Zubrin) outlines how people and
cultures will develop there.


The technology for living in space is not here yet. We need

o To be able to resist to mutations and DNA damage much better than
now. Space is full of radiation that is lethal to our bodies as
they are now.

This can be solved by mdifying and enhancing our genetic repair
mechanism to be more efficient. As a byproduct of this research
we would have a cure for cancer, since many cancers are just
genetic repair mechanism problems.

o To develop a closed ecological system that can sustain itself
with solar energy in space. We need to develop photosynthesis
in vacuum, i.e. plants that can resist and thrive in vacuum.

This needs (again) some genetical know how. We need a skin that
is able to resist vacuum AND be transparent for our plants.

o We need machines able to repair themselves automatically and
able to work in space unattended for long periods of time. This
needs progress in robotics and automatic manufacturing. As a
byproduct of this research we would obtain machines that could
replace all our factories with automatic manufacturing. Humans
could be able to reach this by 2070 more or less, in any case
within this century.

But when I look at what's being said on this space topic, it's all
*Terra centered.* Space is seen as a place where you send out machines
to study hostile environments (why?), which people visit very briefly
and hustle "back home," a method for diverting some of a small
government cash stream won from the military industrial to possibly
innovative purposes. (If people had some idea what that 'innovative'
is.)

The technology for human space travel is just not there. Look at the
best humans can manage now: The ISS. It is a few hundred Km away, and
it is still plagued by a lot of problems, it has no closed system
it needs supplies from earth. etc.

The only way to explore now is with automatic machines since they do
not need ANY of the points above to be able to travel in space. The
Mars rovers are exploring Mars now, and this since 5 years! They do
not need fuel/life-support/radiation shielding/ they do not need
ANYTHING, just the solar power they receive each day.

I think that's where today's discussion has basically turned a
wrong corner and busily gets us nowhere. Besides provoking an amazing
amount of verbal rubbish. The root problem seems to me, to be, get
unhooked from that Terra center to things, and realize space is an
awfully big place and let's get our point of view unhooked from Terra
and focussed out there where it needs to be.


It is not enough to "realize " this. We have to develop the
technologies described above, and that is a very HARD problem.



--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32