Final destinations in space

I just finished Robert Sawyer's _Mindscan_: cool book, which reinforces my
notions about uploaded humans as the most logical interstellar explorers.
But another feature of the book is a very upscale lunar colony for the
mortal husks that the uploaded copies leave behind. Interesting, and creepy
too.

Which occasioned me to think again: For all the back&forth about manned
exploration, I'm not hearing much (here or anywhere else) about permanent
human habitation off this planet. That is to say, you leave the earth, and
you don't come back, ever. Hopefully, you live for a while in space before
you qualify as recyclable organic material.

The key, I suppose, is the linkage between motivation and finance. There
was a gap of more than seventy years between the European discovery of the
New World and the first permanent Settlement on the North American continent
proper. Greed and religion featured prominently in future developments.

Is any such motivation in sight for off-world habitation by humans and other
species? We've burned up nearly four decades since Apollo 11, and still
there is no St. Augustine or Massachusetts Bay Colony anywhere off-planet.
Granted, it costs a bundle to reach escape velocity by whatever means you
choose, and destination development is a long way from cheap. What sort of
motivation is finally going to make the capital start to flow?

I'll say this, and you can take it as gospel: If someone had offered me,
when I was a single man in my twenties or thirties, a chance to be on a team
that settled the moon or an asteroid, I would have signed on immediately.
Even now, as I stand between retirement and dotage, if I had a shot at
talking my wife into settling permanently on the moon, I'd make every
persuasive argument possible. Eventually 1/6th gee would be a blessing to
our aging bones -- but I don't have tens of millions of dollars lying about
to pay our one-way fare.


Jim McCauley

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:35:22 -0700, "Jim McCauley" jematfriidotnet
wrote:

I just finished Robert Sawyer's _Mindscan_: cool book, which reinforces my
notions about uploaded humans as the most logical interstellar explorers.

Assuming it is ever possible to upload humans.

Which occasioned me to think again: For all the back&forth about manned
exploration, I'm not hearing much (here or anywhere else) about permanent
human habitation off this planet.

I agree. Maybe it's because the prospect of the Singularity makes
such speculations moot. OTOH, if it turns out that uploaded humans,
an artificial successor intelligence to humans, bionanotech or
whatever all turn out to be impractical, then permanent human
habitation is going to be the means of getting almost anything
meaningful done off-earth.

The key, I suppose, is the linkage between motivation and finance.

Motivation and finance are there already. The key is technology that
will make the finance adequate to satisfy the motivation.

There
was a gap of more than seventy years between the European discovery of the
New World and the first permanent Settlement on the North American continent
proper.

Over 500 years.

Is any such motivation in sight for off-world habitation by humans and other
species?

A number are possible, military advantage being perhaps the most
persuasive. It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
nations of the earth.

We've burned up nearly four decades since Apollo 11, and still
there is no St. Augustine or Massachusetts Bay Colony anywhere off-planet.

The precedent set by China after the Cheng Ho expeditions in the 15th
C certainly gives one pause. IMO posterity will likely look at our
society's priorities today (whether it's taking the $T that could have
begun the human expansion into the galaxy and using it instead to make
enemies in Iraq, to stop people from using fairly harmless drugs, to
reward rent seeking behavior, or to prolong the terminal sufferings of
the elderly and the vegetative states of the brain-dead) and shake its
head in disbelief.

Granted, it costs a bundle to reach escape velocity by whatever means you
choose, and destination development is a long way from cheap. What sort of
motivation is finally going to make the capital start to flow?

My guess: Chinese nationalism. Another possibility: the need to
quarantine dangerous bionanotech experiments.

-- Roy L

Jim McCauley; I'm not hearing much (here or anywhere else) about
permanent human habitation off this planet. That is to say, you
leave the earth, and you don't come back, ever. Hopefully, you live
for a while in space before you qualify as recyclable organic material.

That's because our extremely nearby moon is simply taboo/nondisclosure,
as in need-to-know. Such as for knowing that it can be affordably
terraformed, at least on behalf of accommodating a reasonably good
quality of life that's mostly sequestered underground, which in of
itself is hardly isolated being that you're so closely in orbit about
mother Earth. Of course, mentioning any associations as having to
involve the ME-L1/LL-1 or the Lunar Space Elevator has been seriously
topic taboo from the very get-go. However, I just thought you'd like
to know, of whomever establishes the one and only LSE-CM/ISS is also
encharge of all that's Antarctic and Lunar property rights, and I
believe that's not to mention their being encharge of just about
everything else under the sun.

I believe it's that freaking simple. Unfortunately, this Usenet of
such an intellectual brown-nosed cesspool from disinformation hell is
so overfloweth with the likes of such pagan brown-nosed arrogance and
bigoted souls, acting out every bit like our resident LLPOF warlord(GW
Bush), if not otherwise having become far too Hitler like if not merely
of those fools having become snookered and summarily not otherwise
dumbfounded beyond the point of no-return to realize otherwise.
Whereas the likes of the few and far between souls that still have at
least a common shred of remorse to spare, as these extremely few
individuals might actually manage to save the day, as well as our sorry
butts from ourselves, though I certainly could be wrong.
-
Brad Guth

wrote:

It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
nations of the earth.

It is simply a fact that this "high ground" analogy -- bogus when
Heinlein & Laning peddled it in Collier's in 1947, bogus during
post-Sputnik alarums, bogus for SDI/High Frontier, bogus today -- has
an endless, zombie-like vitality. Space is strategically valuable only
for military surveillance and communications -- exactly the niche
where civilian satellites have been economically viable, and for the
same reasons.

If you're talking about neo-Mahan "control of the space lanes," Mahan
was writing in a context of 400 years when access to overseas
resources, markets and colonies had been economically important to
great powers. All space activity for the foreseeable future doesn't
add up to a fraction of that for any contemporary power.

If you're talking about space hardware for use against ground targets,
you need much, *much* cheaper access to space before you can put up
either significant munitions or power supplies adequate for
directed-energy weapons. And the same features of orbit that make it
"high ground" make it a highly visible and vulnerable place to be,
with no reverse slope and a fresh shot at your hardware every 90
minutes.

If you're talking about destructive (rather than jamming) conflict
between space hardware... think "debris." As I've said before, I'm
sure our descendants -- locked away from space by a million new chunks
in orbit -- will admire the bloodless resolution of the
Tehran-Pyongyang-Caracas Space Crisis of 2017.

But, of course, if you're talking about Space Power as a way of
fulfilling zoomy dogfight fantasies... of getting a piece of a DoD
budget 25x larger than NASA's... or as a scary pretext for *selling*
space, along with the killer asteroid, the lunar PGM/He3 boom, and
escape from the imminent gray goo catastrophe... you go, boy.

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 15:48:36 GMT, wrote:

It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
nations of the earth.

Only if they had completely ceded control of orbital space; not very
likely in the face of any significant developments in the field of
offensive space capability.
--
Stephen Horgan

"intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence"

http://www.horgan.co.uk/

Jim McCauley (jematfriidotnet) wrote:
: I just finished Robert Sawyer's _Mindscan_: cool book, which reinforces my
: notions about uploaded humans as the most logical interstellar explorers.
: But another feature of the book is a very upscale lunar colony for the
: mortal husks that the uploaded copies leave behind. Interesting, and creepy
: too.

: Which occasioned me to think again: For all the back&forth about manned
: exploration, I'm not hearing much (here or anywhere else) about permanent
: human habitation off this planet. That is to say, you leave the earth, and
: you don't come back, ever. Hopefully, you live for a while in space before
: you qualify as recyclable organic material.

Battlestar Galactica.

: The key, I suppose, is the linkage between motivation and finance. There
: was a gap of more than seventy years between the European discovery of the
: New World and the first permanent Settlement on the North American continent
: proper. Greed and religion featured prominently in future developments.

Water and food were here, and oil is everywhere, well, dispersed across
the planet anyway.

: Is any such motivation in sight for off-world habitation by humans and other
: species? We've burned up nearly four decades since Apollo 11, and still
: there is no St. Augustine or Massachusetts Bay Colony anywhere off-planet.

And there won't be unless we can find natural resources like water on the
moon, for example.

: Granted, it costs a bundle to reach escape velocity by whatever means you
: choose, and destination development is a long way from cheap. What sort of
: motivation is finally going to make the capital start to flow?

Serious degradation of the earth like on Battlestar Galactica.

: I'll say this, and you can take it as gospel: If someone had offered me,
: when I was a single man in my twenties or thirties, a chance to be on a team
: that settled the moon or an asteroid, I would have signed on immediately.

Yes, we get folks to go to war, too.

: Even now, as I stand between retirement and dotage, if I had a shot at
: talking my wife into settling permanently on the moon, I'd make every
: persuasive argument possible. Eventually 1/6th gee would be a blessing to
: our aging bones -- but I don't have tens of millions of dollars lying about
: to pay our one-way fare.

I think you were born 100 years too early. Just my guess...

You make me want to add to the old saying, "bloom where you are planted".
Bloom when and where you are planted.

Eric

: Jim McCauley

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 15:48:36 GMT, wrote, in part:

A number are possible, military advantage being perhaps the most
persuasive. It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
nations of the earth.

Your second sentence is absolutely true. But your first sentence is not
something one can deduce from it.

Yes, if we have one trillion people in the Solar System, using materials
from the asteroid belt and Oort Cloud to live, they will be, together, a
force more powerful than Earth.

But as that will take generations, the process that leads to it will not
be begun from a perspective of "military advantage", as such. The long
term survival of democracy as a way of life, perhaps, but even that is
not quite the same thing.

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:51:47 GMT, Stephen Horgan
wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 15:48:36 GMT, wrote:

It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
nations of the earth.

Only if they had completely ceded control of orbital space; not very
likely in the face of any significant developments in the field of
offensive space capability.

A space-faring civilization would have no trouble eliminating any
plausible earth-orbital defenses. Just put a small comet into a
retrograde low earth orbit, and watch the fireworks.

-- Roy L

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
You make me want to add to the old saying, "bloom where you are planted".
Bloom when and where you are planted.

Fair enough. And I have, really.

It's just that I suspect that one of these days, the Lunar grass will be
greener...


Jim McCauley

Jim McCauley (jematfriidotnet) wrote:
: "Eric Chomko" wrote in message
: ...
: You make me want to add to the old saying, "bloom where you are planted".
: Bloom when and where you are planted.

: Fair enough. And I have, really.

: It's just that I suspect that one of these days, the Lunar grass will be
: greener...

Lunar grass? Sound like something that can be dried out and smoked.

Eric

: Jim McCauley