Why Colonize Space?

wrote:
It will certainly cost a lot mo
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/News/150...er-budget.aspx


Pat


Yes, there is that.

One would think that if anyone at NASA had any sense these days, the second
generation rover would be exactly that, a second generation, not a do-all,
end-all, whiz-bang rover to end all rovers. Mars isn't going anywhere.


One of the big problems with MSL is it's going to use a radioisotope
power supply rather than solar arrays - like the present rovers - due to
the fact that when it was first designed, they didn't know the Martian
dust devils would blow the dust off of solar arrays like the apparently
immortal MERs showed would happen.

Pat

In sci.physics Pat Flannery wrote:


wrote:
It will certainly cost a lot mo
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/News/150...er-budget.aspx


Pat


Yes, there is that.

One would think that if anyone at NASA had any sense these days, the second
generation rover would be exactly that, a second generation, not a do-all,
end-all, whiz-bang rover to end all rovers. Mars isn't going anywhere.


One of the big problems with MSL is it's going to use a radioisotope
power supply rather than solar arrays - like the present rovers - due to
the fact that when it was first designed, they didn't know the Martian
dust devils would blow the dust off of solar arrays like the apparently
immortal MERs showed would happen.

Pat

I'm not sure that is really a problem when you look at the trade offs.

An RTG works no matter what the weather or time of day and the waste
heat can be used to keep the thing from freezing during the night.

What concerns me is the apparent lack of any sort of standardization,
such as a common chassis, so each one isn't a clean sheet design.


--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.

On Jul 21, 7:47*am, Immortalista wrote:
Today I was reading some opinions of people who believe that there is
no reason for humans to leave earth. Are all arguments for moving into
space and onto other bodies in space really that weak and irrelevant?

There are lots of good reasons to colonise space:
- To master the creation of self-contained environments capable of
sustaining human life
- To create a "backup" of humanity in case something destroys the
earth or makes it unlivable
- Provide fresh inspiration for science-fiction writers
- More easily destroy asteroids that come to close to earth
- It's a better place to use telescopes
- Zero-G theme-parks
- Show the martians who's boss
- Make contact with the vulcans

Giga wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Giga wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Giga wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Giga wrote
Immortalista wrote

Today I was reading some opinions of people who believe that
there is no reason for humans to leave earth. Are all arguments
for moving into space and onto other bodies in space really
that weak and irrelevant?

To say on the one hand that there is no reason and on the other 'it is too expensive' is a kind of a
contradiction.

Nope, the original is just a loose form of saying that there
is CURRENTLY no reason for humans to colonise space.

I presume by emphasising 'currently' you mean there might be in the future,

Yes, I'm not silly enough to dismiss that possibility completely.

or perhaps there will be.

Nope.

I suppose if you are already living the good life then why bother,
but billions of people are not.

But its MUCH cheaper to improve their life significantly here on
earth than it is to give them a better life on mars or the moon etc.

This means that if it was a lot cheaper then it would be justified,

Not necessarily, most obviously if no one is interested in being colonists etc.

I think many people would be interested, me for one,

I bet you wouldnt when it came to the crunch and your nose was rubbed in the downsides.

Perhaps, its difficult to know in advance,

Not for me.

anyway there are many who would.

Nope, just a few loons at most.

You cannot call astronauts a 'few loons'

They arent COLONISING a damned thing.

these are some of the most highly trained,

Yes.

intelligent

Mindlessly silly.

and brave people around.

Or stupid.

Any of them would jump at the chance I'm sure.

I bet **** all of them would in fact.

I bet even Aldrin wouldnt be volunteering for a one way trip to Mars either.

When some kind of working settlement has been started by such souls

They have no souls, just a couple of soles.

other lesser ones will follow,

I bet **** all would actually be that stupid.

until maybe such as me may as well.

I doubt it when you realise the downsides.

but I doubt that I would be chosen.

Dunno, someone may want to get rid of you.

)

and that means there must be some reason for doing it, and the
persons putting forward such an argument obviously recognise that.

Utterly mangled all over again.

So you do not recognise any value human beings exploring space with manned craft?

No, compare with the much cheaper and more viable alternative of exploring space with unmanned craft.

That would be an extreme and difficult to justify position.

Wrong, as always. Completely trivial on cost alone in fact.

I read some where recently that the most powerful super computer in the world, which presumably fills a large
building,

Nope, they arent anything like that big.

Overview
IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE)
National Nuclear Security Administration.[6][7] It is a hybrid design
with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i[8] and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core
processors[9] in specially designed blade servers connected by
Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with
Fedora[10] as its operating systems and is managed with xCAT
distributed computing software. It also uses the Open MPI Message
Passing Interface implementation.[11]

Roadrunner occupies approximately 6,000 square feet (560 m2)[12] and became operational in 2008.

That sounds like a large building to me!

More fool you !!!

It is in fact quite a modest sized building.

has only the power of a cricket (insect).

Its much more powerful than any cricket in a hell of a lot of ways.

Obviously.

The delay time to Mars is what 18 minutes x 2, each time your dumb
stupid robot needs some guidance.

So you give it enough intelligence to work out the basics for itself
and just tell it general stuff like 'look for signs of water' etc.

We have done that already with those robots.

The oprerator has to rely on the fairly pathetic information
gathering systems of said robot to make decisions as well.

No reason why that cant be as good as is necessary.

And what about the feel of a place, the atmosphere

Maybe you underestimate the power of human senses.

Or maybe I realise that proper measurements are a lot more viable.

We can recreate that here is we are silly enough to want to bother
with that much cheaper than sending some human there and back.

(pure materialists will dismiss this as just imagination but I would disagree).

Your problem.

Or like that.

What ?

In summary you need people on the spot to properly explore it

No you dont.

and preferably a settlement so they have the time to do it throughly.

Pity about the much higher cost of doing it that way.

Yes.

It would take thousands of people many years of dedicated work to survey Mars if adequately.

Taint worth the cost. We havent even bothered
to do that with the bottom of the ocean here.

It would take 10,000s of robots centuries I would say,

That number is straight from your arse. We can tell from the smell.

A guess, and a pretty wild one. Actually I got it from the arse of a bull.

A likely story.

Even you should have noticed that we do in fact use robots to
explore the bottom of the ocean and dont bother to send humans.

Except the humans that are sent, yes.

We dont send humans there. Essentially because its
much more expensive than just sending a robot instead.

We dont even bother to send humans when exploring
enemy territory anymore, we just send a robot now.

Nope.

Yep. The vast bulk of that sort of exploring is done by robots from the air now.

In spades with the destruction of enemy properly.

You presumably realise the cruise missiles dont
actually have very small children pilots in them.

We dont even bother to use humans to take out enemy individuals very
much anymore, we use fancy robots we call missiles to do that now.

A few stupid rag head still do blow themselves to bits doing
stuff like that, but then they are just stupid rag heads after all.

so maybe people would be cheaper in the long run?

Not a chance.

So if it just a question of allocation of resources,

It isnt.

rather than fundamental value of the enterprise, then fine, it should recognised as a financial discussion, not
really a philosophical one.

No one ever said it was a philosophical one.

Giga" "Giga wrote:
wrote in message
...
In sci.physics "Giga" "Giga" just(removetheseandaddmatthe
wrote:

I read some where recently that the most powerful super computer in
the world, which presumably fills a large building, has only the
power of a cricket (insect). The delay time to Mars is what 18
minutes x 2, each time
your dumb stupid robot needs some guidance. The oprerator has to
rely on the
fairly pathetic information gathering systems of said robot to make
decisions as well. And what about the feel of a place, the
atmosphere (pure
materialists will dismiss this as just imagination but I would
disagree). In
summary you need people on the spot to properly explore it and
preferably a
settlement so they have the time to do it throughly. It would take
thousands
of people many years of dedicated work to survey Mars if
adequately. It would take 10,000s of robots centuries I would say,
so maybe people would be
cheaper in the long run?

The rather simple robots sent to Mars so far seem to have done much
better than OK in doing what they were supposed to do.

One can safely assume the next generation of robots sent will be much
improved.

For sure, but nothing compared to a human with billions of years of
evolution and 1000s of years of culture and tens of years of training
(and a billion super computers to call on plus whatever a robot could
carry).

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to keep those high value assets back
here on earth and use them do direct fancy machines that do the work.

The trassmissions delays will of course be the same, at least for now.

Yes, but its completely trivial to give the robots enough intelligence to be able to handle that fine.

We even do that with military systems which need to be able to
operate even when the transmissions have been compromised.

And there are hordes of complex systems that only work because
a computer and not the human is doing the most difficult work.

:: I suppose they are the same type of people who beleived early sailors
:: would fall of the edge of the world,

: David Johnston
: We never detected an edge of the world.

Oh much more than that. It's been well known that the world is roughly
spherical for more than 2500 years now. So, no, the people who say
there's not an adequate motive for going into space aren't analogous
to those who believed sailors would fall of the edge (if indeed there
were any such in, say, Colombus' time, which is doubtful), both because
those makeing those statements aren't making points from a similarly
out-of-date worldview (ie, for Colombus, the fall-off-the-edge worldview
would be 2000 years or so out of date), nor are they arguing physical
possibility, simply motive.

Similar problems with Giga's other attempts at analogy.


Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw

Giga" "Giga wrote:
"David Johnston" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:53:31 +0100, "Giga" "Giga"
just(removetheseandaddmatthe wrote:


"Michael Stemper" wrote in message
...
In article , "Giga"
"Giga"
just(removetheseandaddmatthe writes:
"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Giga" "Giga wrote

To say on the one hand that there is no reason and on the other
'it is
too expensive' is a kind of a contradiction.

Nope, the original is just a loose form of saying that there
is CURRENTLY no reason for humans to colonise space.

I presume by emphasising 'currently' you mean there might be in
the future,
or perhaps there will be. I suppose if you are already living the
good life
then why bother, but billions of people are not.

If we wanted to give billions of people the "good life", I'd like
to suggest that their lives could be improved immensely right here
on earth. Give them simple things like access to clean water,
adequate food supplies, sewage treatment, and antibiotics, and
you've improved their lives by orders of magnitude.

That to me would just the adequate life. Space could potentially
give us the
resources for everyone to have their own planet!

There are only eight within reach you know. Some of us would have to
settle for for Kuiper Belt Objects.

I am constantly amazed (yes AMAZED) at the confidence with which people beleive that humanity can never bridge
interstellar distances (let alone intergalactic).

Only a fool believes that. Its obviously possible to have
a self sufficient colony that moves in the direction you
want to go and it will eventually get there even if that
takes a millennium or two to make it there.

Tad unlikely that you will find too many who want to volunteer
for one tho, and even less likely that it will survive that long.

I suppose they are the same type of people who beleived early sailors would fall of the edge of the world,

Nope, those were just the pig ignorant who didnt realise
that we had proved that the earth is roughy round LONG
before we even considered circumnavigating it.

that travelling faster than a fast horse would be impossible (on early trains),

It was always obvious that that was possible. They'd had bullets and
cannon balls that had done that for a long time before any trains showed up.

that nothing could go faster than sound and stay intact,

They'd already had bullets do that fine.

that astronauts would sink into 50 foot of dust if they dared set foot on the moon

We'd already measured the surface consistency by firing stuff at it.

and now that there is no financial or radiological way for men to reach Mars.

No one has ever been stupid enough to claim that.

JUST that it makes a lot more financial sense to not bother to include any humans in that.

Plenty still maintain that the immense cost of putting a few humans
on the moon made absolutely no sense. It was just a PR stunt to
make up for the fact that america was second in space.

History has proven such people wrong every time

Nope.

The chinese did in fact have a decent fleet that explored quite a bit of africa
and then decided that it was too boring to bother with and scrapped the fleet.

and I'm sure that it is a wrong attitude now.

Your problem.

If you want to live someplace where survival is difficult, you
could go to someplace like Nunavut or the Sahel today. No
selection to pass. They have the additional advantage that you
don't need special equipment in order to breathe.

I wouldn't wan to go for the discomfort involved, as I'm sure you are aware, but to explore and discover.

Colonizations is what comes after explore and discover.

Giga" "Giga wrote:
"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Giga" "Giga wrote:
wrote in message
...
In sci.physics "Giga" "Giga" just(removetheseandaddmatthe
wrote:

wrote in message
...
In sci.physics "Giga" "Giga" just(removetheseandaddmatthe
wrote:

"Immortalista" wrote in message
...
Today I was reading some opinions of people who believe that
there is no reason for humans to leave earth. Are all arguments
for moving into space and onto other bodies in space really
that weak and irrelevant?

To say on the one hand that there is no reason and on the other
'it is too
expensive' is a kind of a contradiction. This means that if it
was a lot
cheaper then it would be justified, and that means there must be
some reason
for doing it, and the persons putting forward such an argument
obviously
recognise that. So if it just a question of allocation of
resources, rather
than fundamental value of the enterprise, then fine, it should
recognised
as
a financial discussion, not really a philosophical one.

Depends on who you are talking about doing it and what you are
talking about doing.

Governments do lots of things for no other reason than enough
people think it is a "good idea" both directly and indirectly
through grants.

i.e, the voters and tax payers who are going to pay for it?

Yeah, through the elected representatives funding things like NASA.

Yep. I noticed Obama was talking pretty positively, during
campaigning at least, about his support for the space programme. I'm
sure this is because most of his employers feel the same way.


Commercial enterprise doesn't do anything that doesn't have a
ROI.

Potential and hoped for ROI at least.

What's your point?

There is little in life that is a sure thing, but if your business
plan doesn't show a good ROI, the bean counters won't fund you.

I just meant that businiess is often involving quite high risk
especially if the potential is large.


The only government colonies have all been penal colonies.


America wasn't a penal colony.

I didn't say it was.

It was a British colony. So was India, Malaysia, Burma (now
Myanmar), Australia (partly a penal colony for some time), Hong
Kong, Singapore, America (as you say yourself not a penal colony),
Canada, New Zealand, South Africa etc etc etc.


The colonies in North America were not government colonies either.
They were funded by private enterprise.

They were funded by the crown initially,

Nope, just given a license by the crown.

I beleive the initial explorations were funded by the crown (Sir Walter Raleigh)

Thats not colonisation.

but again I really cannot be bothered to check.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...#The_New_World

"His voyages were funded primarily by himself and his friends,
never providing the steady stream of revenue necessary to start
and maintain a colony in America. (Subsequent colonization
attempts in the early 17th century were made under the
joint-stock Virginia Company which was able to pull together
the capital necessary to create successful colonies.)"

And I think if it was licensed by the crown then in a way it was still a
government supported enterprise in the way things worked at that time.

Doesnt mean that the govt FUNDED it.

There were British crown warships and trioops involved as well.

That came later.

but I suppose you could say that was not a government in the modern sense

No king paid for a damned thing.

Queen Elizabeth the first.

She didnt fund it either.

(I suggest you jump on this face saving lifeline).

No need, he's right.

It is estimated that 50,000 convicts were sent to North America by Britain to serve as slaves or endentured labor.

So what was America a penal colony or not, you seem to be contradicting yourself in this struggle to warp history.

Nope, just rubbing your nose in the fact that it was never
a penal colony, even tho some from jails were sent there.

He was arguing that it *was* a penal colony.

No he wasnt. He only did that with Australia and he got that wrong with his all claim too.

Australia had many government colonies, all penal colonies.

That is just plain wrong. Quite a few of them never were.

If you say so, howver I was not arguing that they were.

I didnt say you were, I was commenting on his claim.

While there were some "free settlements" in Australia, the population was predomanitly convicts and their
decendants until the gold rushes of the 1850's.

So this one example means all government colnies....I can't even be bothered.

Giga wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Giga wrote
Rod Speed wrote
John Stafford wrote
Quadibloc wrote
Giga just(removetheseandaddmatthe end) wrote

I'm sure there are other sheilding methods than just great big
lumps of lead. Surely one can generate something of a magnetic
field around the spaceship (loads of free electricity after all).

Not all forms of radiation consist of electrically charged particles.

John, but aren't the uncharged particles harmless to us?

Nope, most obviously with Xrays.

I'm probably confused regarding ionized and not.

Just very confused.

OP: How about surrounding the craft with water tanks (of ice).
Water will be necessary anyway.

Doesnt stop plenty of things.

Maybe this is why they are considderring the moon first as staging post.

Nope, they are doing that because its clearly possible
to put humans there and return them to earth.

To lauch the 'necessary' shielding from there, perhaps collected on the moon itself,

Soorree, no such animal there.

would save a lot of lauch weight from earth. You could probably just use a load of basalt?

Nope, that doesnt stop everything either.

It doesn't have too.

Never said it did.

Have you any idea how hard basalt is to 'collect' ?

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
Now do the math with something like Delta IV or Atlas V.....


Trick is getting it back down though; there would be few things more
ironic than some poor person being killed by blobs of molten gold as
they fall from the sky. ;-)

Pat