The Urge to Explore

Werner Arend wrote:
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.

larger 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.

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.

Sure. In a shirtsleeve environment like Earth's surface (for
sufficient values of "shirtsleeve") you can slap together a coracle
of plant and animal parts and discover an entire continent if you're
lucky. The ROI exceeds mere exponentiality. OTOH getting to NEO
costs considerably more than just getting sixty-some miles up and back.

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.

Well, let's discuss what we mean by "revitalizing". The OP
appears to use it to mean a pushing back of perceived boundaries, i.
e. expanding the available "shirtsleeve" environment which still has
practical "leibensraum" connotations. But the kind of enterprise you
describe has historically meant revitalizing an entire economy by
exploiting new resource bases on the behalf of the "parent" economy
at the expense of the colony planted for the purpose of extracting
the new resources; but the colony is not expected to become a
thriving economy on its own hook, and if it shows signs of doing so,
the "parent" sends soldiers to keep the resources flowing despite
the fact that that strategy never works.

But that's a peculiarly human thing; other lifeforms spread their
progeny with no expectation of return beyond perpetuating their genes.

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.

Well, perhaps in the "eggs in one basket" sense.

But I'm not convinced it will happen in my lifetime.

Sadly, I concur.

Mark L. Fergerson

wrote:

Paul F. Dietz wrote:

Mark Fergerson wrote:


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 [...]

Also, it's not at all clear why something that's important for
unintelligent organisms is also something that should drive government
or other societal goals. It's a mixing of unrelated categories.

As I say elsewhere in this thread, governments do it to get
resources from somewhere else to supplement their internal supplies
at the expense of the remote "economy", if one exists. This is
predation, not colonization.

AFAIK all other lifeforms do it solely to perpetuate their genes.

And as I've pointed out before, just because there's an instinct or
drive for something, that doesn't mean government should promote
it.

Yep.

Should government actively promote sex, for example, in all its
various unusual permutations? People certainly have a strong
sex drive, stronger than a putative exploration drive. Wouldn't
that mean the budget for the National Sex Administration should be
correspondingly larger than that of NASA?

"Go forth and multiply"... oh, wait; the "go forth" part sorta
implies colonization.

Well, the national average expenditure per capita probably is. The
difference being, the government doesn't have to take money from
citizens to invest in sex. We do that without regulation. National
health provision... opinions vary. Outer space? Most of Joe Public
would rather put the money towards a burger. But sex - ah, now you're
talking.

(I am, of course, including spinoff industries such as fine
restaurants, motels, chocolate...)

Liberals would fight it; you picked such _elitist_ industries...

Mark L. Fergerson

By the time it's affordable to go, we won't need to. That's the
optimistic outlook. The pessimistic one is: by the time we need to go,
we won't be able to afford it.

Doug

Mark Fergerson wrote:
wrote:

Paul F. Dietz wrote:

Should government actively promote sex, for example, in all its
various unusual permutations? People certainly have a strong
sex drive, stronger than a putative exploration drive. Wouldn't
that mean the budget for the National Sex Administration should be
correspondingly larger than that of NASA?

"Go forth and multiply"... oh, wait; the "go forth" part sorta
implies colonization.

Well, the national average expenditure per capita probably is. The
difference being, the government doesn't have to take money from
citizens to invest in sex. We do that without regulation. National
health provision... opinions vary. Outer space? Most of Joe Public
would rather put the money towards a burger. But sex - ah, now you're
talking.

(I am, of course, including spinoff industries such as fine
restaurants, motels, chocolate...)

Liberals would fight it; you picked such _elitist_ industries...

Hmm. I think you'll find it's pretty democratic ;-)

David Johnston wrote:
On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 14:53:44 -0400, "Jeff Findley"
wrote:

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_.

This is wrong. What's holding us back isn't the "mass of the life support
hardware", but the high cost of launching *anything* into space. When costs
are in the $10,000 per lb to LEO range, *everything* you launch costs a lot
of money.

So...how is it wrong?

Well, we can send human crew and life-support into the deep ocean,
although I think extended missions are military secrets or Irwin Allen
movies or both...

We should have been launching lighter astronauts to save money; women,
midgets, amputees. People with slower metabolism. That's if we wanted
a workforce up there rather than human political symbols.

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We should have been launching lighter astronauts to save money; women,
midgets, amputees. People with slower metabolism. That's if we wanted
a workforce up there rather than human political symbols.

You're not basing this argument on actual experience in space. Legs are
useful things to have in zero gravity, as are arms. Women most certainly
are astronauts today, so we've already crossed that bridge. As for people
with slower metabolism being better, take a look at actual mass requirements
for life support systems (food, water, O2, etc) and you'll be surprised at
how little it really takes to keep someone alive.

Again, the mass of life support equipment and consumables isn't the real
problem. The high cost of getting anything into LEO is the real problem.

Jeff
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"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...
"Jeff Findley" wrote:

The fact is that on exploration missions like Apollo, people did far more
exploration and sample return than all of the unmanned missions combined.

Which handwaves away the inconvenient fact that there isn't a real,
organized, focused unmanned program to actually honestly compare
Apollo to. At least on the American side of the house, the unmanned
side existed almost solely as a support function of the manned
program, any science produced was incidental and distinctly secondary.

If unmanned vehicles really are cheaper and more capable, why don't we see
the US Navy building unmanned submarines to replace existing submarines?

An unmanned submarine could solve the "crush depth" problem by using
nitrogen gas to pressurize the vehicle to a pressure equal to the water
outside. I wonder what the endurance would be of an unmanned nuclear
submarine, since you wouldn't have to surface to obtain consumables for the
crew.

Jeff
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"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...
Jeff Findley wrote:
While this is true, the benefits of sending humans are far greater than
sending "robots". Look at the lunar missions to date. We got back more
and
better scientific samples from the manned missions than all of the
unmanned
missions combined.

However, the most important scientific data from the moon were
isotope results, and that could have been obtained with sample
return. Indeed, it could have been obtained with that samples
that *were* returned by the Soviets.

This is true, but it doesn't negate my point that it's hard to place an
actual value on the more massive and varied sample returns we got from
manned missions compared to the limited returns we got from the Soviet
landers. This is one of the biggest reasons that the manned versus unmanned
debate is a debate in the first place. You can't point to one as a clear
winner in terms of the cost/benefit ratio.

Jeff
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Jeff Findley wrote:

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...

"Jeff Findley" wrote:

The fact is that on exploration missions like Apollo, people did far more
exploration and sample return than all of the unmanned missions combined.

Which handwaves away the inconvenient fact that there isn't a real,
organized, focused unmanned program to actually honestly compare
Apollo to. At least on the American side of the house, the unmanned
side existed almost solely as a support function of the manned
program, any science produced was incidental and distinctly secondary.

If unmanned vehicles really are cheaper and more capable, why don't we see
the US Navy building unmanned submarines to replace existing submarines?

Because of the chain of responsibility involved in handling
nuclear materials like reactors and bombs. That's why military
pilots are always officers.

An unmanned submarine could solve the "crush depth" problem by using
nitrogen gas to pressurize the vehicle to a pressure equal to the water
outside. I wonder what the endurance would be of an unmanned nuclear
submarine, since you wouldn't have to surface to obtain consumables for the
crew.

Sure, but if the thing screws up, who's responsible; the officer
who ordered the thing deployed, the techs who maintained it, the
strategic think-tank that told the DOD it was a good idea, or all
the above? How about the civilian contractors who built it and wrote
its software (please, no M$oft jokes; it'd probably run on
fifty-year-old FORTRAN)? Is the President ultimately responsible? If
you were President, would _you_ sign off on an autonomous boomer? I
sure as hell wouldn't.

But this has nothing to do with humans in space (except for
unmanned military missions, which the DOD constantly sweats about).
For me, it still comes down to whether the return is worth the cost
and so far it basically isn't.

Mind you in theory I agree that humans are better at handling
unforeseen problems than machines are or ever will be. Forty years
ago I sorta daydreamed that today, I'd be retiring from a mining
career on Mars. Then the US manned space program basically stopped,
and I keep thinking I'm in some sort of awful alternate reality. I
feel vaguely cheated, but I now have a better grasp of harsh
realities than I did forty years ago.

Mark L. Fergerson

"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:ecire.7$yW.5@fed1read02...
Jeff Findley wrote:

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...

"Jeff Findley" wrote:

The fact is that on exploration missions like Apollo, people did far
more
exploration and sample return than all of the unmanned missions
combined.

Which handwaves away the inconvenient fact that there isn't a real,
organized, focused unmanned program to actually honestly compare
Apollo to. At least on the American side of the house, the unmanned
side existed almost solely as a support function of the manned
program, any science produced was incidental and distinctly secondary.

If unmanned vehicles really are cheaper and more capable, why don't we
see
the US Navy building unmanned submarines to replace existing submarines?

Because of the chain of responsibility involved in handling
nuclear materials like reactors and bombs. That's why military
pilots are always officers.

When we get to the point of building vehicles with big nuclear reactors
and/or nuclear rocket engines to really explore the outer planets, we'll
have the same issue with spacecraft.

For me, it still comes down to whether the return is worth the cost
and so far it basically isn't.

Mind you in theory I agree that humans are better at handling
unforeseen problems than machines are or ever will be. Forty years
ago I sorta daydreamed that today, I'd be retiring from a mining
career on Mars. Then the US manned space program basically stopped,
and I keep thinking I'm in some sort of awful alternate reality. I
feel vaguely cheated, but I now have a better grasp of harsh
realities than I did forty years ago.

Unfortunately the blank check funding for the US manned space program
stopped a few years before the first moon landing and has never returned.
Unfortunately, NASA has never seemed to realize that they must make due with
less. Griffin seems to be making the same mistake. His vision for the US
space program isn't going to be sustainable without large increases in
funding, which I doubt NASA will ever get.

The biggest problem facing NASA today isn't lack of "vision", it's the high
cost of putting a pound of anything into LEO. NASA specific, shuttle
derived, heavy lift launch vehicles aren't going to solve that problem
anymore than the shuttle itself.

Jeff
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