What is a spacefaring civilization?

The recent post here commemorating three years of manned presence
aboard ISS got me to thinking.

First, good. Hooray for ISS and its crews. A continuous presence in
space is the obvious first property of a spacefaring civilization. If
our presence isn't continuous, then we're just visitors.

Second, good start. Between Salyut 7, Mir, Soyuz, and Shuttle,
humanity had a continuous presence in space for almost ten years.
From 5 Sep 1989 to to 28 Aug 1999, we always had someone in orbit. I
will be glad when we hit ten years even. Twenty will be better.

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

Thanks,

-R

writes:

[...]

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

I think it should have enough people living off the home world to be
able to survive the loss of the home world. In time (looooong time),
the same goes for loss of the home star.

Chris Jones writes:

writes:

[...]

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

I think it should have enough people living off the home world to be
able to survive the loss of the home world. In time (looooong time),
the same goes for loss of the home star.

(Spoke too soon, I think, so I'm following up to myself.)

Actually, that is what I think humanity's long-term goals should be, and
obviously that requires that we become a space-faring civilization, but
I think the definition of that term is less encompassing. Drawing
analogies from seafaring, a spacefaring civilization should have a
quantity of ships travelling to faraway places and back, the capability
for these ships to operate independently over long distances, and there
should be some benefit that accrues to the civilization as a result of
this activity.

Chris Jones wrote:
writes:

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

I think it should have enough people living off the home world to be
able to survive the loss of the home world. In time (looooong time),
the same goes for loss of the home star.

Surviving the loss of the home star requires a starfaring
civilization, a huge step beyond spacefaring.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
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Text-Only Version:
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Enhanced HTML Version:
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Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

In article ,
wrote:

Second, good start. Between Salyut 7, Mir, Soyuz, and Shuttle,
humanity had a continuous presence in space for almost ten years.
From 5 Sep 1989 to to 28 Aug 1999, we always had someone in orbit. I
will be glad when we hit ten years even. Twenty will be better.

Yes, it was a pity Mir couldn't be stretched an extra year. Not that it
would really have achieved much per se beyond spending a little more
money, but it would have had a nice symbolic value.

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

I remember wondering about this last time someone asked the question -
what are the properties of a *seafaring* civilisation? I'm not sure if
the analogy quite holds up, but it might be worth thinking about. And
bearing in mind that the Phoenecians and Polynesians were seafaring g

--
-Andrew Gray

On 22 Nov 2003 17:59:20 -0800, wrote:

The recent post here commemorating three years of manned presence
aboard ISS got me to thinking.

First, good. Hooray for ISS and its crews. A continuous presence in
space is the obvious first property of a spacefaring civilization. If
our presence isn't continuous, then we're just visitors.

Second, good start. Between Salyut 7, Mir, Soyuz, and Shuttle,
humanity had a continuous presence in space for almost ten years.
From 5 Sep 1989 to to 28 Aug 1999, we always had someone in orbit. I
will be glad when we hit ten years even. Twenty will be better.

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

Thanks,

-R

The major component, the very definition of a "spacefaring" society,
is one that has managed to make space pay for itself in terms of
return on investment of time, effort, and resources, one that has
found a way to turn a planetary profit by exploiting the environment
of space, so that profit can then be poured back into an expanded
presence in space, feeding more profit both to the homeworld and to
permanent habitations in space.

Right now whether that is possible to achieve is unclear. The
expenses are huge, the distances vast, the travel time extreme, and
the natural resources identical to those found on Earth and more
easily accessed right here at home.

Other than the collector's value, there's nothing on the Moon or Mars
or the asteroids that can be sold on Earth for a profit. Figuring out
how to make a profit from an airless, waterless desert where tens or
hundreds of millions of miles and huge gravity wells seperate you from
fairly commonplace materials compares to finding a way to sell
antarctic ice to Alaskan ekismos.



..

John Ordover wrote


The major component, the very definition of a "spacefaring" society,
is one that has managed to make space pay for itself in terms of
return on investment of time, effort, and resources, one that has
found a way to turn a planetary profit by exploiting the environment
of space, so that profit can then be poured back into an expanded
presence in space, feeding more profit both to the homeworld and to
permanent habitations in space.

Should one not throw into the mix preventing/mitigating loss as well
as gaining profit? A lot of things -- the military and medical
establishments for example -- are funded for essentially negative
reasons -- to prevent bad things from happening, not primarily because
they make a profit. Though lots of people do wind up making tidy profits
off them, of course.

In the case of space, aside from the NEO-deflection stuff, alleviating
the eggs-in-one-basket problem seems to be a possible negative motivator.
Of course, people being people, I doubt that will be taken seriously
unless and until we suffer some hideously disastrous close call.

Andrew Gray writes:

[...]

I remember wondering about this last time someone asked the question -
what are the properties of a *seafaring* civilisation? I'm not sure if
the analogy quite holds up, but it might be worth thinking about. And
bearing in mind that the Phoenecians and Polynesians were seafaring g

One of my previous posts mentioned this analogy, and I think it's a
strong one. Other seafaring civilizations I thought of were the
Japanese and the Basques, who travel long distances to fish, but have
not established colonies, which is why I exclude colonization as a
requirement. (I've made it clear I think colonization is a good thing,
but simple spacefaring doesn't require it. What do we call a colonizing
{space,sea}faring civilization (if not simply that)?)

In email, it was pointed out to me that my definition didn't require
that the ships have crews, which was interesting (and in fact wasn't
something I considered when I wrote the words).

I think Earth's humans can be considered the very earliest sort of
spacefaring civilization, and our hold on that claim is tenuous at
present.

In article , Chris Jones wrote:

One of my previous posts mentioned this analogy, and I think it's a
strong one. Other seafaring civilizations I thought of were the
Japanese and the Basques, who travel long distances to fish, but have
not established colonies, which is why I exclude colonization as a
requirement. (I've made it clear I think colonization is a good thing,
but simple spacefaring doesn't require it. What do we call a colonizing
{space,sea}faring civilization (if not simply that)?)

Indeed, the Basques and Phonecians arguably travelled distances which
would have been achievements centuries later (to the Grand Banks or to
Cornwall)... and didn't do anything.

The Basques or Japanese went to fish, the Phoenecians to trade, the
Polynesians I assume fished (although I don't know much about them).

I think we may be able to say that the motivator was to gather
resources, whether by trade or, er, resource-gathering, in these cases.

But I'm not sure I'd class these as activities which made them
seafaring; they're things they did *with* seafaring. Early military
uses, too, of course - naval supply of troops, or "amphibious attacks"
(you'd be surprised - Jaffa was once taken by a covert attack by
Egyptian crews...), probably even some reconnaisance - they're all
fairly logical things to do once you have a ship.

Trade is uneconomical - there's not many people to go and sell pottery
to, and no-one much suggests suborbital rocketflight is likely to become
an economically useful part of our transport net. Resource-gathering is
a long way off, in any real sense, be it energy or lunar regolith.
Tourism exists at a proof-of-concept level, with two explicitly tourist
flights (and maybe a dozen more ever flown or sketched in - if you
consider, for example, Jake Garn's flight to be touristic). The only
real uses for space just now are as communications infrastructure
(seafaring - ocean cables, ~1850), earth observation (not really an
analogy) or scientific work (again, only something that began to exist
per se in the late-18th & early 19th centuries).

Yet, as comes up below, we're in a spacefaring civilisation of some
form. And the fact that the analogy has to have all the timeframes
reversed doesn't help... ;-)

What makes a society foofaring seems to be that it travels in foo,
and that there's not much more to it than that, or so it seems to me.
YMMV, and all that.

In email, it was pointed out to me that my definition didn't require
that the ships have crews, which was interesting (and in fact wasn't
something I considered when I wrote the words).

The era of the (effectively) uncrewed ship is getting nearer, and is
probably possible if someone had the determination to implement it, but
really wasn't an option until this time-period.

I think Earth's humans can be considered the very earliest sort of
spacefaring civilization, and our hold on that claim is tenuous at
present.

Indeed. I'm not sure we can reliably claim to have managed the analogy
to anything more than "beginner level" either way...

--
-Andrew Gray

wrote:

My question - and I think this is the best place to ask this question,
so I hope it generates a discussion which doesn't degenerate too
quickly into mindless flames and trolls - is: what are the other
properties of a spacefaring civilization?

Commercial use of space (people making a living in space-based
businesses). We're already there by that measure. Resource exploitation
(bringing stuff back to earth) - that's a little further off.

.......Andrew
--
--
Andrew Case |
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