Why don't people care about space anymore?

[Sparky]

[YMix]

What's the point of sending people to the Moon, for instance? Unless you're making the effort to establish a research base, it's quite useless, not to mention expensive.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

[Tinker]

[Torchwood]

Well, GPS and Google Earth are products of the space race, but admittedly they are not quite Star Trek. We have the "communicators" from the latter but not much else.

The above products, however, highlight that we have made phenomenally fast and unpredicted advances in electronics, but those satellites are still launched using technology which hasn't really moved on since 1944 vintage V2s. There's a deeper message here, which is that major technological advance is definitely not a question of here is a need/opportunity , let's find a way to fill it; it is more here is an unexpected discovery, what can we do with it. Electronics, together with antibiotics, genetics and nuclear power were big 20C ideas, but much of our day-to-day technology is basically 19C, which made fundamental discoveries at a much faster rate than the 20th.

Rockets are not even that , but medieval Chinese technology. Unless someone comes up with a more efficient way of getting into orbit, which would probably involve recovering re-entry kinetic energy, humans won't be able to afford to go there in any significant numbers; Virgin Galactic is just another Branson marketing stunt, as far as I know they won't even go into orbit.

For space settlement to take off, three things are needed:

1. Somewhere to go and a reason to do so. That's probably the easiest : not Moon/Mars/certainly not Venus, but free floating . That would finesse our main constraint on growth - that is, a finite Earth environment (global warming or not, Colonel, there's still resources and biodiversity). The Spenglerite pro-breeders and the greenies would both be happy. Artificial to live in vast rotating tin drums? well, so are where virtually all of us live today, the farmed landscapes almost as much as the cities. What do we do up there? Well what do we do down here, given that not many hewers of wood and ploughers of soil are needed these days.

2. The technology. Nowhere near, as discussed above.

3. A gradual, competitive, perfecting-through-feedback way of getting there. That's a major issue; you don't build a start up soemthing like a like the first cars or PCs cobbled together in the back of a garage. Certainly not by governments, with their built in inefficiency; the space race of the 60s resemble Admiral Zheng He's prestige expeditions for the Ming, which lead nowhere; what we need instead is an equivalent of the slow, piecemeal but ultimately successful European settlement of North America, without the red men and black men casualties.

NASA is hopeless. Why do they need hordes of people sitting in a room in Houston for each mission - surely a couple of computers could do the job?

[Colonel Sun]

[Torchwood]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

[I am ST]

[Tinker]

Well a cargo ship can carry a lot more than a train or a tractor trailer. I see the container ships all the time in the bay here, and you see them going up from New Orleans. The Mississippi is pretty high traffic, but considering that's a small portion of American shipping and a single ship carries a vast amount more than a single train... Of course, out west it's not uncommon to see a freight train that is more than a mile long.

[Torchwood]

[I am ST]

TW,

Thanks for the explanation.
Hah. I should have known. When in doubt, if it comes to an industry underperforming, always blame the unions. Odds are better that even that you'll be right.

[Ibrahim]

[Torchwood]