GWiz Posted February 6, 2011 Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 (edited) Ahem....any star that is one million light years away would be in another galaxy. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. Let's start with our own neighbourhood first. Naaa, you start, I'm too busy... BUT, be sure to let me know what the new neighbours are like when you meet them... It always amazes and amuses me when theories are presented as facts, but I guess that's just HUMAN nature... <edit> Ooops, you got me, it should have been - 1. :angry: Edited February 6, 2011 by GWiz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GWiz Posted February 6, 2011 Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 Indeed, there are millions of perfectly good stars within a thousand light year radius of us, and likely millions of planets too. What's more likely, the planets of this thread or Global Warming? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wild Bill Posted February 6, 2011 Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 (edited) Indeed, there are millions of perfectly good stars within a thousand light year radius of us, and likely millions of planets too. Bonam, wouldn't an ion rocket get us to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? And what about a light sail? Or a Bussard ram jet? Are they still scifi or is the technology there yet? Edited February 6, 2011 by Wild Bill Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonam Posted February 6, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 (edited) Bonam, wouldn't an ion rocket get us to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? Existing ion rockets and other electric propulsion systems are limited by their power source. Electric rockets use an electric (or magnetic) field to accelerate ionized fuel. That field takes a lot of energy to generate and maintain. To date, all electrically propelled spacecraft have used solar power as an energy source. Since the amount of power that can be provided is small, only small accelerations are possible. There are some designs, such as Project Prometheus to use nuclear fission reactors to power electric rockets, and these would allow higher velocities, but still far far short of a "significant fraction" of c. That's because the mass of the reactor and associated systems (most especially the radiators) increases as you want it to produce more power. Some estimates of the potential power density of future fusion reactors suggest that a fusion-powered electrically propelled spacecraft could get to high enough velocities for reasonable interstellar travel to nearby star systems, however, most of what I've seen suggests that a fusion-thermal system would work better. That is, instead of using the fusion reactor to produce electricity which powers an ion rocket, you rather directly exhaust the fusion plasma through a nozzle. This is what is called a "fusion rocket" and given that nuclear pulse propulsion is not politically viable, it will likely be the first technology that allows us to really send a probe to another star system. And what about a light sail? Or a Bussard ram jet? Are they still scifi or is the technology there yet? Light sails are certainly a reality. For example, the Japanese recently launched a light sail spacecraft, IKAROS. The disadvantage of a light sail is that the propulsive force depends on solar wind and radiation from a star... the farther away from a star you get, the less that force is, with a 1/r2 dependence. Thus, it would provide minimal acceleration in the outer solar system and basically none at all past the heliospheric bow shock. Theoretically, you could push a light sail spacecraft across interstellar space using an enormously powerful laser beam pointed at it, but laser technology of that scale is far beyond our current capability. As for Bussard ram jets, they for now remain in the realm of science fiction, and there is considerable doubt whether such a system is physically viable at all. Edited February 6, 2011 by Bonam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Bandelot Posted February 6, 2011 Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 Yeah, things will really start picking up, once we invent the matter- antimatter "warp drive"... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonam Posted February 6, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 6, 2011 Yeah, things will really start picking up, once we invent the matter- antimatter "warp drive"... While a "warp drive" or other faster than light travel system of some sort would certainly open up whole new realms of possibilities, it is not necessary for the things we are talking about here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyly Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Bonam, wouldn't an ion rocket get us to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? And what about a light sail? Or a Bussard ram jet? Are they still scifi or is the technology there yet? even so any trip is a one way journey for the crew...how many volunteers are going to sign up for a journey where they may not even live long enough to see their destination, even if there is a hospitable planet at the other end and have no hope of returning...even if we could travel at the speed of light and the nearest star is 4.2 light years away the ship would need to start accelerating very gradually for a loooooooooooong time to avoid killing the crew and then slowing it's speed waaaaaaaaaaaay out from it's destination to avoid having the crew splattered on the inside of the ship...unlike star trek there is no instantaneous light travel from point A to B and then stopping on dime at arrival.... then there's the issue of hitting even the tiniest meteorite at light speed ...ouch nope I'm afraid we're stuck on this rock called earth and we best take care of the only home we'll ever have... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GWiz Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 (edited) even so any trip is a one way journey for the crew...how many volunteers are going to sign up for a journey where they may not even live long enough to see their destination, even if there is a hospitable planet at the other end and have no hope of returning... even if we could travel at the speed of light and the nearest star is 4.2 light years away the ship would need to start accelerating very gradually for a loooooooooooong time to avoid killing the crew and then slowing it's speed waaaaaaaaaaaay out from it's destination to avoid having the crew splattered on the inside of the ship...unlike star trek there is no instantaneous light travel from point A to B and then stopping on dime at arrival.... then there's the issue of hitting even the tiniest meteorite at light speed ...ouch nope I'm afraid we're stuck on this rock called earth and we best take care of the only home we'll ever have... Ahhh finally some rationallity returns to this thread... <by edit> I think you're wrong about the acceleration and decelleration in space though... Without G & C to influence the motion you are essentially a part of the craft you are in... ie - Space Shuttles & other capsules in space now where you feel no "forces" while in space... Edited February 7, 2011 by GWiz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonam Posted February 7, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Ahhh finally some rationallity returns to this thread... You call that rationality? That's just a "sit at home and wait to die" mentality. The only rational course of action is to keep progressing as quickly as we can. So long as we are confined to one solar system, our species is vulnerable to any of a long list of disasters. To survive, we must expand outward. As for accelerating to high speeds, if you had a propulsion system that could continuously provide 1g (Earth gravity: 9.81 m/s2) acceleration, it only takes ~ 353 days to reach (just under) light speed. That's not at all an unreasonably long time. As for the crew, they benefit from time dilation, if they travel at close to the speed of light, the time span of the journey will seem much shorter to them than it would to external observers. As for meteorites... deflecting debris with some system would be a trivial problem compared to getting your spacecraft to a high fraction of light speed in the first place. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyly Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Ahhh finally some rationallity returns to this thread... ya but it makes me sad too I still like si-fi I like speculating speculating on what may be out there and what it would be like... but realistically we're not going anywhere and no one or thing is comming here... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GWiz Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 ya but it makes me sad too I still like si-fi I like speculating speculating on what may be out there and what it would be like... but realistically we're not going anywhere and no one or thing is comming here... Well, I too like Sci-Fi, but even in the realm of reality, while "going anywhere" (without some significant "outside" influence) may be true, I'm not so sure about the "no one coming to us"... For reasons of my own I'm inclined to say "they" have already come... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Squid Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 (edited) ....millions or billions of lightyears ago and NOT what is there now Lightyears are a measurement of distance, not time. Kepler-11 is located about 2,000 light-years from Earth.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41429052/ns/technology_and_science-space/ The light from those planets and star reaches Earth in 2,000 years. Pretty close, relatively speaking... Not so long ago in a galaxy not so far away... Edited February 7, 2011 by The_Squid Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GWiz Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Lightyears are a measurement of distance, not time. The light from those planets and star reaches Earth in 2,000 years. Pretty close, relatively speaking... Not so long ago in a galaxy not so far away... Your waaaay behind on this thread, you need to spend time reading through threads before commenting... ie - Light Years are BOTH distance and time... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dre Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Its fun to talk about this, but were probably 1000 years away from being able to colonize a planet in another star system. A permanent base on the moon, and mars that did some initial habitation experiments could happen in the next hundred years though... the question is, who can afford it? The west is flat broke... I guess we gotta hope that emerging economies like China and India get the "space itch" in a big way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyly Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Its fun to talk about this, but were probably 1000 years away from being able to colonize a planet in another star system. A permanent base on the moon, and mars that did some initial habitation experiments could happen in the next hundred years though... the question is, who can afford it? The west is flat broke... I guess we gotta hope that emerging economies like China and India get the "space itch" in a big way. this sounds like the stories I was told when I was kid, we'd all have jet packs flying to work and school, or our homes and cars would be powered by miniature nuclear reactors...reality has physical and practical limits no technology can overcome...and how slim are the odds that humanity will even be here in 100yrs? the planet can not sustain the resource depletion it is being subjected to... humanity has really just entered the age of technology and it's already dug it's self a big hole... you have way too much faith in technology... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Squid Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 ie - Light Years are BOTH distance and time... No it is not. A light year is a unit of distance. No where will you see a light year defined as a unit of time, other than by people on the interwebs who use the term incorrectly. the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1 year; 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometerswordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn An alternative spelling of light year en.wiktionary.org/wiki/light-year A unit of length (abbreviation ly) equal to the distance light travels in one year; used to measure extremely large distances; A very long way; A very long time en.wiktionary.org/wiki/light_year The distance for which light, with its speed of 299,792 km/sec (186,282 miles per second) needs one year travel time. 1 ly = 9.46 trillion (10^12) km or 5.88 trillion miles (more acurately: exactly www.maa.clell.de/Messier/E/Xtra/Terms/terms.html The distance light travels in a year. It is equal to 0.3066 parsecs. It is 9461 billion km or 63 240 astronomical units. www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html Not a unit of time! The distance travelled by light in one year, equal to 9.4607E12 km (5.88 * 10E12 miles or 63,240 AU). www.dirtyskies.com/index.php/glossary/ The distance between stars and galaxies in the universe is so vast it would be unwieldy to describe it in miles - like measuring the distance from New York to Tokyo in inches! Instead, scientists use light-years to measure distances in space. ... souledout.org/nightsky/nsglossary.html Distance that light travels in a year through a vacuum. This unit is derived from the fact that light (electromagnetic radiation) takes a finite length of time to travel through space. Defined as 299,792,458 m/s. www4.nau.edu/meteorite/Meteorite/Book-GlossaryL.html The distance traveled by a beam of light in a vacuum in one year. Approximately 9.46 trillion (million million) km / 5.88 trillion miles. Back to top www.crawleyas.co.uk/dictionary.htm The distance light travels in a year. 9,460,920,000,000 km or 5,880,000,000,000 miles or 63,239 AU www.synapticsystems.com/sky/skygloss.htm unit of measure conveniently used in astronomy to qualify the important distances existing in the Universe. 1 light-year is 5.9 trillion miles (9,463 billion km) stars5.netfirms.com/glossa.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Squid Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Your waaaay behind on this thread, you need to spend time reading through threads before commenting... I didn't see where anyone corrected your error... also, I didn't see where anyone mentioned how close those planets were to us. Over 2,000 years, the planets will be virtually unchanged, so we aren't looking at what occurred millions of years ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GostHacked Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Yeah, things will really start picking up, once we invent the matter- antimatter "warp drive"... The recent unifying theory that some scientists claim to have worked out, makes folding space a real possibility. Mathematically now it can be done. I think I heard it on a cbc podcast a couple weeks ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dre Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 (edited) this sounds like the stories I was told when I was kid, we'd all have jet packs flying to work and school, or our homes and cars would be powered by miniature nuclear reactors...reality has physical and practical limits no technology can overcome... and how slim are the odds that humanity will even be here in 100yrs? the planet can not sustain the resource depletion it is being subjected to... humanity has really just entered the age of technology and it's already dug it's self a big hole... you have way too much faith in technology... and how slim are the odds that humanity will even be here in 100yrs? the planet can not sustain the resource depletion it is being subjected to...humanity has really just entered the age of technology and it's already dug it's self a big hole... Sure, I agree that our current behavior isnt sustainable. But that doesnt necessarily mean the end of the human race it could just mean contraction. Id wager we will be around for quite some time on some level. Even if theres periods where theres only a few hundred million of us. Edited February 7, 2011 by dre Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyly Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Sure, I agree that our current behavior isnt sustainable. But that doesnt necessarily mean the end of the human race it could just mean contraction. Id wager we will be around for quite some time on some level. Even if theres periods where theres only a few hundred million of us. then I would argue that there wouldn't be need to leave if we aren't in peril...it's an enormous economic undertaking for what return value? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dre Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 then I would argue that there wouldn't be need to leave if we aren't in peril...it's an enormous economic undertaking for what return value? I think its in our nature... research into space, and astronomy etc, has never really been about tangible needs. We explore just for the sake of exploring. Just to find out whats there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonam Posted February 7, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 (edited) I think its in our nature... research into space, and astronomy etc, has never really been about tangible needs. We explore just for the sake of exploring. Just to find out whats there. Well said. Here is an article by Michael Griffin, former NASA administrator, on this subject: I am convinced that if NASA were to disappear tomorrow, if we never put up another Hubble Space Telescope, never put another human being in space, people in this country would be profoundly distraught. Americans would feel that we had lost something that matters, that our best days were behind us, and they would feel themselves somehow diminished. Yet I think most would be unable to say why. There are many good reasons to continue to explore space, which most Americans have undoubtedly heard. Some have been debated in public policy circles and evaluated on the basis of financial investment. In announcing his commitment to send the country back to the moon and, later, on to Mars, President Bush quite correctly said that we do it for purposes of scientific discovery, economic benefit, and national security. I’ve given speeches on each of those topics, and these reasons can be clearly shown to be true. And presidential science advisor Jack Marburger has said that questions about space exploration come down to whether we want to bring the solar system within mankind’s sphere of economic influence. I think that is extraordinarily well put. But these are not reasons that would make Americans miss our space program. They are merely the reasons we are most comfortable discussing. I think of them as “acceptable reasons” because they can be logically defended. When we contemplate committing large sums of money to a project, we tend to dismiss reasons that are emotional or value-driven or can’t be captured on a spreadsheet. But in space exploration those are the reasons—what I think of as “real reasons”—that are the most important. When Charles Lindbergh was asked why he crossed the Atlantic, he never once answered that he wanted to win the $25,000 that New York City hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered for the first nonstop aircraft flight between New York and Paris. Burt Rutan and his backer, Paul Allen, certainly didn’t develop a private spacecraft to win the Ansari X-Prize for the $10 million in prize money. They spent twice as much as they made. Sergei Korolev and the team that launched Sputnik were not tasked by their government to be the first to launch an artificial satellite; they had to fight for the honor and the resources to do it. I think we all know why people strive to accomplish such things. They do so for reasons that are intuitive and compelling to all of us but that are not necessarily logical. They’re exactly the opposite of acceptable reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. First, most of us want to be, both as individuals and as societies, the first or the best in some activity. We want to stand out. This behavior is rooted in our genes. We are today the descendants of people who survived by outperforming others. Without question that drive can be carried to an unhealthy extreme; we’ve all seen more wars than we like. But just because the trait can be taken too far doesn’t mean that we can do without it completely. A second reason is curiosity. Who among us has not had the urge to know what’s over the next hill? What child has not been drawn to explore beyond the familiar streets of the neighborhood? Finally, we humans have, since the earliest civilizations, built monuments. We want to leave something behind to show the next generation, or the generations after that, what we did with our time here. This is the impulse behind cathedrals and pyramids, art galleries and museums. Cathedral builders would understand what I mean by real reasons. The monuments they erected to the awe and mystery of their God required a far greater percentage of their gross domestic product than we will ever put into the space business, but we look back across 600 or 800 years of time, and we are still awed by what the builders accomplished. Those buildings, therefore, also stand as monuments to the builders. The return the cathedral builders made on their investment could not have been summarized in a cost/benefit analysis. They began to develop civil engineering, the core discipline for any society if it wishes to have anything more than thatched huts. They gained societal advantages that were probably even more important than learning how to build walls and roofs. For example, they learned to embrace deferred gratification, not just on an individual level, where it is a crucial element of maturity, but on a societal level, where it is equally vital. The people who started the cathedrals didn’t live to finish them. The society as a whole had to be dedicated to the completion of those projects. We owe Western civilization as we know it today to that kind of thinking: the ability to have a constancy of purpose across years and decades. It is my contention that the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals. The space program satisfies the desire to compete, but in a safe and productive manner, rather than in a harmful one. It speaks abundantly to our sense of human curiosity, of wonder and awe at the unknown. Who can watch people assembling the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind—the International Space Station—and not wonder at the ability of people to conceive and to execute the project? And it also addresses our need for leaving something for future generations. Of course the space program also addresses the acceptable reasons, and in the end this is imperative. Societies will not succeed in the long run if they place their resources and their efforts in enterprises that, for whatever reason, don’t provide concrete value. But I believe that projects done for the real reasons that motivate humans also serve the acceptable reasons. In that sense, the value of space exploration really is in its spinoffs, as many have argued. But it’s not in spinoffs like Teflon and Tang and Velcro, as the public is so often told—and which in fact did not come from the space program. And it’s not in spinoffs in the form of better heart monitors or cheaper prices for liquid oxygen for hospitals, although the space program’s huge demand for liquid oxygen spurred fundamental improvements in the production and handling of this volatile substance. The real spinoffs are, just as they were for cathedral builders, more fundamental. Anyone who wants to build spacecraft, who wants to be a subcontractor, or who even wants to supply bolts and screws to the space industry must work to a higher level of precision than human beings had to do before the space industry came along. And that standard has influenced our entire industrial base, and therefore our economy. As for national security, what is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere? What is the value to the United States of being a leader in such efforts, in projects in which every technologically capable nation wants to take part? The greatest strategy for national security, more effective than having better guns and bombs than everyone else, is being a nation that does the kinds of things that make others want to do them with us. What do you have to do, how do you have to behave, to do space projects? You have to value hard work. You have to live by excellence, or die from the lack of it. You have to understand and practice both leadership and followership. You have to build partnerships; leaders need partners and allies, as well as followers. You have to accept the challenge of the unknown, knowing that you might fail, and to do so not without fear but with mastery of fear and a determination to go anyway. You have to defer gratification because we work on things that not all of us will live to see—and we know it. We now believe that 95 percent of the universe consists of dark energy or dark matter, terms for things that we as yet know nothing about. Is it even conceivable that one day we won’t learn to harness them? As cavemen learned to harness fire, as people two centuries ago learned to harness electricity, we will learn to harness these new things. It was just a few years ago that we confirmed the existence of dark matter, and we would not have done so without the space program. What is the value of knowledge like that? I cannot begin to guess. A thousand years from now there will be human beings who don’t have to guess; they will know, and they will know we gave this to them. Edited February 7, 2011 by Bonam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Bandelot Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Well said. Here is an article by Michael Griffin, former NASA administrator, on this subject: I am convinced that if NASA were to disappear tomorrow, if we never put up another Hubble Space Telescope, never put another human being in space, people in this country would be profoundly distraught. Americans would feel that we had lost something that matters, that our best days were behind us, and they would feel themselves somehow diminished. Yet I think most would be unable to say why. There are many good reasons to continue to explore space, which most Americans have undoubtedly heard. Some have been debated in public policy circles and evaluated on the basis of financial investment. In announcing his commitment to send the country back to the moon and, later, on to Mars, President Bush quite correctly said that we do it for purposes of scientific discovery, economic benefit, and national security. I’ve given speeches on each of those topics, and these reasons can be clearly shown to be true. And presidential science advisor Jack Marburger has said that questions about space exploration come down to whether we want to bring the solar system within mankind’s sphere of economic influence. I think that is extraordinarily well put. But these are not reasons that would make Americans miss our space program. They are merely the reasons we are most comfortable discussing. I think of them as “acceptable reasons” because they can be logically defended. When we contemplate committing large sums of money to a project, we tend to dismiss reasons that are emotional or value-driven or can’t be captured on a spreadsheet. But in space exploration those are the reasons—what I think of as “real reasons”—that are the most important. When Charles Lindbergh was asked why he crossed the Atlantic, he never once answered that he wanted to win the $25,000 that New York City hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered for the first nonstop aircraft flight between New York and Paris. Burt Rutan and his backer, Paul Allen, certainly didn’t develop a private spacecraft to win the Ansari X-Prize for the $10 million in prize money. They spent twice as much as they made. Sergei Korolev and the team that launched Sputnik were not tasked by their government to be the first to launch an artificial satellite; they had to fight for the honor and the resources to do it. I think we all know why people strive to accomplish such things. They do so for reasons that are intuitive and compelling to all of us but that are not necessarily logical. They’re exactly the opposite of acceptable reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. First, most of us want to be, both as individuals and as societies, the first or the best in some activity. We want to stand out. This behavior is rooted in our genes. We are today the descendants of people who survived by outperforming others. Without question that drive can be carried to an unhealthy extreme; we’ve all seen more wars than we like. But just because the trait can be taken too far doesn’t mean that we can do without it completely. A second reason is curiosity. Who among us has not had the urge to know what’s over the next hill? What child has not been drawn to explore beyond the familiar streets of the neighborhood? Finally, we humans have, since the earliest civilizations, built monuments. We want to leave something behind to show the next generation, or the generations after that, what we did with our time here. This is the impulse behind cathedrals and pyramids, art galleries and museums. Cathedral builders would understand what I mean by real reasons. The monuments they erected to the awe and mystery of their God required a far greater percentage of their gross domestic product than we will ever put into the space business, but we look back across 600 or 800 years of time, and we are still awed by what the builders accomplished. Those buildings, therefore, also stand as monuments to the builders. The return the cathedral builders made on their investment could not have been summarized in a cost/benefit analysis. They began to develop civil engineering, the core discipline for any society if it wishes to have anything more than thatched huts. They gained societal advantages that were probably even more important than learning how to build walls and roofs. For example, they learned to embrace deferred gratification, not just on an individual level, where it is a crucial element of maturity, but on a societal level, where it is equally vital. The people who started the cathedrals didn’t live to finish them. The society as a whole had to be dedicated to the completion of those projects. We owe Western civilization as we know it today to that kind of thinking: the ability to have a constancy of purpose across years and decades. It is my contention that the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals. The space program satisfies the desire to compete, but in a safe and productive manner, rather than in a harmful one. It speaks abundantly to our sense of human curiosity, of wonder and awe at the unknown. Who can watch people assembling the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind—the International Space Station—and not wonder at the ability of people to conceive and to execute the project? And it also addresses our need for leaving something for future generations. Of course the space program also addresses the acceptable reasons, and in the end this is imperative. Societies will not succeed in the long run if they place their resources and their efforts in enterprises that, for whatever reason, don’t provide concrete value. But I believe that projects done for the real reasons that motivate humans also serve the acceptable reasons. In that sense, the value of space exploration really is in its spinoffs, as many have argued. But it’s not in spinoffs like Teflon and Tang and Velcro, as the public is so often told—and which in fact did not come from the space program. And it’s not in spinoffs in the form of better heart monitors or cheaper prices for liquid oxygen for hospitals, although the space program’s huge demand for liquid oxygen spurred fundamental improvements in the production and handling of this volatile substance. The real spinoffs are, just as they were for cathedral builders, more fundamental. Anyone who wants to build spacecraft, who wants to be a subcontractor, or who even wants to supply bolts and screws to the space industry must work to a higher level of precision than human beings had to do before the space industry came along. And that standard has influenced our entire industrial base, and therefore our economy. As for national security, what is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere? What is the value to the United States of being a leader in such efforts, in projects in which every technologically capable nation wants to take part? The greatest strategy for national security, more effective than having better guns and bombs than everyone else, is being a nation that does the kinds of things that make others want to do them with us. What do you have to do, how do you have to behave, to do space projects? You have to value hard work. You have to live by excellence, or die from the lack of it. You have to understand and practice both leadership and followership. You have to build partnerships; leaders need partners and allies, as well as followers. You have to accept the challenge of the unknown, knowing that you might fail, and to do so not without fear but with mastery of fear and a determination to go anyway. You have to defer gratification because we work on things that not all of us will live to see—and we know it. We now believe that 95 percent of the universe consists of dark energy or dark matter, terms for things that we as yet know nothing about. Is it even conceivable that one day we won’t learn to harness them? As cavemen learned to harness fire, as people two centuries ago learned to harness electricity, we will learn to harness these new things. It was just a few years ago that we confirmed the existence of dark matter, and we would not have done so without the space program. What is the value of knowledge like that? I cannot begin to guess. A thousand years from now there will be human beings who don’t have to guess; they will know, and they will know we gave this to them. Indeed... Go where... no man has... gone before... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GWiz Posted February 7, 2011 Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Indeed... Go where... no man has... gone before... Ahhh, yes, but would you want to stay there? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonam Posted February 7, 2011 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2011 Ahhh, yes, but would you want to stay there? There would be no shortage of eager volunteers for one way space missions, just as there were no shortage of volunteers for one-way crossings of the Atlantic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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