Space: the final frontier

[Stavros]

An interesting article by Martin Rees on the exploration of space. I would like to circumnavigate the globe from space and then come back, I can't see the point of wandering around a dust ball like the Moon or anywhere else if I can't come back. But I can imagine some people would take the risk.

Any here? Any planet catch your fancy?
Martin Rees: For our future in space, China must aim further than the Moon

A famous picture in the English edition of Newton's "Principia" shows cannon balls being fired from the top of a mountain. If they go fast enough, their trajectory curves downward no more steeply than the Earth curves away underneath it – they go into orbit. This picture is still the neatest way to explain orbital flight. Newton calculated that, for a cannon-ball to achieve an orbital trajectory, its speed must be 18000 miles per hour – far beyond what was then achievable.
Indeed, this speed wasn’t achieved until 1957, when the Soviet Sputnik was launched. Four years later Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into orbit. Eight years after that, Neil Armstrong made his "one small step". The Apollo programme was a heroic episode. And it was a long time ago – ancient history to today’s young people.
Had the momentum of the 1960s been maintained over the next 40 years, there would be footprints on Mars by now. But after Apollo, the political impetus for manned spaceflight was lost.
The most crucial impediment to space flight stems from the intrinsic inefficiency of chemical fuel, and the consequent requirement to carry a weight of fuel far exceeding that of the payload. This is a generic constraint, based on fundamental chemistry. If a planet’s gravity is strong enough to retain an atmosphere, at a temperature where water doesn’t freeze, and metabolic reactions aren’t too slow, the energy required to lift a molecule from it will require more than one molecule of chemical fuel.
Launchers will get cheaper when they can be designed to be more fully reusable. It will then be feasible to assemble, in orbit, even larger artifacts than the International Space Station. But so long as we are dependent on chemical fuels, interplanetary travel will remain a challenge. Nuclear Power could be therefore be transformative. By allowing much higher in-course speeds, it would drastically cut the transit times to Mars or the asteroids. And it could transform manned spaceflight from high-precision to an almost unskilled operation. Driving a car would be a difficult enterprise if, as at present for space voyages, one had to program the entire journey beforehand, with minimal opportunities for steering on the way. If there were an abundance of fuel for mid-course corrections (and to brake and accelerate at will), then interplanetary navigation would be a doddle – indeed simpler than driving a car or ship, in that the destination is always in clear sight.
In the light of this, I would venture a confident forecast that during this century, all the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system will be explored and mapped. The Hubble Telescope’s successors, with huge gossamer-thin mirrors assembled under zero gravity, will further expand our vision of stars, galaxies and the wider cosmos.

But the role that humans will play in this is debatable. There’s no denying that NASA’s “Curiosity,” now trundling across Martian craters, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist could overlook. But robotic techniques are advancing fast, allowing ever more sophisticated unmanned probes. And the cost gap between manned and unmanned missions remains huge. The practical case for manned spaceflight gets ever weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation. Indeed, as a scientist I see little purpose in sending people into space at all.
But as a human being, I’m an enthusiast for manned missions. I hope some people now living will walk on Mars – as an adventure, and as a step towards the stars. They may be Chinese: China has the resources, the dirigiste government, and maybe the willingness to undertake an Apollo-style programme. And China would need to aim at Mars, not just at the Moon, if it wanted to assert its super-power status by a “space spectacular”.
However, NASA’s manned programme, ever since Apollo, has been impeded by public and political pressure into being too risk-averse. Unless motivated by pure prestige and bankrolled by superpowers, manned missions beyond the Moon will need perforce to be cut-price ventures, accepting high risks – perhaps even one-way tickets. Such missions would need to be privately funded. No Western governmental agency would expose civilians to such hazards.
Nonetheless, a century or two from now, there may be small groups of pioneers living independent from the Earth – on Mars or on asteroids. Whatever ethical constraints we impose here on the ground, we should surely wish these adventurers good luck in genetically modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments. This might be the first step towards divergence into a new species: the beginning of the post-human era.
And machines of human intelligence could spread still further. Whether the long-range future lies with organic post-humans or with intelligent machines is a matter for debate. Either way, dramatic cultural and technological evolution will continue not only here on Earth, but far beyond.
By Martin Rees , University of Cambridge

http://www.independent.co.uk/incomin...n-9018641.html

[BellaBellucci]

Beam me up first!

~BB~

[EvaCassini]

Lets find out what Europa holds beneath it's icy shell!!!

Bet you my whole penis, that there is life there!

[bluesoul]

I would like to circumnavigate the globe from space and then come back, I can't see the point of wandering around a dust ball like the Moon or anywhere else if I can't come back.

if i went to space, coming back to this polluted sandbox is the last thing i'd want.

rather be vacationing on gliese 581g or kepler-22. i'm sure one of those planets has a revolving door that leads to a casino that looks a little like the mgm grand circa 1991 where the scenario of a cheap and sleazy novel loop indefinitely

[danthepoetman]

I agree with Eva: the satellites of the two first giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are the most interresting. Europa is indeed a celestial body covered with liquid water under an icey surface. There must be life there. Calysto also has an ocean; id it deep enough to have liquid water under surface? It remains to be seen.
There has been a lot of talk about terra-forming Mars. Unfortunately, Mars is a geologically dead planet. It has no global magnetic field -only small ones, dispersed here and there. Therefore, it's not protected from solar radiations, as earth is. I can't imagine this problem being eventually overcome.
Distant stars are also interresting. We are now more and more able to discover planets around stars and to specify their nature. If we were to discover an earth like planet revolving around a star less than 5 or 6 light years, it could be interresting to start thinking of ways to get there. Of course, planets similar to earth are the most difficult to find, because they're small; but with the improvement of technology, we're getting there.

On the other hand, something keeps bothering me on the topic. I just think we're far from ready to encounter life. I listen to searchers, even to the very bright people at the SETI project, and they all sound to me like a bunch of over-enthusiastic kids, most often. They're affraid we could find intelligent life not much more advanced than dolphins, for instance, have I heard once a distinguished lady say. They want to find intelligent life with culture and technology! And to me, that's precisely the problem.
We still don't know what life is. The limit between some form of very organized material formation and animated matter is still undefined. We're not even sure viruses should be called "living". The same can be said for intelligence: we don't have a clue as to what it should be defined with. Moreover, we're still completely caught in our own animalistic pulsions (competitivity, attraction, gregarity, violence, etc.), which we tend to attribute to the rest of what is. Anything could be waiting for us out there.
As was also said by an undeservedly forgotten thinker, Marshall McLuhan, our technology is only the extension of what "we" are. When we fall on real intelligent life in space, will we even be able to realize it?
I tend to think like Stanislaw Lem on the subject, the author of the novel "Solaris", put to the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Sodherberg: thus far, we're only seeking mirrors in space. All we want is to find ourselves. We're still that desperate for some kind of acknowledgement of the existence we were randomly given by the infinity of circumstances. Or either, we're still simply trying to put ourselves at the center of this universe by attributing to "life" our particular brand -what we call anthropocentrism. We are not ready yet. And we're still far from it imo.

[bluesoul]

Bet you my whole penis, that there is life there!

according to this movie, it's a giant octopus

[EvaCassini]

Saw that last week! Great fucking movie!

And, that may be the case down in those waters.

[danthepoetman]

Is this what we're talking about?

[trish]

Already having had some experience with being a mind awkwardly wired into mismatched body, I might be willing to have myself downloaded into the main computer of a robotic mission to explore the universe.

Within our own neighborhood, the moons of Saturn. (Btw, Europa Report is a good film; I just streamed it a week ago).

My own curiousity would take me to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy that is obstructed from our view in the galactic plane by all the dust and debris in our line of sight. I’d love to fly over above the galactic plane and look down onto the whirl of dust and stars caught within the extreme curvature of its queer geometry: a perfect place for a radiation resistant, silcon mind to survey and test the tenants of quantum gravity.

[EvaCassini]

Trish. Have you heard about the gas cloud with the size of 3 Earths currently falling into SgrA? Watched the documentary about it the other night. It's pretty fascinating how a blackhole ( especially ours ) feeds.

I am also looking forward to the new scope they are currently working on that is pretty much meant to replace Hubble. They are planning it to be placed at the LaGrange point 2. 1 million miles on the other side of our Moon.

So exciting!!!