And Mars is being oversold. Want to see the colossal Martian volcanoes? Stick with the orbiter images. Those shield mountains spread out over so much territory that their slopes are only a few degrees above horizontal -- standing on their flanks you would hardly know it. How about dangling your legs over the rim of the super canyon that dwarfs the Grand Canyon? That's the problem, the extraterrestrial gully is so far across that all one will see is the flat plain of the bottom stretching to the empty horizon. To get around this publicity problem Mars fans have been fooling the gullible with computer generated 3-D scenes of the Martian landscape made appealing by extremely boosting the vertical exaggeration. A family vacation will cost countless millions, lock up the kids in small spaces and suits for a maddening length of time, and expose that the parents are not especially concerned about their children surviving to tell the tale to their classmates.
Then there is the problem of contamination. Mars that is. It has been argued that to find life over there may require sending people to look for it. But if there are microbial Martians, then sending people is the best way to introduce earthly invasive microbes that could severely degrade the very Martian biota we want to study. Sort of like Kudzu and Dutch elm disease on an interplanetary scale. Before sending folks to Mars we must first get a good assessment of what is already there or not, and if there are Martian microbes then have a careful democratic debate and discussion about whether to risk screwing up the biota or not. Doing that will require the development and deployment of highly sophisticated but biosterile robots that can do pretty much what humans can do, but will cost far less to send because they will not require all that life support apparatus that makes putting people into space so extravagant. In which case what then is the point of sending humans?
Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Frontiers are viable projects only when they are readily inhabitable. Every truly successful human frontier as involved tropical and especially temperate lands. Humans are barely able to inhabit polar latitudes despite the abundance of breathable oxygen, and no one mislabels Antarctica as a "frontier." Past predictions that a fair number of humans would migrate into an illusory marine "frontier" have gone bust because there is no air down there, making it too expensive and dangerous -- how long would the kids living in an underwater habitat live before accidentally drowning? Moving lots of humans into airless space will be even more impractical so out there is not a feasible frontier. From the perspective of an evolutionary researcher I have pointed out that humans in space is the evolutionary equivalent of fish going to the trouble and expense of conquering the land by constructing fish tanks on treads. Space vessels are air filled aquariums for supporting people. Not needing oxygen smart robots will be the spacecraft, which can be correspondingly minimal in size and cost. So much as fish moved onto land by evolving into air compatible tetrapods, moving minds into space is best done with vacuum compatible robots.
If the space station, no longer properly supported by the shuttle, does not first suffer a major failure it is likely to be shut down in less than a decade. There is a good chance that the American government will never get around to again putting people into space in a big way, and the Russian government may get out of the business as well -- finally taking the good old Khrushchev era R-7 out of the space travel business. In the questionable scenario that the Chinese authorities mount a major human space program it is likely to prove to be a costly dead end. Private suborbital flights may prove fashionable theme rides for the wealthy and for small-scale science projects, but their continuing popularity and legal practicality if and when some clients are killed is open to question. Same if rich citizens and corporations pay through their noses to get to orbit. The possibility that capital sans government subsidies will ever send people beyond orbit can be ranked as near zero. As time progresses robot intelligence should improve to the point that cybermachines can do what humans do without the danger or extreme cost. So it is robots that are most likely to conquer space, not the biobeings that initially created them.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
