Posted on 04/10/2011 3:57:02 PM PDT by KevinDavis
AFP - On Tuesday, the world will be awash with talk of courage and vision as it looks back on 50 years of manned space flight, a trail blazed by Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute trip around the planet.
But what if the past half-century has been just a cosmic waste of money?
Presidents and space agencies insist manned missions will always be at the heart of their space programmes.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
Nope. Not until we have true artificial intelligence with intuition, gut feelings and curiosity.
The robotic missions are fine for preliminary pathfinding but man needs to git er done.
If we don’t bring this nation back from the brink of disaster, any serious discussion of space missions will be about what other countries are doing.
Were manned missions to the Americas a waste?
No, but they were evil, eeevviiillll, in allowing now-dead white man to enslave and exterminate the peaceful natives who lived in perfect harmony with each other and nature until the Europeans arrived.
Human sacrifice? What human sacrifice? It was their culture, and therefore benign since all cultures but ours are equal and beneficial.
/channeling junior moonbat
Properly exploiting resources in space could well be a path back from the economic brink...
Exaclty..
Were manned missions to the Americas a waste?
Well ............................
“peaceful natives”
—descendants of earlier “manned missions” to the Americas. I don’t think they sprouted from the ground there.
Mankind is no more able to survive the mass extinctions than species that succumbed in the past. If we stay on Earth and don’t colonize space we’ve adopted an all the eggs in one basket approach to survival. Sooner or later the basket, Earth, may not be able to support us.
Well, manned space missions are merely a moot subject since we have now canceled all further manned missions except for those when the Russians allow us to tag along.
It’s a question from France......don’t answer it as it only encourage them....
Eventually, Earth’s luck is going to catch up with it, in the form of some devastating and destructive disaster, which may be years in coming, or strike quickly. But in either case, having a “bio-library” on Mars could take literally millions of years off of Earth’s biological recovery.
Even if only a few thousand species were annihilated in the disaster, it could very well cause implications throughout the Earth’s environment, a domino effect killing thousands more species, knocking out entire genus or families of life.
Likewise, such a Martian colony could contain exhaustive records of human history, so information is not lost.
The humble beginnings to this are found in a single Mars mission, which transports a nuclear powered tunnel mining robot, that within just a few years mining could dig an extended-stay habitat.
The intro to Firefly kinda makes point that space travel is necessary.
We keep looking for signs of intelligent life on other planets. We have yet to find very much on THIS PLANET. I think we should start here before we start looking elsewhere.
Manned missions with no more politically correct shuttle. Men. Yes, many volks about to see their declines after the default in this depression by way of political correctness believe that men are “a waste of space.”
But that’s going to change within a decade. Enjoy the ride.
Those costs would make the current debt and deficits look like pocket change.
Well, the problem here is that you are looking at the humanity as a whole. But according to the 2nd Sturgeon's Law 99% of anything is cr@p. It quickly becomes apparent to a careful observer that there are people worth saving and there are people worth killing and everything in between. A gray-haired genius scientist, who is about to discover a Warp drive, is not comparable to a street thug drugged out of his mind who is looking for someone to murder for more drugs. But nobody makes that distinction in a last century or two.
This means that the average intelligence of the entire population of Earth is doomed to remain somewhere between an imbecile and an idiot. You can hope that one day this will change, but I'm afraid this is distribution is built into our genes - this effect is the same across time and space; we had scientists and murderers from Egypt to these days.
At some point, probably after some revolutions and reforms, the humanity may split into - not exactly Eloi and Morlocks, but into good people and bad people (or smart and stupid.) This won't be too difficult, actually - even today bad people like to stay together, and good people do the same, for all kinds of reasons. Such parting of ways will require some major rewriting of laws of political correctness, and it will have to be acknowledged that people are not born equal and they are not equally capable.
If that happens then the "good" people will fly to the stars and the "bad" people will be living in ghettos - until, of course, the genes kick in again and "good" children are born in "bad" families and vice versa. There are quite a few SciFi stories set around that. But the executive summary is that humanity needs to understand itself first, then acknowledge what it found, and then to separate itself into castes according to one's ability. Only then we can have sufficiently large groups that have certain unique traits (like intelligence.) And then those groups can be treated as separate societies. One example of such a division is shown in Asimov's The Currents of Space though the aristocracy in that novel was not selected on individual's merits. Other books, especially the Fantasy genre, are offering tons of examples of the latter. One common plot device is that anyone can become a wizard and gain a high position in the society ... as long as he can do the wizardly things.
The current conflict between Muslims and everyone else is caused exactly by pretending that Muslims are just like us, importing them in huge numbers from their native lands, and doing business in their lands. But imagine that there is a solid wall between Us and Them ... we wouldn't even care what they do over there. To summarize, mixing of incompatible people causes crime and wars. We don't want that. In old days inconvenient people were just killed en masse. Today we don't do that; but we still can exile them if we want to. I'm sure 90% of Mexicans would gladly take their 10% of narco-terrorists and shove them into some underground cave and pour concrete over the only exit. Normal Mexicans don't like the daily body count any more than we do, and they know what one rotten apple does to the entire barrel.
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