Spent a lot of time with Engineers in many disciplines...
I call this a solution looking for a problem...
We cannot even explore the bottom of our oceans but we want to run off to space??
Engineers...
Also a GREAT way to create a “dream” and burn through scandalous amounts of money to do what...
Float around in a space station looking down at that which you don’t really know while casting your eyes about for ...
Vanity, All is Vanity...
How many people came over on the Mayflower?
Vanity?
I give you Teflon and Tang!
Ventures like this cause solutions to hundreds of problems, and tech gets better. Every dollar spent on human manned exploration is priceless.
We can go to and survive on Mars: right now. If we wanted.
We need to build a massive ship in orbit, that can first go to Mars, then further. I will get behind that. But a mission whose payload is all launched from the ground can’t do it, and shouldn’t be supported.
Doing this solves dozens of problems and weight limits right away.
Shades of Karl Stromberg.....
Y3ah, let’S just stay here in our nice safe cave.
Engineers finding solutions to problems that don’t exist have been at the heart of most all of the major important advancements in history
Look at just the inventions of Tesla alone. There was no such thing as alternating current before he invented it. So none of the items that it led to were even thought of, let alone were ‘problems’ to solve.
MOST great discoveries were not the result of a search for them and a sudden shout of “Eureka! I found it” but more often began with “Hmmm...thats funny...”
We know exactly what problem we’re trying to solve. It is inevitable that this rock will cease to sustain us at some point. Even if we humans don’t mess it up, between ice ages, asteroids, pole reversals, and an eventual turning off of the sun we are on a ticking clock here. And if we don’t have a self sustaining subsection somewhere else when that happens nothing else we’ve done matters at all.
Not vanity at all. SURVIVAL.