Let’s go to Mars
http://www.myspace.com/lennysolomon

Gott, J. Richard III. “Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects.” Nature. May 27, 1993, pp 315-319.

The reason we went to the Moon in the 1960’s and 70’s was because we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy said so, to paraphrase what he said, it was to win the hearts and minds of the people on earth and to not leave the Soviet Union the only country in space. Landing on the moon was to central theme to that goal.

Now we would go back to the Moon and to Mars for different reasons. Our military enemies sure don’t care about any technical achievements; they might just want to see us being a different religion. This president wants us to go back so he can make wonderful speeches that make him look like some visionary. But if he can’t and won’t pay for the enlarged space program and doesn’t want to pay for what is mostly a voluntary war, it’s not visionary, it’s hubris. And we should not support such a position.

Going back to the moon and to mars to visit doesn’t get us anything. We know we have the technical capability to do such a thing. We didn’t know we could do it in the 1960’s.

We shouldn’t go back to the moon at all. Leave the airless worlds to machines.

Mars is much different. The planet has a rotation about the same as the earth and most of the things we need to live there are more available. But humans we shouldn’t go to Mars and come back. We should go to Mars in only one way trips. Send people to mars who want to pioneer and settle the planet.

My wild ass guess is that it costs 25 percent of the money for a Mars trip to go to Mars, 25 percent to stay on the planet and do something and 50 percent to come back. Coming back from Mars has been described as the most vulnerable of the trip as well. If we forgo spending the money to bring these people back, we can afford to spend more on better living when they are there.

In Antarctica, the rate of resigning on to spend another winter there is higher than most people would think. Why? Because those people who went there made friends and if their friends resigned, they did to. Maybe only one out of 100 million people would agree to do it, but on a planet of 6 billion people, that is still a pool of 60 people to choose from. Send them a few years to Antarctica and Devon Island in Canada to train and pick the best ones from that group.

We sometimes forget the hardships that humans did before human technology came around. The things that people did and still do to survive in harse environments is remarkable. That same spirit could be used to explore the new world of Mars.

We could send new pioneers after the first bunch, every 2 years as the orbits of our planets allow. In 20 years time, we could have hundreds working on the planet with the first goals of exploration, science and developing a self-sufficient settlement.

Otherwise don’t go at all. Machines can do the science. It’s not visionary to visit the Moon and Mars at the same time running up budget deficits and accumulate debt that we borrow from other countries. We should be better than that.

It’s just that it costs a lot more to lose a war than it used to, for some reason.

NASA budget FY2007/8 = $17.3 billion
Losing the war in Iraq = $123 billion
Money lost due to subprime mortgage and derivatives crisis so far = $200 billion
US trade deficit in Jan 2008 = $58.2 billion – that’s just for January.

So for the NASA budget you could lose the war in Iraq for seven weeks, match the subprime losses for five week, or balance the USA’s sending its money overseas for less than four days.

NASA’s peanuts. Don’t sweat it.

Why do you say humans “have to” colonize space? It’s one thing to say we have to take every new opportunity that comes to us, due to our inventive large brain. But we don’t have a “destiny” that somehow compels us to make huge sacrifices of what we still have here on earth in a long-shot attempt to bring this new “manifest destiny” forward from an uncertain span in the future up to *right now*.

Space exploration aside for a moment, everyone here on earth needs a solution to two converging, very pressing issues: climate change, as well as our dependence on fossil feuls which will not last that much longer, and which may be at or near peak annual extraction already – we haven’t yet explained to ourselves how we can continue as technological, growth-oriented economies without increasing energy resource use.

There is enough coal and unconventional oil (e.g. tar sands) still left to create a serious risk of runaway CO2-climate feedbacks such as permafrost thawing leading to large methane releases. But both conventional oil and natural gas may be facing crises before many more years. Lots of turmoil and conflict should be foreseen arising from this.

If we need a new Apollo project, landing a man on Mars has to rank below a really serious, united effort by the whole country (and the whole world) to move promptly to renewable energy sources and far greater efficiency of energy consumption. This has to be done on a scale to replace the vast current volume of fossil fuels before we hit a new mega-energy-crisis AND before we pile too much GHG in the atmosphere to be able to avoid the worst foreseeable impacts (plus whatever unforseen ones could be far worse – what a gamble!)

To get that much change from the status quo, in so many areas of the economy, is a much bigger challenge than the Apollo moon mission, and needs bold national leadership (in every country at the same time!)

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) has used this idea of a “New Apollo Project” in reference to proposed legislation to begin moving toward energy independence and sustainability.

In a few decades, we’ll know if we’ve met these twin challenges or not. In that time frame, we may be able to return to the longer-term dream of sending humans beyond the moon. That target is just not the right place to be focusing at this critical crossroads for our own planet.

* To advance and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe.
* To advance human exploration, use, and development of space.
* To research, develop, verify, and transfer advanced aeronautics and space technologies.

I’ve helped design supercomputers, and helped sell a bunch of them to various parts of NASA that I loved working with. I’m a science-fiction reader for 50+ years and I’d love to see permanent outposts out there sometime … but I would perfectly happy to put *manned* spacecraft beyond near-Earth orbit on hold for a quite a while. We can do lots of good science that needs to get done without that.

In particular, if we don’t put a lot of NASA-talent effort into dealing with Peak-Fossil+Climate Change over the next 50-100 years, we’re not going to end up with a sustainable technic civilization good enough to discover and fend off the next dinosaur-killer that comes by. [We will need deep-space capability, but it's a whole lot more cost-effective to do it with robots, notwithstanding various Hollywood movies.] Given that the probability of such ~1, sooner or later, with totally unpredictable timing, it would be good to allow for the possibility.

Joe’s comments are right on.

Expert: “We’re brainwashing our children” about global warming
Another post from guest blogger Rick Neale of Florida Today, from the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando:

William Gray, the well-known Colorado State University hurricane forecaster, routinely uses the annual National Hurricane Conference as a platform to bash global warming. In a statement to Florida Today, Gray argued that the scientific consensus on global warming is bogus — and “a mild form of McCarthyism has developed toward those scientists who do not agree” that mankind is in danger.

“We are also brainwashing our children on the warming topic. We have no better example than Al Gore’s alarmists and inaccurate movie which is being shown in our schools and being hawked by warming activists with little or no meteorological-climate background,” Gray wrote.

————

Joe – Go ahead and bash Gray …. without sounding like a ‘McCarthyist’ ….

Welfare programs are NOT the best way to pump up people’s income. At best, they just provide a floor to support the recipients at some minimum level. The best way to pump up an economy is with new technologies, products, companies and highly-skilled, high-paying jobs that result from the long-term pure R&D programs that only a government can afford to wait for.

Your health, on the other hand, should be your own responsibility, although reforming the healthcare insurance industry is a good start (and I speak as one salaried with the medical industry, not NASA). However, you can exercise regularly, eat healthy, don’t drink, smoke or do illegal drugs, and you’re still going to die anyway.

What causes little Johnny or Jane to go to bed hungry each night is the fact the U.S. throws away $100 billion worth of food each year, not because we have a few government-paid employees camped out in a high-tech Winnebago.

Research into how to sustain human life in space, on other planets and in other places considered hostile to us is really research into how our species works and what is needed to support it. This increased understanding results in huge benefits in medicine and other aspects of living. The full extent of these benefits are completely unknown and unknowable in advance because it is not possible to predict what paths creatively thinking researchers will travel.

When you come down to it, the bottom line isn’t the bottom line.

It’s not about the cost. It’s not about fixing all our problems at home first before we go either. For over 4,000 years, those problems have always existed and will therefore never end; it’s an impossible condition to attain because as soon as you solve one problem you have ten more that will pop up in its place (You feed everyone in the world, you birth more babies. You then have a larger population to deal with).

It’s about giving those at home some relief from their daily problems by giving them some hope that there’s something worthwhile ahead, something to look forward to, a reason for working through the immediate problems, to surmount them and to go beyond them.

NASA’s budget is only a fraction of the total Federal Research and Development budget (6/10ths of 1%, to be exact); the rest is in other agencies. This is the funding that develops new technologies, or advances old ones to create new products that build new businesses which develop new jobs that can improve people’s circumstances.

Yet only 5.6% of the whole Federal Budget is devoted to Research and Development that will result in new technologies, new products, new companies and new high-paying jobs.

And the Vision for Space Exploration (going back to the moon, and on to Mars and beyond) is only a piece of that. . .

So the question you should really ask your elected officials is this:

“Since the future of the U.S. Economy depends so much on new technologies, new products, new companies and new jobs, why is the R&D portion of the Federal Budget, especially for the Vision for Space Exploration, so small?”