The second man to walk on the moon has an odd op-ed in the Washington Post today, “Time to Boldly Go Once More.” Not surprisingly, he wants to go to Mars, but a key reason he offers — to study climate change — is very strange indeed.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Aldrin’s moon-landing mission with Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins. Aldrin notes:
A race to the moon is a dead end. While the lunar surface can be used to develop advanced technologies, it is a poor location for homesteading. The moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things. And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or inspire the support and enthusiasm of the public and the next generation of space explorers.
Can’t argue with that. But then he argues for “more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program”:
Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America’s future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.
A Mars mission is typically projected to cost tens of billions of dollars, though if by “homestead” Aldrin means to suggest this is a one-way mission, it would certainly be a lot cheaper, albeit infinitely riskier. Also, I’m not certain why we need a sustainable revitalization of our manned space program when we haven’t even figured out how to live sustainably on this planet, and we have far more urgent need for that kind of money, a point I’ll return to.
What is most amazing about this article is that Aldrin actually offers up climate change as a reason to go to Mars:
Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet’s surface.
Very disappointing — especially from a man whose entire career was built around staggering advances in science.
“With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution” could win awards for the lamest euphemism of the year. Earth is in the throes of humanity destroying our livable climate with unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, a climate that has been remarkably stable for some 10,000 years (see “Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization“).
If Aldrin understands and accepts the fact that science says humans are the primary cause of recent, rapid terrestrial climate change, he should just say so. Of course, if he did that, he’d eliminate much of his argument that we need to go to Mars to study its geologic-time-scale climate change (see, also, The “Other Planets Are Warming” Myth). As an important aside, Mars has such a radically different atmosphere and environment that its benefit to understanding human-caused climate change on Earth is quite limited at best and could be completely captured by multiple unmanned probes for a few billion dollars.
[Note to Washington Post: Is the only kind of climate change that editorial page editor Fred Hiatt will let anyone write about is what has occurred on other planets?]
Three years ago, I made a very provocative statement at a conference sponsored by Technology Review:
Romm predicts that the US [manned] space program will be essentially abandoned by 2025 because we will recognize that every available dollar must be put into combatting the effects of global climate change.
As I wrote at the time (see “Whither the Manned Space Program?),
I believe that, thanks to the refusal of this administration to take any concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, come 2009, the next President — and every subsequent President — will have to make action on climate a larger and larger priority in the federal budget. And if we don’t follow the advice of NASA’s James Hansen and aggressively deploy GHG-reducing technologies in the next decade, then, come the 2020s, we will be so desperate to deal with global warming that we will divert funds from many discretionary areas of the budget, such as the space program.
A NASA scientist came up to me afterwards to make sure that I was not speaking about abandoning NASA’s terrific work on Earth sciences, which has helped make everyone aware of the climate problem. Not at all. Though, sadly, again, the Bush administration has been busy cutting back that valuable research in order to fund the manned space program, including its plans to put humans back to the Moon and Mars. And yet, ironically, thanks to the Bush administration, it is increasingly doubtful we will put humans on Mars this century, at least.
This may well be a suprising point for many Americans — and I count myself as a space enthusiast — but on our current path of reckless disregard for the climate, the manned space program faces the certainty of slashed budgets.
We have passed the point at which avoiding catastrophic warming can be done easily. When the country final does confront the reality of catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — we will dramatically realign our priorities. At that point, which will almost certainly come by 2025, it is inconceivable we would ever spend the many tens of billions of dollars needed to put humans on Mars. Aldrin writes:
If we avoided the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.
No.
I do think that in 2029 humans will be desperately struggling for survival on a planet with a changing climate not terribly hospitable to human civilization. I’m afraid, however, that planet will be Earth (see “Memorial Day, 2029“).
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Mostly engineering, actually, and you know how many evolution and climate deniers are engineers
Any suggestion that Mars could/should be considered a new colony for we threatened earthlings should be confined only to script writers at Saturday Nite Live or copy editors at Mad Magazine.
What could prompt an otherwise intelligent person to imagine there is any substance to such a foolish notion? Perhaps it is his and others failure to see the future as it is now playing out.
The planet is facing a 2 degree C temp increase in this century and the planet’s ecosystems and weather patterns are already showing signs of unraveling.
When the US southwest runs out of water, we won’t be thinking about Mars. We we be running from Mad Max.
John McCormick
We definitely do need to spend more money to establish colonies of people living in places besides the earth — but a viable permanent moon base is obviously the next logical step. Scientists have known this since the 1950’s and even George W. Bush managed to get that one right. Buzz Aldrin should stop wasting his time and energy on something that can’t possibly happen for at least 30 or 40 years (if we are ever in a position to do it before climate change and/or population growth tosses us into economic collapse).
This post was filed under “humor”, wasn’t it?
One of the best arguments against spending zillions of dollars to send human beings to Mars is the absolutely astounding and impressive success of the robotic probes that we have sent there at far, far lower cost and of course lower risk. If we want to learn about Mars there is a lot more we can still learn by sending robots.
And the idea that there is something we still need to learn about anthropogenic global warming on Earth that we can learn only by studying Mars — let alone by sending human beings to Mars — is inane.
On the other hand, there is valuable information we could learn about the Earth’s climate, hydrosphere, cryosphere and biosphere from unmanned, Earth-observation satellites — funding for which, if I recall correctly, has been cut.
Pat Richards wrote: “We definitely do need to spend more money to establish colonies of people living in places besides the earth”
Why? So that they can die when civilization collapses and there is no one able to supply them? If you are thinking of creating some sort of “Noah’s Ark” in space, where the human species could survive after we have destroyed the capacity of the Earth to support life, then you are talking about one hundred percent fully self-sustaining space colonies. And we are nowhere near having the knowledge, let alone the technology, to create such a thing, on Mars, the Moon, or anywhere else.
What piffle – this and crazy geo-engineering plots are a mark of desperation. Even this report http://www.oxfam.org.uk/ resources/ policy/ climate_change/ downloads/ bp130_suffering_science.pdf is more positive than it should be, because it is assuming the developed nations will be able to deal with climate change. I am not so sanguine. The ecosystems are collapsing everywhere, as is apparent by the testimonies cited.
dhogaza,
Engineers are a mixed bag. It was a computer science BA who convinced me that the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars Missile defense shield) would not work an when I read the two Office of Technology Assesment (since defunded by the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Thanks guys!) publications revealing the glaring weaknesses in the program I wrote a term paper back my college days in the late 80’s on how it wouldn’t work except to bankrupt the Soviet Union and possibly the United States too if this monster was actually built.
Other engineers are shockingly ignorant of the science on AGW and repeat the mantras put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others not knowing where these talking points came from and believe they are the actual science and plain common sense.
And, of course, if we could do that, then we could turn Earth into our “Noah’s Ark” after destroying its capacity to support life naturally, without all the expense of manned space travel.
It’s all silly-think.
If it’s planetary science we’re interested in, the current dependence on robots is far and away the best way to go.
cuz biosphere 2 was such a blazing success…
Yes, I know – I did use a smiley, after all!
I tend to agree with the “stay home” folks. It is foolish to think that we can start a “sustainable” civilization on Mars with zero free oxygen. frozen water and no growing season when we cannot support a sustainable system here on earth with liquid water, oxygen and established life cycles. However compromised.
Fix it here first, then dream. Besides who gets to go first? Perhaps we should give the honer to the hair dressers and accountants as Douglas Adams suggests. Maybe even open the ranks to the GW deniers…
Continuing to confine human civilization solely to our planet of evolutionary origin would be extremely foolish. Never put all of your eggs in just one basket. The $18 billion a year spent by NASA is chump change compared to the trillion dollars a year spent by the US military industrial complex.
Climate change is easy to solve by investing a lot more money in more nuclear and renewable energy resources. America spends between $10 billion and $60 billion a year protecting Persian Gulf oil. If that money were spent on building more nuclear, biowaste, small hydro, wind, and solar production facilities, we’d be free of fossil fuels in just 20 or 30 years while creating millions of high priced jobs in America.
Colonies on other planets and moons come under the heading of romance, not science. I have never liked wasting our money on manned space mission, and I am a physicist. Let robots explore if, and only if, we have spare money! Our problems on earth are too great and they need all our attention and money. Also our technology is too primitive to go to Mars. We must be patient and first solve our disease problem, our population problem, our war problems, and, of course, our climate problem!
‘Mars for America’s”??? What’s up with that? America isn’t the only nation on Earth, and colonizing or even visiting Mars (humans) doesn’t make it America’s. Let’s hope NOT.
This reminds me of the SciFi movie “Silent Running”. A hippy-era flick that had as a premise that in the future life on Earth had been damaged to the point of annihilation by pesticides, pollution and uneven management and in an effort to save the failing biodiversity treasure chest of the planet they lofted into orbit huge greenhouses of plants to wait for the day when the Earth was cleaned up.
Well it never was, and to cut costs they had the greenhouses destroyed so the astronauts could return. The anti-hero (a long-haired Bruce Dern) hijacks one of the domes and moves it into another orbit and then dies for his temerity, but not before the greenhouse floats off into deep space on autopilot leaving the demolished earth far behind to evolve as best it may as a desiccated clod one orbit in from the other desiccated clod, Mars.
And to what purpose all this? None purpose at all. But the nightmare outcome is probably approximate to any dangerous fantasy Buzz Aldrin could dream up in his doddering naps.
cougar
Also, as Buzz Aldrin points out:
“And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist”
Maybe someone should warn future Mars geologists that it might not be a good idea to use their ears to examine Mars rocks.
Talking Mars rocks?
(definitely under humor)
Carl Sagan discussed the important reason to colonize mars, life would not be extinguished if life were on two planets and one was hit by a comet. We are in no position to consider terraforming another planet when we are grinding our own planet into a depleated lifeless rock. If we survive the next few hundred years (human population of 0 is possible, re “green sky”), then I would hope/dream that we would be able to populate a 2nd world. Right now, absolutely no money needs to be spent on colonization, that would just be fiddling while our planet is burning.
It’s really quite lame to try to justify human exploration of space as being for the science, or for spinoff technologies.
There’s one reason, and one reason only, to send humans into space: TO SEND HUMANS INTO SPACE.
I know that seems self-referential, but it’s really the reason: we all want to go there (or at least have the option). We want to become an interplanetary species — we want to inhabit a larger world. This also feeds into Carl Sagan’s point, as others have said above, that an interplanetary species has a better chance for survival in the long term.
So we who advocate for manned space exploration need to just stand up and admit that that’s the reason. And it’s a reason that’s worth putting a consistent national effort into, until it can become self-sustainable. Playing games with using the side benefits as the main reason for going just muddies the water and confuses people. Aldrin’s idea about studying climate change is just another of these meek attempts.
We don’t want to do another one-off “moon shot” project. Sure, we could get to Mars in just a few decades if we just push to get there, but there’s no sustainability after that point.
I think one of NASA’s main problems is that it is too project-oriented: the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, the Hubble Telescope, the International Space Station… being so focused on individual achievements causes Congress to be similarly focused on space with a one-thing-at-a-time mentality. This virtually assures that funding levels can vary wildly from year to year, and that inconsistency is one of the most damaging things to all NASA programs.
NASA needs to break its projects up into smaller, more-interchangeable pieces that Congress doesn’t need to consider individually. Congress simply decides whether or not it wants to commit to maintaining a human presence in space, and NASA will tell them how much it needs per year — the same amount each year, not an extra $10B for three years to fund this special project, etc. Maybe set up such funding in 10-year blocks (the way the Farm bills are renewable every 5 years).
Space stations should be composed of small, standardized modules, such as habitation pods, science bays, interconnect modules, ion engines, etc, whose designs are continuously improved on a regular basis as lessons are learned from the models deployed in orbit. All manned launches should be in minimal, disposable capsules that will only go to a space station; extra fuel, engines, etc. needed to go to higher orbits, or the Moon, or NEO asteroids, etc. should be sent up in unmanned rockets, as this will be less expensive (manned launches must be done with lower acceleration, which raises costs, and of course with much tighter safety margins). No one goal (e.g. getting a man to the moon) will be done with any single launch or as a special program. The program is simply to put people into space; the individual missions will be just sub-goals.
We are missing one point here. As I recall, “CO2 is life” to the global warming deniers so if we could send them first to Mars they should thrive quite well in it’s CO2 atmosphere. We would need to send a few extra blankets at a modest cost as Mars is reported to be quite cold I understand.
Test: trying out my real (non-sneakemail.com) email address to see if that’s what’s triggering the moderation filter…
Leif has a good idea!
The cost of the original lunar rover mission was a bit over $800 million. According to wikipedia, the first four extensions cost another $104 million. Add more money because they refuse to die, and call it a cool $1 billion.
The annual salary for NFL players is about $3 billion.
I think we can afford such missions …
NFL salaries bring up a point. Perhaps we, as a civilization, spend too much money on entertainment and not enough on mosquito and malaria control in Africa and India. Perhaps, just perhaps, we do not spend enough on CO2 emission reduction. Does this point need to be hammered home more?
Compared to what the US spends on the F-22, missile defence, or a dozen aircraft carriers, the NASA budget is chicken feed.
So why pick on NASA, which does wonders for the image of the United States?
I don’t think our inability to produce a sustainable society on Earth applies to Mars, mainly because of population. Even our current lifestyle would be sustainable if there were only a billion of us. We could all drive coal-fired Hummers with roofs made of polar bear skins if there were only a few hundred of us. A Martian colony will start out as just a handful of people. Not to mention those people will all be scientists and engineers whose sole mission in life is to create a sustainable colony. Who are very, very aware that failure in doing so means death, not for their grandchildren or nameless people on the other side of the planet, but for them, right there and then.
I’m sure we could put people on Mars sometime this century (maybe not 2029) and I would love to see (and visit!) it, but not, of course, at the expense of climate funding.
Mike D wrote “Even our current lifestyle would be sustainable if there were only a billion of us.” Fear not. Fossil fuels would eventually be used up (irrespective of the effect this would have on climate). Minable phosphate used up, ending industrial agriculture. And on and on and on …
19 Leif: Venus has a lot more CO2…….
We don’t have the launch capacity to boost even a pretend self-sustaining colony into space. If the Peak-Oil people are right we aren’t going to have that capacity any time soon. Space colonization is an intellectual monkey-trap. We have to let go of the goody we’ll never eat before we are destroyed.
Presuming the magical, free-energy booster, becomes available O’Neil’s L-5 colony proposals make a whole lot more sense. It’s a lot easier to mine rocks if you can push them around with an ion engine two weeks from Earth rather than a bulldozer a year from earth. Then the wizards, druids, animists and Jedi can get together and whip up a self-managing ecosystem for us.
As long as we’re wishing for miracles lets use the better class of entertainment to guide our wishes.