Buzz Aldrin Is Not All That Impressed With Walking on the Moon
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
Can we just burn down the internet yet?
Conclusion: polarizing, divisive, conversation discouraging pot-stirring. Downvoted.
Better informed and more logical is good enough for me, and somewhat hard to dispute.
You don't want to "burn down the internet" if you merely think some people on it are less well informed than you are, only if you think they are lesser people who don't deserve it, or to protect yourself / your group identity from "them".
Some political ramblings, feel free to stop reading.. I lost some respect for Obama when he extrapolated numerous things well beyond his possible term limits, the space program specifically. I want to see him try and do more exciting things while in office. Though I believe the limited budget is starting to make NASA be more innovative again.
Heinlein does it much better.
Most of the Mars Trilogy just discusses the colonization and the issues that come up with doing so. There's a lot of discussion about setting up different sort of habitats, a space elevator, greenhouses etc. Much of this is discussed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAu5PD4OS-w#t=5m00s
There's certainly a lot of KSR's politics that bleed out of that, but he doesn't take the easy way out. His characters don't magically cure cancer, they come up with an assortment of medical treatment that among other things reduce cell division error, given the timescales involved (2020-2200) it's not unplausable that something like that would be invented.
They don't come up with a political system that everyone agrees with. There's a civil war over it (and almost another one). The end product is a federated system on Mars where each colony on the planet has control over its own affairs within some limits. Terraforming is a federal issue, so is water management, the right to health care and other things like that. The full text of the constitution is available in "The Martians". It's quite interesting.
Finally out of around 100k lines in the novel around 100 contain the word "sex". That's a fuzzy metric, but I didn't find that it discussed partying, drugs and sex out of proportion.
Well worth a read if you haven't already.
He is talking decades after the first humans arrive. By that time commercial flights and colonization to mars may be possible.
Buzz Aldrin: To Mars and Beyond!
We should be aiming for colonizing space with one-way trips and subsequent supply drops. The colonies should aim to become as self-sustainable as possible using robotic factories to mine and produce what they need on-location.
Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car. Evolutionary theory has explanations for this sort of behavior.
Well, that's one (wrong) way of putting it. I suspect you may be trolling, but here's some reasons that we might /want/ to pursue space travel:
1) Right now, all of humanity's eggs live in one basket -- literally. One large asteroid strike, sufficiently virulent pandemic, nuclear war, etc, would wipe out our species. Planting a self-sustaining colony on a non-Earth body fixes that.
2) A self-sustaining orbital technology (necessary for a colony) would allow us to build enough solar power satellites to give everyone on Earth enough clean, cheap energy for the next thousand years.
3) Putting a large chunk of our manufacturing on the Moon or in orbit would allow us to reduce the environmental impact of industry.
By the way..."a drug that would make us all happy and compassionate"? Huxley called it "soma", and I would not want to live in the Brave New World.
By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.
Frankly, I think there is some good reasons for a mars base. It's a shorter distance to the asteroid belt where mining could become a profitable idea.
At the very least, aiming for mars colonization would give us something to strive for and develop technology for. The stuff that came out of the moon program is still incredible today. We need big ideas. Somehow back in the 60s and 70s, big stuff managed to get built. We should return to that style of doing things. In my city, Montreal, they can't even replace a damn interchange built in the 60s which is failing apart. One project, compared to about 5 similar scale projects built back then. Instead we get some odd trash disposal system (read wired this month).
it would be all downhill from there :)