Congress Wants a New U.S. Military Branch, a ‘Space Corps’
fortune.com
fortune.com
Once the US militarises space, Russia, China and arguably India will feel they have to as well. We cannot, after all, allow a missile gap.
Space is relevant to military use even without putting weapons in space as we've agreed not to do.
This is just organizing these things in a separate branch of the military, in the same way that Russians/USSR have always done - the existence of Russian Space Forces is within the bounds of these treaties, and the same would be for USA.
What a terrifying quotation
Though it's absolutely not on to just blame the military for the military, civilian society elects the politicians that send soldiers into wars, civilian society ignores issues like this and elects the politicians that allow them to fester.
If this actual person didn't do their job because they considered it immoral, everything else being the same, someone else would be found for the job. If "everything else" changed, and the person would be the same (assuming for the thought experiment he's a horrible monster), they would still not get to do the job of lord space death or whatever.
So indeed the finger pointing at soldiers or generals is way too easy, and not productive. As skeptical and critical I may be of them, it's between themselves and their friends if they meet their responsibilities as human beings, just like it's for all of us. That person is much less interesting than the wider questions, and it's positively diabolical to spend more energy on demonizing people working within our (incentive) structures, than examining our potential propping up of those structures. Not that anyone is doing that, just generally speaking.
All that said, bleh to the militarization of space, there is no excuse for allowing it. Occupy Cape Canaveral!
Thus in the interest of increasing our species odds of survival and reducing our dependence on a single planet, we should pursue space travel as soon as possible, regardless what other problems remain unsolved.
But better than space travel is space commercialization. Make space a profit center rather than a cost center. If space can be made economically viable sooner than later, for example via JPL's recent KISS study, so much the better. There's quadrillions of dollars of value in the asteroid belt, enough to forestall earth-based resource wars for generations at least.
But the human race will always be messy, and attempting to focus on fixing that unfixable problem is not a good reason to postpone forward progress.
We can't say that for sure. A lot of conflict come from the fear of scarcity and, if we solve that, we will be largely without conflict.
What will be really complicated is a transition from current economies driven by scarcity to economies based on abundant resources and perfect distribution. A lot of people would rather die before allowing others to have the same they feel entitled to have.
Think of all the improvements to mundane parts of lives that we can attribute to satellites. Improvements in weather prediction increasing crop yields. Improvements in geolocation with GPS inproving search and rescue efforts. Improvements in fabrication technology making all consumer products cheaper. The list goes on and on.
I just wish that the kind of funding that would go to a space corps was instead directed at NASA for fundamental research.
If the major take-away from this is "money can improve our lives", then why are we spending so much of it on military programs in the first place? A fraction of the money dedicated to human lethality is capable of producing ARPANET or GPS - what can the rest of it do?
No. The takeaway is that trying to achieve something that we don't know how to do has knock on effects which improve the things we think we know how to do.
>It'll exist as long as there are entities with conflicting interests.
I meet people whose interests conflict with mine on almost a daily basis. It's a pretty basic part of social interaction to be able to move past those conflicts without violence. I cannot see how war is unavoidable in that sense.
>If nobody is willing to use violence
This is not the same as working to end war. Self-defence can still be justified without dragging war into it. That argument reminds me of the kind of points brought against conscientious objectors who didn't participate in the draft - not all violence is equal.
The violence hasn't been eliminated, it's just been pushed one level higher. There is a state that uses violence to enforce the results of artificial dispute resolution mechanisms.
But I still don't accept that as a human feature, it's a potential human dysfunction. Those who say it has to be that way are simply saying they cannot even imagine the life I live and the people I see for decades, and that's even before the pseudo-scientific explanations like "it's genetic". Let's grant that it "is genetic", whatever that means: we can still compete by being the funniest, friendliest, smartest, bravest, the best lovers and parents and friends and whatever would impress a partner. There's your competition.
Like, in that circle of friends or colleagues, where nobody gets trampled on? The witty person gets to talk a bit more than the dork, that's it. The pretty person gets looked at more than the ugly person. But nobody glares at the dork like "why are you even talking", nobody tells the ugly person to gtfo. You'd still have competition -- but no, you don't have humans tearing each others to shreds and making castes because their parents didn't (or couldn't!) allow them to develop a full blown and trusting personality so that they are always afraid and assume so is everybody else.
Problems of food & water security. Problems of air pollution. Problems of equality. Problems of disease. Problems of enough toys at Christmas. You could always insert a new problem on Earth - of strictly subjective seriousness - to use to prevent that leap. Conceptually it's the: eventually you have to launch, problem. There will never be a shortage of serious problems to solve on this planet.
Why do you have to launch?
If we can't solve our serious problems on Earth, what do we expect to gain by going into space?
(Theme of counless scifi, e.g. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth)
Why did you even buy it in the first place?
Two, I literally bought this computer from a charity auction.
(Are you actually genuinely unclear on why "sell everything you have" is not an ethical imperative, or are you trolling?)
Disclosure: I strongly disagree with his (Singer's) thoughts on this matter.
If we can do so cost-effectively, then we can slowly destroy Earth, move people to Mars gradually as Earth becomes less habitable, and finally leave just a team of miners and nobody else on Earth, to slowly extract the last few resources. Then we need to do the same to Mars, and we need to find another planet, probably outside this solar system, to move people to as we exhaust Mars' resources.
If we can't do that, then we will have Earth-humanity slowly die out as Earth's resources are exhausted, and Mars-humanity slowly die out as Mars' resources are exhausted, and nothing to do about it other than Mars-humans reading Earth's history books and realizing the farce.
Alternatively, we can figure out, as a species, how to provide for everyone without destroying the planet we're on.
If you know what the bound is on the resources needed to satisfy people's desires, and that's a finite number of planets greater than one, sure. But if you don't have a bound, it's going to be far more effective to adjust people's desires. (And if you do have a bound, and it's slightly greater than one, it may still be more efficient to adjust people's desires to get it to less than one than to expend the engineering work needed to build a multi-planet civilization.)
Yes we do because human growth is not exponential and there are limitless resources in space.
Given the history of the argument, it seems forgivable to assume that the people who make it in the context of space travel are simply besotted by the romance of space travel.
In this case, getting nearer to post-scarcity will undoubtedly involve capturing a much larger portion of the Sun's energy output (only one billionth reaches Earth), which will require significantly more developed space industries. Or if fusion becomes viable, we will need to harvest some of the more efficient inputs, such as He3 from the moon.
The technologies we develop to accomplish these endeavors will provide enormous benefits to all humans, including those still living on Earth.
A colony on Mars! I'm sorry, I really don't get the question.
Why do you want one?
If we can mine 1 asteroid, we can get more valuable metals from that than have ever been mined on earth.
Unfortunately, the military is run so inefficiently I tend to say "no" to any idea that gives them more money.
Wikipedia says there's 1.3 million active personnel. They could probably cut that to 100k and move the rest into reserve, and free up a lot of money for the space wars.
This is basically the premise to the book Ghost Fleet, and the inefficiency of the DoD is a significant plot point.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/05441...
Do we need the ability to destroy earth from space when we already have MAD (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction), the nuclear triad (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad), and are currently engaged in proxy/brushfire wars like Afghanistan that have been leaching resources for over 16 years now?
Hacker Gary McKinnon 'claims that while going through U.S. Navy files he also stumbled upon files detailing “fleet-to-fleet” cargo transfer records of “off-world” space stations manned by “non-terrestrial officers” of the U.S. military. He also accessed a file listing 30 “non-terrestrial officers” and their ranks.' - http://www.inquisitr.com/2619406/hacker-gary-mckinnon-may-ha...