Revisiting the Moon
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From my perspective I see literally thousands of ambitious projects yearly that go unfunded that would do mankind magnitudes more good than sending people into space or generally peering upward.
I have heard the arguments ad-nausea for why investment in space exploration has a positive ROI and find none of them compelling. No, the handful of "dreamers" that it produces is not worth the billions of dollars, No, the handful of technologies [1] that we can find terrestrial use for as a byproduct are not worth the billions of dollars spent.
If invisible braces were that big of a need we likely could have found the solution through much cheaper means.
We should be putting our money into Fusion, AGI and longevity research. Not walkabouts on the moon.
I'm going to try to help open that longevity door first; I expect there to be quite a bit of exciting possibilities behind it (and probably a great deal of social chaos, but we can deal with that when we get there...).
Longevity will be
... I sure hope that wasn't an ironic interruption.
In theory we can, but in reality we can't. That is not how, historically we allocate resources.
And who's to say it has to be a government that does this?
Actually I don't say that at all and intend fully to be on the train for one of these breakthroughs in the private sector.
Companies like SpaceX are stepping up and picking up NASA's slack at a rapid pace.
NASA "invested" 500M into SpaceX long ago. The USG also picked up most of the bill for the Falcon 9 if I remember correctly. I think SpaceX is doing great stuff but lets not get too excited about market demand for space exploration. The bulk of these programs look at earth, which I think are valuable and useful. I think Musk is going to find that he has trouble finding a robust market for manned exploration - the ROI (in every way) just isn't there.
What do you see as the long term (100,000 year) future of the Human race?
The species you are describing (us) evolved to be successful in the specific environment of the earth.
We know enough about our solar system from terrestrial based observation to determine that there is no other habitable planet for humans within our solar system.
Moving us somewhere else without significantly changing our biology or having the unlimited resources to terraform and build synthetic atmospheres would be an exercise in futility given the insane costs.
On the other hand if we are able to live long enough to build Fusion ("free" energy), build superhuman AGI to help us optimize our decisions and activities, and become blended with technology such that our biological limitations are removed, space exploration is trivial.
I want to live forever as much as anyone else who makes this claim, but if an asteroid hits in 20 years, the difference between humanity being completely wiped out and being able to eventually re-start is whether we've got canned apes somewhere off the vulnerable surface.
So that we can build the technologies that will preserve their "information."
Think about it like this, all great breakthroughs were enabled because people were able to transform their thoughts to written or spoken word. Most people do not have this ability, yet the amount of insight worldwide is innumerable. For example first hand accounts of the 1920's are very quickly going away. If we can extract these insights and extend their metaphors longer, the pace of our breakthroughs will expand because we will have better data to compare to.
> build superhuman AGI to help us optimize our decisions and activities, and become blended with technology such that our biological limitations are removed
We are pretty far away from being able to do either of those, far enough away that there could be a major barrier stopping us from doing one or the other that we haven't really seen yet. If that is the case, maintaining both research tracks in parallel seems perfectly rational to me.
Agree completely, which is part of the whole transhumanist thing. I was simply stating it as a condition for exploration - one that few explorers acknowledge.
I choose to believe we don't need to make a choice. We can do it all.
The nice thing about space travel: we know what the intermediate steps are, and we also know it has a history of appreciable technological spinoffs. Like, say, microchips.
Blue sky goals are noble aspirations, but immediate (say in 10 years) achievable goals are vastly more productive.
Spinoff technologies are great, but I bet that any scientific or engineering venture you throw money at will also produce spin off technologies. E.g. AI research makes it's way to hundreds of different industries.
Personally think it's more wise to spread money over many different fields and projects rather than giant mega projects.
We have already thrown money at these problems
Not even close. There is no "Manhattan Project" for any of those like there was for the space race/nuclear bomb.
If the same amount of resources were put toward AGI ($<100M* since 1956) or Fusion ($29B* since 1954) as was put toward just the apollo program alone ($~110B* from 1961-1972). We would likely have achieved the goals.
*All figures inflation adjusted
No such thing as "fill in the blank" engineering to be done to make AGI, Fusion or extreme longevity happen. Nobody knows how to do these things even in principle. Nobody has the slightest clue how to do these things. While we should try; the idea that throwing large amounts of money at such things will do anything but employ large numbers of smart people on something that may be a futile exercise is preposterous.
As for $29 billion on Fusion research since 1954: complete and total bullshit. ITER has already cost $20 billion: and that's one project. NIF is pushing $6-7 billion by now; it's predecessor, NOVA was several billion: that's already more than your allegations of a $29billion total spent on fusion research. In reality, we've spent well over a hundred billion on this topic; and it's about as close to fruition now as it was in the 1950s, because our entrenched bureaucracies keep doing the same stupid things.
That is the problem with fanboys who want science fiction things that may never exist: you can't count. Counting is important.
As a species, we don't need to create AI to make our magical programmable waifus, and we don't need to prolong the lives of those rich enough to afford it and to reinforce the order of things that got them to that point.
AGI is a crock, because we can't even treat the sentient beings we already have with respect. Longevity is a crock, because it doesn't help the next generation.
What is the benefit of billions of the starving and impoverished masses suddenly having longer life spans?
What is the benefit of having an enslaved sentient being to do your simulations and calculations?
Fusion is pretty obviously something that can help everyone.
I believe AI is very dangerous, but theoretically it could be used as a "meta-solution" to every problem we currently have. Want space exploration? Have a super-intelligent AI design spacecraft that make ours look like paper airplanes. Have it design nanotechnology that can cheaply produce everything. Have it invent cures for all diseases. Etc.
Furthermore, these research areas are massive umbrellas with hundreds of competing hypotheses that require testing and vetting in order to find the few winners. There are no shortcuts in Science, and as such there is an immense need for resources to simultaneously explore these paths and determine which ones have potential.
The moon can wait.
The best answer I can muster against framing the question in terms of ROI, is that we suspect we could go to the moon and stay there longer than ever before, and that puts us on a path of opening up vastly more unknowns, more rapidly than we would otherwise encounter by staying on the Earth and sending probes with limited sets of instruments, with narrow perceptions into space.
Indeed, why would anyone travel anywhere on Earth even, when it's cheaper to look at pictures of the destination from the internet, or read the guidebook and be done.
You could dismiss this as a purely humanistic argument, but if at least some of our resources aren't allocated to get to places where we simply don't strictly know the outcomes, we will simply will never grow beyond some confines.
EDIT: I guess the assumption about basketball played on the moon is that most of us would watch that on television. But how much would a team have to make in TV advertising revenues to recover the cost of sending athletes to the moon and keeping them alive there? (A similar question applies to the costs of running the Olympics on the moon.) Ladies and gentlemen, those are fun jokes, but is this kind of joking response going to prompt anyone to invest their own money in a moon mission?
For one we could set up a lunar observatory.
Both of the space telescopes I mentioned are targeted for L2, which is well beyond the Moon's orbit, so there's no chance they'll de-orbit. I believe they use reaction wheels for pointing, not propellant, but as L2 is not stable, you're right that it needs some fuel for station keeping.
On the other hand, the Moon has quakes, and large temperature swings. Wouldn't that be much easier to set up an effectively stationary sunshield for the stillness of L2 instead? Plus, the Moon blocks out about 1/2 the sky, which seems like it might limit what you can do.
Sure :) But it's attaching something to a satellite rather than launching a satellite. After all, the moon is a satellite of the earth, but a natural one rather than an artificial one.
There has been talk of very large liquid based mirrors (limited in size on earth), the far side of the moon is free from radio interference from the earth and a bunch of other proposals. All of them were shot down based on a very simple observation: we don't have people on the moon, nor do we have a power plant or a way to install this stuff or assemble it out of pieces after landing it there.
But that might change.
"Really long term" on the Moon means dealing with moonquakes, which can last for more than 10 minutes. That's going to affect any baseline distances.
We can get a much longer baseline in space than on the Moon. LISA and DECIGO give some idea of how accurate we can expect to measure a baseline that is over 1 million km long. There's no way the Moon can match that baseline, if that's what you're looking for.
Labeyrie has proposed a 100-kilometer space-based 'Hypertelescope' that might be able to directly see continents on planets up to 10 light years away. I strongly suspect this is harder to pull off on the Moon, which has gravity, vibrations, and every-changing thermal stresses messing up the interferometry.
I think you are confusing two different telescope projects. Liquid-based mirrors are for optical telescopes, which aren't affected by radio interference. While there are proposals for 20m-100m liquid mirrors on the Moon, they have the big problem that they can't be pointed; it seems to be more cool than useful, as the lack of research for projects on Earth like the Large Zenith Telescope suggests.
While there's some advantage to using the Moon as a radio shield, the WP page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_side_of_the_Moon points out other difficulties in addition to the simple difficulties you pointed out:
> Before deploying radio telescopes to the far side, several problems must be overcome. The fine lunar dust can contaminate equipment, vehicles, and space suits. The conducting materials used for the radio dishes must also be carefully shielded against the effects of solar flares. Finally the area around the telescopes must be protected against contamination by other radio sources.
As an alternative, the radio telescope can be built in lunar orbit, as, for example, the OLFAR proposal at http://doc.utwente.nl/75270/1/Smallsat_final.pdf . This seems cheaper and easier than building a farside telescope and support infrastructure with the same capabilities.
Two questions: first, in a zero-sum model, why is human exploration of the moon more worthy than other similar unfunded projects? In an non zero-sum model, why is it worthy enough to justify growing the funding pie for science projects?
How many billions of dollars are there in "a little more effort", in your estimation?
It's not in either case in my opinion, and I would argue is it significantly less worth than those other projects.
Even if I can expand available resources because of the promise of these alternatives, or through reinvestment of gains, I still must choose what to do at any time, until I have enough resources to pursue all promising avenues simultaneously.
I would argue though, that even if Big Science were to make a comeback, manned Moon or Mars missions would not be an efficient use of those precious dollars. There is much more pressing and productive research that is starved for funding at the moment. Robotic space exploration is cheap and effective, and scientifically far more useful.
I say this as one of the biggest space nuts I know. Let SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace do their thing and develop commercial space. We'll get our Moon bases eventually, it'll just take time to grow the economic infrastructure.