I don't believe that having no benefit to visiting these places is what's slowing down progress I believe that we humans have just hit a brick wall. Even if we found a complete duplicate planet Earth exactly 1 AU away from a class G2 star that has patches of bright lights shining during the night we still wouldn't be advancing any faster on our end. That would basically be a proverbial billboard that says "ALIENS!! HUMANS?!" but that wouldn't be able to magically kickstart some revolutionary propulsion tech for us back on Earth. It's not from a lack of trying our best, we are just stuck right now. I will say this though, one thing that always does kick humanity into high gear is warfare. We are damn good at figuring out better ways to kill stuff and each other and a lot of our technological advances come from us figuring out better ways to kill. You want to see humanity get serious about space tech then let us figure out that Russia or somebody has been secretly building a military base on the Moon. America would have a full blown Battlestar Galactica built and park it out there next to James Webb in the next decade. You are correct about needing a reason or benefit for technology to continue. Unfortunately for us humans one of our main "reasons" for ever trying to discover new technology is to figure out a more efficient way to kill you with it and we sort of figure out that we can use that technology for other purposes too. Rockets weren't invented to send people into space, rockets were invented as a way to launch a ballistic missile at people. Sending stuff into space with them was a byproduct.
That's the real irony when I hear people talking about our great history of space exploration. The moon race was just a part of the cold war. It was a race to prove who had the superior system and technology. The motivation had very little to do with science.
Unfortunately you are right. We have even figured out a way to wage war with our own computing devices now! Then there is this...perhaps there is still hope for us.
Yup, but the good thing is that the Apollo missions did advance our scientific understanding, it's just funny/sad that as you said, it wasn't the purpose of it. The main goal of Apollo, a huge scientific undertaking for humanity to send actual humans to another celestial body.... wasn't to explore the Moon... it was to give the Soviet Union the middle finger because they got to space first and to show that communism sucks and we do everything better than you. Competition in terms of warfare isn't necessarily good but it does have it's benefits. We achieved a lot of things during the Cold War space race and a lot of it was mainly to always try to one up the Soviets. If there was still a Soviet Union and still a Cold War then America would have probably had people on Mars by now because the Russians would have been desperately trying to have people on Mars by now and if our scientists even thought the Russians were anywhere close to being ready to go then we would have kicked into super high gear and launched something first. Military drives technology, which is good but from a moral and philosophical perspective it is almost comically messed up. Take helicopters for example. They were built and designed as a practical way for observation and search and rescue and transportation to small landing sites, etc. Civilians showed them to the military and said hey you guys can use this to pick up wounded people and do recon and stuff. Then the military said yeah good idea, lets put guns on it and shoot people with it too can we do that? lol. I laugh because I get it, I'm no hypocrite, my actual real life job is to fly military attack helicopters. But I look back at the history of aviation and laugh because that really is what we do as humans. You give us any type of technology for whatever it's designed for and the military takes it and puts guns on it lol. Humans are mother ****ers lol.
Very cool!!! I was going to try for fighter pilot but couldn't pass the physical. It's too bad we have to use the military to fight wars. They have such cool toys!
The moon program gave the US population and the world to a lesser degree one hell of a morale boast. Growing up in that era the comments I would hear over and over is if we can go to the moon then we should be able to solve this or that problem. Now the men who went to the moon are dying of old age with no replacements in sight. What a bummer.
The EmDrive, NASA's 'Impossible' Space Engine, Really Is Impossible 'Impossible' EmDrive Space Thruster May Really Be Impossible Ion thrusters are the new thing now
Even if the technology existed...only a 'few' humans will leave Earth. There's not enough money on Earth to build machines that can mass-transport 'lots' of humans. And again even if we develop machines capable of light-year distance travel, are humans themselves capable of such travel? 50 years since man set foot on the Moon and I'm astonished humans did not create a habitat on the Moon. Now all the talk about going to Mars but creating an outpost on Mars is many decades or centuries into the future. The idea of humans flying to Saturn or the next closest solar system, without the discovery of new physics and/or near SOL travel, and without trillion$ in funding, is interesting and exciting, but more of a dream...
(7.2*10^9)(e^(0.0109*82)) By 2100, the global population would be at around 17.6 billion. There will be not enough space on earth so humans will go populate elsewhere. Like Mars? NASA Will Reach Unique Metal Asteroid Worth $10,000 Quadrillion Four Years Early-Forbes Thats just one Rock! Mars' proximity to the asteroid belt makes it perfect for space mining. Capture asteroids and drag them into the Martian orbit Carbon pollution on mars will only help to terraform it. So we could have all of our production plants and factories on there
Well you know like , if the Nasa boys and girls got stuck into anti-gravity you could have botanic garden spaceships to go where nobody else has gone before. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the opposite to falling ''down'' is falling ''up''.
I'm no expert on the topic but I don't think mars has sufficient gravity to hold a sufficient atmosphere and the whole colonizing Mars idea is so far off the earth will have reached a crisis population/resources crunch long before then...
2100? How can they even project anything would take that long (other than the trip itself, I suppose). We went from having no airplanes to the moon in a shorter span than that.
I'm wondering whether those crazy ideas come from people who don't know how to figure out population growth or people who don't know how to figure out space. Or, maybe it's people who don't want to be responsible about Earth. There's room in their "logic" for some really big holes to coexist.
I've heard 11billion by mid century...but that's assuming things progress as they are, circumstances can change...environmental collapse effecting the food chain, more countries achieving zero population growth...
Even if so, i don't think they can estimate how long things will take on the order of greater than 30 years. There is too much potential for unanticipated challenges or unanticipated breakthroughs.
Go ahead and assume a good outcome on earth. Yes. In the 1970's China had twice our growth rate. Now, the population of china is growing at a slower rate than is our own. I don't have any info that would suggest we aren't going to have problems - especially with climate change as it affects agriculture. But, we do have to be careful about projecting future growth.
yup, it'll interesting to see what happens... my mother lived to 102, she grew up with horse and wagons lived through both WWs up close and personal, saw the Graf Zeppelin fly over her house as a young woman, radio, tv, man land on the moon and the internet age which completely baffled her...maybe I've inherited her genetics and I'll still be around in 30 yrs to see what progress humanity makes...
