Posted on 04/14/2009 3:04:18 PM PDT by LibWhacker
IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms.
Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain — like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners — a pipe dream.
The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do. Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“To get away from you, for one thing. LOL.”
In that case the space program is worth every penny.
LOL
We can only send men to the moon and Mars, and perhaps some other planets moons.
Mercury? too hot.
Venus? too hot.
Jupiter? gas planet.
Saturn? gas planet.
Neptune? gas planet.
Uranus? why anyone would want to go there is beyond me.
Pluto? Not even a planet why go there?
Travelling outside the solar system? Impossible for the next 10,000 years at least.
The resources on anything but the moon are inaccessible and would cost 10,000 times the resources to bring back to earth.
Terraform Mars might be possible in 1,000 years or so.
The liberals making the world unlivable for humans or seeking our extinction is reason enough to seek such an alternative.
I’m biased, though, since my novel “Sirat” is exactly on this topic.
You have a limited imagination. Imagination makes new things happen. Good and bad, to be sure.
Jupiter and Saturn have moons that are very intriguing. Colonizing them may just happen, but not first.
Venus. I have never known a reason for people to even try to go there.
Ditto Mercury, unless there is something good to mine on the dark side. Unlike other planets, it actually has a dark region all the time.
Neptune equally not useful, accept for the gasses for fuel, but you can crack those out of the asteroids. Once again, a nice place to visit and ooh-ahh over, but not to stay.
Pluto would be a stunt, but kind of fun for some future speed races, like people do with race planes now.
As for travelling outside of the Sol group not for another 10000 years? Why? You really need to look up the Alcubierre theories and the ones that are in work now. Warp drive is an approachable theory, with a lot of motivated and highly-educated geeks trying to make it work. You would truly be surprised.
So. Moon and Mars. Both pretty well understood, both fairly close, and both in a temperate zone of the system. A lot of construction materials are on the Moon, and Mars looks to have free water available. Between resource utilization on the Moon and carbon-rich asteroids, building up the Moon, Mars, and free-flight space stations for colonization are achievable for nothing more than hard work. No Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers... just nuts and bolts and hard work, and some creative engineering.
As for bringing resources back, you really wouldn’t need to - but you would use them IN SPACE to build what you need to stay there, and build power-beaming stations to send solar energy streaming downward to collectors on Earth for very cheap power.
It is not utopia, and it won’t make Earth into a Star Trek type of existence, but it would be another worthy effort for humanity to pursue, and a continued improvment of the condition of our race.
-- Hazel Stone, The Rolling Stones
by Robert A. Heinlein, 1952
OK, I would jump behind the space program if they would just change the name of Uranus.
I can’t say it without laughing.
I mean come on.
At the very least, choose a flight that offers snacks.
And for god’s sake, don’t go coach, 800 years in those
narrow bunks eeeeeek.
It's the Peter Principle of civilization, an inability to see things in their true perspective:
Society Has Finally Risen To The Level Of Its Own Incompetence
“Tell me then, O Great Cynic, why are we still engaging in multiple shuttle missions per year? Why are we sending probes to Mars, etc.?”
How many Big Government programs have you known to stop once they’ve started?
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