[LINK] "Manned Space Exploration Is Bullshit"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at his blog Infinite Recursion, my old friend Stephen DeGrace wrote a blog post with the above title.

Stephen's point still stands in the context of Planetary Resources' announcement, would still stand if it succeeded in its goal of mining asteroids for platinum-group metals. Planetary Resources' plan wouldn't involve shipping humans into Earth orbit by the thousands to mine asteroids, but would instead depend on robots. If the robotic asteroid mines were successful, perhaps helping humanity meet its necessary task of producing enough energy to run a high-tech civilization cleanly enough to avoid deterraforming the only world capable of supporting non-trivial numbers of human beings, then manned space travel and even colonization might be viable in the long term. Might. For the time being, getting started on viable robotic asteroid mines is challenge enough.

(Incidentally, after I linked to Stephen's post on Facebook an extensive discussion got started. The comments are worth reading.)

I feel like manned space travel, especially travel to other planets, is a kind of revenge-of-the-nerds wish fulfillment for many of its proponents. Don't worry if those ignorant yobs destroy the Earth. They deserve what they get. We will build a new society elsewhere that will be better without their ignorance.

The less negative type of argument is that life on Earth is finite. Since life on Earth will come to an end, humanity will come to an end unless we colonize other worlds. I'm slightly sympathetic to that argument over the very long term, say on a scale of millennia, but over a timescale that matters to any of us, this argument is meaningless.

Note that I am at pains to say manned space flight. I think scientific curiosity is a good enough reason to continue to send unmanned probes into space.

[. . .]

First of all, it is incredibly expensive. Trillions of dollars expensive for major colonization projects. This will represent a significant diversion of resources away from other priorities - it's not trivial.

Secondly, everywhere in space is very hostile. To put it in perspective, the Antarctic ice cap is a friendly environment compared to anywhere off-Earth in the solar system. Antarctica has water and oxygen, considered major problems to be solved in other settlement schemes, so it already has a leg up. Build thriving cities in Antarctica before you talk to me about the moon.

Thirdly, I am happy to go out on a limb and say that I predict the central speed limit problem of space travel will never go away, i.e., nothing can travel faster than light and we will never find a way around that. So in terms of other solar systems, we would have to put together a mission on a wing and a prayer based on data from automated probes sent to random-ish star systems, with a cycle time of years.

Finally, due to the expense and technical challenges, space travel will never be a mass activity, and any escape hatch into space will be so for only a tiny and privileged few.

No corporation is ever likely to have the resources to do all this, SpaceX notwithstanding, without significant public help. So what, the take-home message is that taxpayers should fund this giant technological whack-off fantasy to the tune of trillions of dollars that will never help most of them in any way out of a nebulous sense of ideological accomplishment in getting some human genes into space? Personally, this is not something I can support.

[. . .]
Space travel was a product of the era of cheap and plentiful energy, which is drawing to a close. Luxuries like space depend on cheap energy, and so to does the ability to feed seven billion people. I think that that latter problem is just slightly more urgent.

Cheap, clean and renewable energy is an absolute prerequisite for humans to have a future more than a generation or two into the future with anything remotely like the lifestyle we want to enjoy and with anything like our present population (i.e., without a massive die-off). Being a humanitarian rather than an environmentalist, this is a vision that I have to endorse. If this problem is solved, then stupid fripperies like space are on the table, but otherwise, space is a waste of valuable time and energy.