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Stephen Hawking: Explore space


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Stephen Hawking: Explore space for humanity's sake

CTV News

LOS ANGELES -- Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who spent his career decoding the universe and even experienced weightlessness, is urging the continuation of space exploration for humanity's sake.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/stephen-hawking-explore-space-for-humanity-s-sake-1.1232362

I'm all for benefiting humanity.

Is space exploration really the most cost effective approach to benefiting humanity?

Why not instead:

- subsidized health care?

- subsidized therapeutic medical research?

- subsidized high nutrition foods for impoverished locations?

- lower taxes, so instead of spending it on space adventures, the citizens that actually earn the $money can spend it themselves?

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The reason we need to explore space is if the population of this planet keeps going up its going to get really crowded and resources are strained as it is. Another reason is that one day this planet may not even be habitual and if the human race is to survive we may have to find somewhere else to live.

Still think we should do some of the things that you suggested.

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I'm all for benefiting humanity.

Is space exploration really the most cost effective approach to benefiting humanity?

Why not instead:

- subsidized health care?

- subsidized therapeutic medical research?

- subsidized high nutrition foods for impoverished locations?

- lower taxes, so instead of spending it on space adventures, the citizens that actually earn the $money can spend it themselves?

Because it takes 1 big rock to make all those things redundant and the human race becomes dust.

It is the msot important thing, but while we fight silly wars like children we are making it harder for us to really move forward in that area. All those resources wasted on war it's pathetic.

And as Hilander pointed out population growth is a problem, we need to shift some of our population elsewhere. I'm would enver condone population control through mass genocide etc, but those things you pointed out will help the population grow. Which makes the situation worse.

Edited by Coffey
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I'm all for benefiting humanity.

Is space exploration really the most cost effective approach to benefiting humanity?

Why not instead:

- subsidized health care?

- subsidized therapeutic medical research?

- subsidized high nutrition foods for impoverished locations?

- lower taxes, so instead of spending it on space adventures, the citizens that actually earn the $money can spend it themselves?

All those things you list, multiculture farming should be able to provide. People often think mistakenly that it's the money that's the important resource. But it's actually the labor energy and time we have at our disposal that's important, as well as the freedom to expand our thinking the way we feel better about. Moneys is just a replaceable means to an end.

Rather than explore the far space, why not further focus on exploring the possibility to make Mars a permanently and self-sufficiently habitable planet? As in explore the possiblities to make plants grow there, first within greenhouses then on open air perhaps? I think Hawkins has the right of it, but the biggest threat for us shouldn't be the stagnancy of knowledge per say, but our own habit to keep ourselves busy at meaningless things we could handle more effectively and with less trouble, and thus get more time to work on what Hawkins suggests.

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Cards on table:

I'm fascinated with science, spend decades as a scientist, stridently enjoy the 3 Mars rovers, love HST, etc.

But I'm also a fiscal conservative.

Space adventures are fabulous!

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 10 Apr 2013 at 10:28:03 PM GMT is: debtiv.gif

The estimated population of the United States is 314,754,680

so each citizen's share of this debt is $53,413.70.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

We simply can't afford it!

Pay off the U.S. federal debt. Drive it down to $Dollar $Zero! (a virtual surplus)

Then we can talk about squandering $Tens of $Billions on space adventures.

"The reason we need to explore space is if the population of this planet keeps going up its going to get really crowded and resources are strained as it is. Another reason is that one day this planet may not even be habitual and if the human race is to survive we may have to find somewhere else to live." H

I dearly love the Noah's Arc myth, and the fascinating adventures of Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson.

But it's all fiction!

Last time I checked, it cost NASA about $50,000.oo to insert one pound of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO).

It costs substantially more to send that same pound of payload all the way to another planet in our solar system.

The prospect of finding another habitable planet, with ~1g gravity, an atmosphere of air, in terrestrial ratios pressure (~14 PSI at sea level), is vanishingly small.

Thinking of it as a jaunt, where we load up the rocketship like a mini-van, and drive over there, and if it's not sufficiently Earthlike, just go find a better planet;

not gunna happen! Not in the next thousand years!

And if ever we do undertake to proliferate our species with permanent self-sustaining settlements beyond Earth, it would almost surely be by planting a seed; the minimum number of humans needed to breed up a viable (not biolotgically [genetically] inbred population).

The notion of sending hordes of surplus humans to another star is sheer lunacy. It's seductive, appealing fantasy.

It's not going to happen.

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those things you pointed out will help the population grow. Which makes the situation worse.

I agree. Most reasonable people believe that there are limits to growth, excluding politicians, land developers, investors etc. But the most cost effective solution is not populating Mars. Slowing down human overpopulation is the key. Of course the devil is in the details as they say.

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"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." - Sinclair, Babylon 5

I'd rather not have the universe blink and for humanity to disappear as if we never existed. If we want to survive as a species we need to go to other worlds. Otherwise the extinction of the human race is guaranteed. Will it take tons of money? Of course it will. Will it take centuries to reach the level of technology to allow us to spread among the stars? Again of course it will. But it is worth the effort. And it is in our very nature to explore our boundaries and to attempt the impossible.

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Bottom line.

We expand into space or we become extinct.

The end.

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Bottom line.

We expand into space or we become extinct.

The end.

Clarification:

If for no other reason, cosmic heat death will spell the end of human biology. Therefore human extinction is a certitude. Whether it will come sooner than that, we don't know.

In addition, we've already expanded into space. We've been conducting space travel for decades, for generations!

We've had multiple manned missions to another celestial body.

We currently occupy the ISS.

We've got robots in our solar system, and beyond.

Virtually none of that will affect human extinction one way or another. It hardly counts as a single baby step toward the daunting engineering challenges of transporting a viable human colony to another planet.

The plea for necessity is fine and dandy.

It doesn't quell the currently insurmountable obstacles of scientific innovation, and astronomical cost. Squandering $Tens of $Trillions on such a risky space gambit is not likely to be an expenditure any politician will make lightly.

- Oh! We'll build you a nice rocketship, and blast you off to Proxima Centauri; where you can land, and have a nice time. The rest of us, the ones that ponied up the $Trillions; we'll just hang back here and wave. -

Really?

I'm not sure even a dictator like Kim Jong Un could get away with that one.

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Clarification:

If for no other reason, cosmic heat death will spell the end of human biology. Therefore human extinction is a certitude. Whether it will come sooner than that, we don't know.

In addition, we've already expanded into space. We've been conducting space travel for decades, for generations!

We've had multiple manned missions to another celestial body.

We currently occupy the ISS.

We've got robots in our solar system, and beyond.

Virtually none of that will affect human extinction one way or another. It hardly counts as a single baby step toward the daunting engineering challenges of transporting a viable human colony to another planet.

The plea for necessity is fine and dandy.

It doesn't quell the currently insurmountable obstacles of scientific innovation, and astronomical cost. Squandering $Tens of $Trillions on such a risky space gambit is not likely to be an expenditure any politician will make lightly.

- Oh! We'll build you a nice rocketship, and blast you off to Proxima Centauri; where you can land, and have a nice time. The rest of us, the ones that ponied up the $Trillions; we'll just hang back here and wave. -

Really?

I'm not sure even a dictator like Kim Jong Un could get away with that one.

I meant extinction in the context of becoming extinct whilst still on Earth. All life is finite for one reason or another.

But that does not mean that we could not extend our understanding of the cosmos.

Stephen Hawking is also the man who understood that we should avoid trying to contact Alien species, as the result would be like the English coming and visiting the Native Americans on the east coast of North America. He understood it's a mathematical certainty that Aliens exist - just as he understands that it's a certainty that if humanity doesn't consolidate itself, its assets, its resources, and work together in a united fashion, we're going to kill ourselves on this rock and that'll be the end of it.

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"He understood it's a mathematical certainty that Aliens exist" E

And their conspicuous absence here is instructive.

I'm not addressing extraterrestrial morality as the mainstay of my reasoning here.

But it would be folly not to consider some practical fundamentals.

Space exploration in any sense germane to this thread will never be undertaken by an adventurous freelancer, from an anarchic planet.

It simply can't happen.

Science is collaborative. Where would we be, without the magnificent contributions of:

- Copernicus

- Newton

- Faraday

- Ampère

- Locke

- Einstein

- von Braun

- countless others

How many scientists, working collaboratively did it take to create the first semiconductor component, a transistor (no even a full circuit; just one component within a single circuit)?

Today, silicon chips have hundreds, if not thousands of complete circuits in them. Photo-lithographic micro-miniaturization is a technological marvel!

It puts the computing power of a decades old super-computer in a shirt pocket!

Any civilization stopping by Earth from Planet-Elsewhere will have to have spawned from a peaceful politic.

They'll have to have already sorted out:

- political stability sufficient to do the science

- the science & technology to build the spaceship

- the discipline to endure multi-generational space flight (unless it's a species with a breeding lifespan of millennia; not likely).

If they get all that; the notion that they'd come here to steal our stuff is laughable!

The cost of the plunder would never be covered by the value of whatever they returned to their home planet with.

It costs more to put solid .999% pure gold into low Earth orbit than the gold is worth!

We're supposed to think they'd come here (an expensive jaunt for them!), and cover the expenses of their journey with plunder?

Not rational!

Hawking's right! They're out there!

That doesn't mean they'll ever come here.

But if they do, it'll almost surely be for scientific exploration, not militaristic conquest and plunder.

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I dont understand why shouldn't we try. It's not like we as a mankind have a better goal long-terms, apart from keeping everyone in the planet content. That could already be done very well, but being hung-up with money is people's problem there too. If something spells the end of humanity, it's probably money. "oh look, we must build these nuclear missiles and agent orange factories and spread them so that there'll be jobs and money!", "oh no we can't afford to build a humanity-saving bunker deep into the earth's crust because we're too busy mining and making money". For one.. it feels like money has been allowed to take control over us, just how long ago?

Why care if grasping straws when it comes to survival as a species is rational or not? When you focus on limiting yourself instead of exploring even the most seemingly impossible possibilities, you become more limited. As if covering to a corner, crouched alone and chanting "save me god" because that's all you can do? You need to believe in yourself too.

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Clarification:

If for no other reason, cosmic heat death will spell the end of human biology. Therefore human extinction is a certitude. Whether it will come sooner than that, we don't know.

In addition, we've already expanded into space. We've been conducting space travel for decades, for generations!

We've had multiple manned missions to another celestial body.

We currently occupy the ISS.

We've got robots in our solar system, and beyond.

Virtually none of that will affect human extinction one way or another. It hardly counts as a single baby step toward the daunting engineering challenges of transporting a viable human colony to another planet.

The plea for necessity is fine and dandy.

It doesn't quell the currently insurmountable obstacles of scientific innovation, and astronomical cost. Squandering $Tens of $Trillions on such a risky space gambit is not likely to be an expenditure any politician will make lightly.

- Oh! We'll build you a nice rocketship, and blast you off to Proxima Centauri; where you can land, and have a nice time. The rest of us, the ones that ponied up the $Trillions; we'll just hang back here and wave. -

Really?

I'm not sure even a dictator like Kim Jong Un could get away with that one.

Just because we don't currently have the technology to travel to other worlds does not mean we never will. It also shouldn't stop us to working towards that goal. After all decades of technogical development is nothing on this scale. It took humanity thousands of years to develop ships that could safety travel the oceans. At one point we only had coast hugging crafts. That didn't make sailing the Pacific impossible.

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"I dont understand why shouldn't we try." Mk

Two reasons why it's not a good idea to being planning for it now.

a) We've got vastly better priorities.

"Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket that is fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children ..." President Dwight D. Eisenhower

B) We can't even afford many of those higher priorities.

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 11 Apr 2013 at 08:14:46 PM GMT is: debtiv.gif

The estimated population of the United States is 314,760,132

so each citizen's share of this debt is $53,382.10.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

"Why care if grasping straws when it comes to survival as a species is rational or not?" Mk

Because it's a spending priority.

You might want to spend it on a space adventure that might benefit a half dozen astronauts, or perhaps a hundred.

But for lower cost, the government could instead build a new bridge and highway across a river, and build a hospital there.

Which expenditure do you think will be more politically popular?

SURE! We all LOVE space adventures! That's what Star Trek is for!

There will no doubt come a time, when we've laid waste to Earth so utterly, that escape is the only option.

We're not near enough that stage to begin planning.

Most of what we might begin to plan now about would probably be obsolete by the time it became a survival necessity.

"Just because we don't currently have the technology to travel to other worlds does not mean we never will." C

We kind of do.

It's not rocket science.

Oh.

Wait.

That's exactly what it is.

OK, so it's rocket science.

Well?

We know how.

It's just that a rig big enough to sustain generations of humans aboard such a vessel would be preposterously expensive. Literally prohibitively expensive at the moment.

That's not going to change in the next few decades.

". It took humanity thousands of years to develop ships that could safety travel the oceans. At one point we only had coast hugging crafts. That didn't make sailing the Pacific impossible." C

And that is the exquisite elegance of my proposal / observation!

In your excellent example; we didn't pay government to undertake a $Trillion $Dollar research program on how to make sailing vessels more stable, more seaworthy.

We let the market handle it. Clipper Ships were merchant vessels. They were quick, wind-driven freighters!

How much would it have cost us to pay Uncle Sam to invent the iPhone? That might have cost us $Hundreds of $Billions.

Apple did it for free!

The system works!

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"I suppose money invented those things, not people then." Mk

sear previously posted:

- Copernicus

- Newton

- Faraday

- Ampère

- Locke

- Einstein

- von Braun

- countless others

Which nations use currencies with these names?

"I suppose money invented those things, not people then." Mk

You believe it was the banking system, & or the Treasury department, and not private industry that invented:

- the incandescent light bulb

- the modern computer

- the automobile

- the airplane

- the telephone

- etc.

You have a very exciting future ahead of you!

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If you hold money in such high regard, why dont you think money didnt invent them then? :P

Edited by Mikko-kun
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You accuse me of harboring a delusion I'm incapable of.

I invite you to quote any comment I've posted which asserts that I think money invents "them".

Good luck with that!

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Maybe I do, but dont you think you put more worth to the money than what it's worth to humanity? With it being handled more sensibly as in not letting monetary semantics hinder things when that money isn't really needed to make 99% of the people's lives any better because it's in any case loitering in overrich people's bank accounts and nice boats and whatnot, not that those were bad by themselves, just saying that in this case we let it be away from this kind of stuff. I guess it's people's right to do that, but why not question yourself there? Who needs a million to be happy? If you need a million to be happy, why not work for it by doing some actual work instead of gambling in the stock market or something? I say all this because you say it's a question of money, so I read your post at least, but I dont see how can it be a question of money if we go like this, unless people are bent on "whatever, lets just let them have their money and have the new generations die anyhow, too much trouble for us to try make changes". That's all.

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"but dont you think you put more worth to the money than what it's worth to humanity?" Mk

I wish you'd quote anything I've ever posted, that leads you to think that.

I've never subscribed to tinkle-down economics.

I've never put corporations ahead of humans.

Mine is simply a flawless economic observation. Free markets tend to innovate better than governments.

If you doubt that, compare a Trabant, a rattle-trap common in the Soviet Union before The Wall fell,

to a Toyota, or a Cadillac, or a Kia.

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Yeah but those are just two of the choises. Third is for people to work free of total corporation control. Corporations are just another way of controlling people than government, and control restricts you from going Leonardo DaVinci or Einstein style, both did their thing despite of what might've been more financially appealing. And financial appeal seems to be what corporates are most interested in these days, because the reality of it seems to be an eat-or-be-eaten system which just strives to make money. They focus more on human rights and well-being because that profits them more, because healthy and happy humans work better. Not because they'd want people to be happy only.

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"Third is for people to work free of total corporation control." Mk

It's an option for some; a vanishing option for most, I suspect.

"There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer's orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee."

Excerpt from Unabomb Manifesto: author convict Theodore Kaczynski; sentenced to Lifetime imprisonment without possibility of parole

"Corporations are just another way of controlling people than government" Mk

Might ruffle a feather at a message board here or there. I don't think it's that.

When the chairman of the board assembles his corporate board, to address plans for growth in the coming year, I doubt s/he says:

In the next 12 months, we need to find more ways to control people!

Not likely.

Instead, they say: In the next 12 months, we need to continue to grow, to strengthen our marketshare, and improve our revenue for our shareholders.

That's hardly about controlling people!

I worked for decades for a Fortune 500.

I don't feel resentful about it. I think it was time well spent. I learned a lot, accomplished a lot.

"and control restricts you from going Leonardo DaVinci or Einstein style" Mk

Wrong-headed.

Leo & Al were masterful innovators of their craft.

But you're addressing the plight of the common man. It's an intrinsic contradiction.

We'll never have the common man living as the rare exceptional humans that only appear once every few centuries.

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We'll never have the common man living as the rare exceptional humans that only appear once every few centuries.

They're all around the planet, people have more talent than you think. It's circumstances and the belief that they can't be DaVincis or anything that hinder them. You just have to break from your old routines every now and then to find your thing, break a bit more free from that old life which is a squirrel wheel. I'm a very gullible, blue-eyed person even though in a lot of cases I can smell treachery a mile away, someone from who you might be able to cheat a hundred bucks but definetely not someone who you could convert to any world-view or religion if they weren't totally agreeing to it from the bottom of themselves. And I might be a prodigy astrologer, I know it's self-flattering but that's where I might be one of the DaVincis. The thing is though, there's many if's which would had taken that chance away from me or taken me further back from that road. If my cousin and some other people wouldn't had introduced me to the mysteries and conspiracies and that side of the world to begin with, if I had only stayed in a work-playgames-getgirls lifestyle instead of looking into that side of the world, if I had only given to my instinct of comfortability, if I had stuck to only writing blogs about this and that, if I hadn't come across astrology through a dating site to begin with... a lot of things, a lot of ifs. The greatest if is, if I wouldn't had gambled myself to any of these things, if I hadn't taken any of the chances.

A lot of people dont take those chances because they're not socially so acceptable or maybe because they might be hung-up on concepts about what's life supposed to be like, like you seem to be when you say what I quoted in this post. It's just you who says that, you know. That alone doesn't have to make it true. Ask yourself if there's any other science than astrology that allows people to explore their potentials and birth-talents? No? Psychology deals with mainly what people associate as mental dysfunctions, that can hardly be called the same even though astrology has taken a major leap forward because of psychology. What conclusion you can draw from the fact that there isn't really any science like that to which mainstream science community has put the label "accepted". Any science that'd reveal us more of our potentials. Where does that lead us? We dont know so much of our potentials, even though all humans have a sense through which we can see a lot of these things.

The thing is, we're most blind to our own cases, and if I hadn't come across astrology, I'd be still doing something else than trying to probe into the human psyche. And I'm a man with no extra money and another dayjob, at factory, it doesn't exactly support psychological sensitivity so much except that you dont have to deal with power-games and social situations as much. Emphasis on have to, because it's the voluntary social situations that are better than compulsory. If I had the money, 100k euros, I could build a self-sufficient farm somewhere in my country and focus more on astrology, and maybe become the DaVinci in that field. Worklife needs balancing and you need a social life in weekends, and a rest from all that too. That doens't leave so much time for astrology.

And I'm just one of the lucky people who found their talent. It's not that we dont have it, most of us dont try to find it. Those who try, often fail. Those who dont fail, often dont have so good opportunity to develop it more fully. I'm one of the last ones, and in that group I'm still in a lot better position than a majority of this world's blue-collar workers who have even less free time and even more pre-ordained lifestyle (whether it's their choise or not, it's more about the degree of choises and the heaviness of consequences). That's how I see it. And I think my view is more profound than yours because I've come to understand how to find people's potentials and where they may have natural lacks in. Can you say the same? Remember that browsing through people's CV's and working histories and interviewing them is one thing, but getting into their psyche to a greater extent is another.

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"people have more talent than you think." Mk

Please don't guess at what I think.

I have great respect and appreciation for the limitless font of human talent.

I simply observe that the talent of Newton, Edison, & Einstein is rare.

That doesn't diminish the talent of others.

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