/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6496003
Technological progress has increased exponentially, but so have its costs and consequences. Today most tech exists to mediate concerns previous tech created: Electric cars to diminish the pollution of gasoline cars, cars at all to travel the large distances our mobile society demands, a mobile society to increase worker productivity, and so on and so on.

The second derivatives of costs and consequences -- the rates at which their rates-of-increase increase -- are higher than the second derivative of progress. Returns diminish, and risk goes infinite before reward.

So when is space travel coming back?

The moon? Mars? All these private launch options are coming online, how soon do we take advantage of them in order to visit Europa or Titan?

Still just shuttling scientists back and forth to low earth orbit. Also we've given up on Hubble, the Chinese are the only ones with serious plans to go back to the moon, and the only launch vehicles that still hold humans are Communist.

Happy deathday, Neil.

No. The age of exploration is over. The Chinese might get back to the moon as a stunt, but nobody's going to waste the sort of money required to put people on Mars.

>>5917160
The moon is the world's second-largest pile of dust. We haven't had any reason to go back -- arguably we didn't have a very good reason to go in the first place -- and that's unlikely to change any time soon.

If we had the technology to terraform another planet, we'd have the technology to transform Earth into an ecological Eden for one millionth the cost... so I'm sure we'll do that first.

Right now we're having trouble solving the 400 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere problem... so I assume the 950,000 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere problem tech is a long ways off.

>>5773327
>>5773342
We're not going anywhere in space that won't have the sun available, we're not harnessing fusion, and when we go underground we use a special technology to transport electricity to us... it's called wires.

>>5749750
>>5750086
>you two knuckleheads thinking that evolving is all about physiological features.

your combined stupidity will be noted.

>>5747681
well wither get off your ass and get a job or suffer the consequences of being lazy.

>>5708230
The space station isn't as far away from the earth as, say, geosynchronous orbit is... but it's still reasonably far outside what we consider the atmosphere.

Fact: The nearest star is Proxima Centauri... but only for the moment. It orbits Alpha Centauri A and B which orbit each other. Once Proxima passes to their far side in about 30,000 years, they'll alternate as the closest star every 40 years.

>>5684503
Never.

The good news is: space is incredibly huge, empty, and boring so you're really not missing much. If we really long to visit dead rocks, toxic infernos, or chilly wastelands we can go to the Moon, Venus, or Mars at comfortably sublight speeds.

Okay seriously. Why all the space threads? What's the draw? It's a vast, cold, airless wasteland full of nothing and hydrogen. Why can't we get this excited about efficient sewage treatment, improved battery tech, soil replenishment and other equally challenging and expensive innovations that would have real effect here on Earth?

>>5442998
There's no reason to go to space. It's a bleak, desolate, destructive environment with no air and no hope. The future of our species is on this planet, the one on which we are evolutionarily suited to live. It is full of food, water, and companionship.

The fact that we haven't figured out how to live here indefinitely while simultaneously increasing our population at exponential rates is the important problem, not figuring out how to jump into cold, worthless vacuum.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

>>5442928
There are no major flaws. That said, I believe that NASA has made this sort of project look easy by hiding the enormous care and expense with which they approached every aspect of spaceflight.

This mission will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is quite likely to kill every person who volunteers to go.

I support it completely, mind you, since those hundreds of millions will go to educated scientists and engineers, and then filter into the economy that supports them. It will also serve as an obvious lesson to anybody else who has dreams of leaving this planet any time soon.

>>5060885
That's not the only problem. It turns out that it's really expensive to reach escape velocity to anything higher than low earth orbit.

I has made a sad for you.

The answer to one obvious question is "in order to visit the Hubble Space Telescope". The ISS is a little more than a third as high.