The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
Stuff the Moon, stuff Mars, let’s go to the stars
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Was it worth? It is worth while, all, — Pessoa, Portuguese Sea Just going to put down this funny cigarette and write an article … The 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has been the occasion for a lot of breast-beating about our failure to stay there, and go beyond it. After a dozen Americans had walked the grey surface, the program was wrapped up in 1972, as were the embryonic plans for a manned Mars mission. With NASA’s money gradually cut to about 20% of its high point in the 60s (when it took 4% of the US budget) attention turned instead to the Space Shuttle, the Jetstar of space exploration. What killed space exploration was less the decline in valiant human et cetera, than the unfolding of the global recession in the 1970s, segueing into the sludgy stagflation of the 70s, which prompted the US to pull back from non-essential spending. Vietnam had also drained the coffers — in effect, the noble human project of exploring space had been sacrificed to killing as many yellow people as possible. Technology and economics work in symbiosis, even though it looks like the gadgets lead the graphs. By 1969 Xerox PARC was ready to roll out the mouse-computer, the graphical interface, and the early developers of the ArpaNet (the forerunner of the Internet) had seen the processes as connected. For pioneers like Doug Engelbart, computing would develop as already networked. But economically the west effectively closed down for 20 years. Its partial and limited revival in the 1980s gave us a more limited version of that revolution — the un-networked PC (and then the Apple Mac) that didn’t do much more than allow us to make party invites using Chancery font, and spreadsheet our chequebooks. Leave something to the market, and all you get is marginal frou-frous. It took the might of a non-market institution like CERN to develop the web that made the internet (itself a non-market institution) usable for billions. So it’s inevitable that a society dominated by the market could see essentially modest and pathetic aims — get back to the Moon, get to Mars in another quarter of a century — as somehow inspiring. Except they’re not. The Moon is just retracing our steps, which is why some of have suggested bypassing it for the red planet altogether. But though Mars is dozens of times further away than the Moon, let’s face it, it’s still local. And aiming for it emphasises the futility of much space travel. Nothing stretching before us but dead planets and gas giants. That’s why space travel isn’t like the great age of earth exploration, where there were always new societies and people to meet, and usually kill, around the corner. We know space is mostly dead, and contemplating it reminds us of the essential futility of human existence. The only way to get the juices flowing is to aim not for something resembling life — the nearest exoplanet we know of in the “habitable zone” of a star, the orbit band that renders possible the existence of liquid water, and hence sustaining life — whether pre-existing or the life we bring it. At the moment that’s Gliese 581c, a planet about 20 light years away. Part of a band of four around a red dwarf star, Gliese 581c has a circumference 150% the size of earth’s, orbits its star every 13 days, and has a likely surface temperature of between 0 c and 40 c, and is solid not gaseous. Better candidates may emerge as exoplanet searches continue, but this is the one for the moment. Mars is extremely difficult. Gliese 581c is impossible, and therefore much more worth trying. What I’m proposing is a global 100-year commitment, a project that lasts beyond any one lifetime, aimed at developing the technology and beginning the journey. And not just a pissy few bucks off the end of national budgets neither. This is about a commitment to the first whole humanity project, with the 50 largest economies devoting say 12.5% of their annual budgets to it — trillions of dollars a year, funding in parallel the decades of research and development that required to get up a craft capable of a speed even a hundredth that of the speed of light — while also designing the ships capable of sustaining life for the 200 years it would take to get to Gliese at that speed. The point is, of course, that for space travel, with (virtually) no friction, and no gravity, the ships can be as large as we can make them. The whole theme — arks that become self-sustaining communities whose descendants will live to see the end of the mission — is explored in hundreds of sci-fi books, so no point dilating on that. But imagine the phenomenal sense of purpose and drive that would give to lives now. Millions would sign up to be engineers, environment designers. Space travel psychologists and sociologists — how much better would it be knowing that your forty or fifty year career was contributing to this immense human project, rather than designing a better way to download ringtones. New technologies for earth management, etc, would bud off at a massive rate. As successively faster ships were built, waves of them would be launched. Maybe most wouldn’t make it, but the whole culture of the ships would be geared around that possibility — a stoicism around a collective human endeavour in the same way as stoic sacrifice once attached to nations. Mars? We’d barely notice we’d got to Mars. The Moon? A commuter jump, since that’s where the mega-ships would be assembled. Human culture would change. A lot that is unimportant would fall away. Of course, once you’ve even decided on a project like that, you may as well use the first five years of it solving the problems of the earth — universal provision of fresh water, food, healthcare and shelter, reduction of carbon emissions, before moving onto the space thing. Compared to getting to the stars, all that’s a doddle — and deciding that we are going, would suddenly throw into relief how easily solvable existing problems really are, once you bust out of the market framework, and find the will to change the world again. And if you think that’s mad … well, consider the alternative. Now where’s that cigarette? |
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12 Comments
I have admired your work for a long time. This is magnificent.
Hold on a second, are you telling me that i can ‘down-load’ ringtones to my phone to add to the ones i already have!?!? What a world we live in…
But in all seriousness, this is the kind of thinking that is impossible for modern leaders to get away with. It simply will not get them elected for the following term, due to the ‘what have you done for me lately’/’whats good for the hip pocket’ syndrome which has take over modern society.
Wonderful article (until that last paragraph anyway, what’s healthcare and carbon emissions got to do with it?).. perhaps project orion could be resurrected?
Yes, a good article, and veiled comment on the way we drive innovation these days?
The whole US economy spins off the back of better guns and equipment; R&D money gets poored into the military, who discover other things while making new guns, and they sell these to the public. Why not cut out the middle man, stop killing each other, and just invent some cool stuff?
I’m with you Guy.
I agree with some of this Guy but the manned part of space travel needs to be thrown out especially for interstellar travel. Apart from anyhting else what sort of person would have child on a 100 year interstellar journey knowing that child would never see a sunset, never breath fresh air, never walk on a beach and spend their life living in a closed spaceship.
I for one, wouldn’t want such a person on any mission representing humanity.
Nice vision Guy.
This would have to be acted on soon though, because until we find other means of propulsion we will need significant amounts of fossil fuels to get the infrastructure off Earth that we need to build the moon base (which will build the interstellar ships etc)
A beautiful dream Guy. We can only wish that it comes true. Unfortunately, human endeavour is far too short sighted and mired in the banal world of guns, religion, the market and pop culture. We better do something soon because at the moment we have all our eggs in the one basket called Earth.
Guy, guy, guy,
Your timeline for Net computing is wonky, but what the hell. It wasn’t the 70s sludge that killed off ‘visionary’ endeavours, it was the gradual return of the market to something like ‘normal’ after WWII.
Tim Berners-Lee invented http so the folks at CERN could share thoughts about high energy particles. Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the late 70s, and the related technologies were deployed at Chalk Creek missile testing range, before Steve figured they might be useful at Apple.
We can probably thank the post WWII implementation of the Cold, Korean and Vietnam Wars for the Raytheon minicomputers in the Apollo landers. The Apollo project was as innocent as my thoughts about Helen Mirren.
Your Beautiful Dream (of interstellar space travel) is wonky, too. Why would we want to cross 20 light years to visit Gliese 581c, a location that’s dodgier than an Apollo Bay real estate development at sea-level? Far better to contemplate the mystery of “spukhafte Fernwirkung” (“spooky action at a distance”).
Or the night sky, which probably looks much the same from Gliese 581c.
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I’d take a one way ticket to Mars or Gliese, if Fieldings, Tuckeys and Krudds who run our political systems.
Guy, are you being sarcastic? I’d like to see some of that 12.5% of top economies’ budget go towards, umm, I dunno - anti-malarial treatment for vulnerable kiddies, a plate of rice and vegies once a day for malnourished Indians, more assistance to Karen refugees fleeing the Burmese junta… Let’s sort this planet out first before we recreate it elsewhere. And maybe those ringtone engineers can look at building more sustainable infrastructure. I love you normally GR, but sometimes those funny cigarettes get downright comical.
Anna, did you read the last paragraph of the article? As you’ll see I was actually suggesting that the chief benefit of this vision is that it might show us how easy it would be to solve problems on earth - that they were a doddle compared to space travel. Call it a modest proposal….
John M
The first networking of remote computers occurred in the late 60s yes? The GUI was developed in the late 60s yes? Any sort of more comprehensive roll-out of the 2 together - as the early developers assumed would happen - stopped short when the 70s private recession occurred, and govt funding also dried up. the ethernet stuff is a later development. i dont understand your point about berners-lee. thats the point i was making - it was a development not for private gain.
If you think we’re going to travel to the stars by quantum entanglement youre on stronger drugs than i am
what amazes me, Guy, is your ability to write so elegantly while in the grip of such powerful hallucinogenics. that’s quite a feat. bravo.
Repost of the original version that was edited down for today’s Crikey Daily Mail:
Alas, Crikey edited a lot of the significance (and poetic vibe) out of my original submission. Perhaps I should have explicitly pointed out that Woodstock festival was held in the month after the first moonwalk, and it is hard to believe that Joni Mitchell was not influenced by that momentous event. Here is my original post (slight edit by me. Did I go too far with the last line? Couldn’t resist the fun.).
We are stardust
(Billion year old carbon)
We are golden
(Caught in the devil’s bargain)
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
(With Joni on the jukebox, no funny cigarettes required for bliss!)
Noble ideas, Guy, and as a science-geek kid that was sent home from school to watch the Moonwalk I reckon I can match your romantic imagination.
But yes, we have a few problems on the little garden planet, and if we (H.sapiens) want to be around to see it in another 100 years perhaps we should focus a tad more on those problems and get ourselves back to the garden. But wait, the two things are not mutually exclusive; let’s send Wilson Tuckey, Ron Boswell, Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding to Mars! Please. Oh, let’s not deprive the boys of some female company on the long trip: squeeze up lads to make room for La Albrechtson. Truly we will have Planet Janet! And dare I say, a fine gene pool to create the first generation of Martians.