On the other hand, it's fifty years since we went to Moon and in the meantime we haven't even set-up a tent there. We assume that we'll have the technology for deep space exploration but we tend to forget the logistics nightmare of any such endeavor.
On the other hand, it's fifty years since we went to Moon and in the meantime we haven't even set-up a tent there.
In the early fits and starts of the exploration of Earth, there were multiple spans of 50 years where progress was seemingly abandoned and nothing happened.
We assume that we'll have the technology for deep space exploration but we tend to forget the logistics nightmare of any such endeavor.
Environmental technology will be harder than we thought at first, then we'll get the hang of it. Some people will die along the way. Then it will improve exponentially, as economic impetus comes into play.
Environmental technology will be harder than we thought at first, then we'll get the hang of it. Some people will die along the way. Then it will improve exponentially, as economic impetus comes into play.
Unless you know a lot that no one serious claims to know, then this is a statement of what you hope for and maybe personally believe, but for which no evidence exists. The sheer bulk of unknown unknowns in environmental tech, not to mention other assumptions you’ve been making about industry in space and more, are too numerous and prevalent to allow for confident statements either way. You may be right that humanity’s destiny is in the far reaches of the solar system, but it could go many other ways. Maybe we’ll die in the dirt, or maybe we’ll thrive in completely different ways. For all that you know, rather than personally wish to believe, our future may more closely resemble something like a Dyson Swarm constructed by drones rather than hurling ourselves into the dim and cold reaches of space. Maybe we’ll figure out a mutually amicable way to control population rates and make the Earth a Paradise, and leave space for robots. Who knows? Not me, not you.
All of which is to say, please stop passing off something that is less than a hunch as an argument. The core of science is skepticism and a demand for evidence, while the core of pop science is an inverse relationship between knowledge and enthusiasm. Claiming to know what will happen in 50 years is a joke, in 100 years delusion, and in 1000 years religion. There are so many branches and twists and turns, both positive and negative and just plain unforeseen that futurism is crap.
It is more due to politics than engineering or logistics. We should have working linear aerospike engines by now. But that project got cancelled(see X-33). We should have had multiple generations of spaceplanes, one half-assed and costly brick did fly, the other was canceled. Many other promising projects met the same fate.
We had time, technology and even the logistics in place for incremental development. Instead, 'we' threw a bunch of money down the drain and have nothing to show for it.
So we are back to basics, but at least we made a useful leap forward (SpaceX re-usability). Once costs are low enough, new applications will come up, which may become a self-reinforcing cycle.
That's what I hope for, at least.
I think in the 50 years, we've found it's more cost effective with a better return on value (and ultimately safer for all humans involved) to just shoot a robot into space equipped with a camera.
The whole Red Scare/Space Domination rhetoric was a Big Thing. The United States was sure that: sending something into space meant you could hit a target anywhere else in the world (with quite a bit of validation). If you do remember, it was because we essentially stole tech/scientists (willingly, or at least intelligently from a political and "i'm going to not be locked up in the gulag" point of view) from the Nazis at the end of the WWII that we were even able to get into space.
