Here's where I curmudgeonly insist that manned space exploration is a terrible idea, and the insistence on it has held back unmanned space exploration by decades. We would have livestreaming Jobian dirigible drones right now if we didn't insist on trying to get humans into the least permissive environment there is.
Maybe you don't realize how important humans in the loop are. Astronauts during the Apollo mission could do way more in a much shorter period of time than, say, Mars rovers, even 50 years after.
People can take initiatives on a completely unknown environment way better than our best computers can, including fixing things. That's a reason manned space stations are so useful, you can launch an experiment up there and know than there are smart people who will make things work even if you forgot some minor details. It is even more important the further you go, as latency increases.
In addition, manned space exploration tells us valuable information about ourselves. About our bodies, our mind. It may lead to valuable medical discoveries. And of course, at some point we will want to go there in person, from long term goals like space colonization to simple curiosity, and these are the things we need to know.
And I don't think manned space exploration held back anything. Manned exploration is inspiring, and Apollo was an important political move, it means lots of funding. Pictures of outer space clearly don't have the same impact. It is easy to see, for the decades where no one considered manned space exploration, not much happened compared to what happened in the 70s, including on the unmanned side, simply because of shrinking budgets due to the lack of interest. Yes, we did stuff, but Voyager, Venera, Hubble, Pioneer, etc... all in the 60s and 70s.
I’ll take the other side of that argument. Without human space flight inspiring the public by pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve, you would never get the public on board to get the political buy-in to send unmanned craft to anywhere.
If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
The irony of our physical existence in a nutshell, and fascinating. It's unfortunate that more people cannot decouple this idea from corporate technology and many of its current pioneers. But, I suppose if you're saying this you already know full well that manned space flight has been, and for some time will continue to be, necessary. If for nothing other than the biophysical reality of our species and it's development.
We're not adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
Being realistic is one thing but completely giving up on pushing out the frontier of our capabilities is shameful IMO. Literally mailing it in isn't a substitute for space travel.
"Giving up" seems like the wrong rubric here because you haven't even identified the goal that putting people into space would accomplish so I can't judge whether or not doing that would actually further anything. Whenever I press people on this it generally comes down to "because it's there", which was also a bad reason to climb Everest.
I can think of three worthwhile goals at a minimum:
1) Access the vast resources available elsewhere in the Solar System.
2) Move most polluting and destructive heavy industry off of Earth (this will take big advances in propulsion technology).
3) Provide good habitats for humans and ideally much of Earth's ecosphere elsewhere in the Solar System. Certainly the human population alone could rise to the hundreds of billions if desired/needed.
Surely it'll take a lot of progress to achieve those goals, but they're within reach of our current scientific knowledge. Interstellar travel, on the other hand, is much more of a stretch goal! ;-)
Yup. And if we end ourselves in this physical form, which I don't think any of us knows 100% for certain, a process which possibly could take place again.
> adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
We carried the seeds of our civilization to new continents which carry our gas mixture, food resources, temperature, gravity, and a million other parameters that the human body plan needs. The destinations were completely hospitable.
Good luck in space. It is beyond hostile and offers nothing for our survival. Also, there's really no economic reason to go there.
Yeah, I agree with the idea that planetary colonization is not the best idea.
I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.
But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.
I think anyone expecting space to yield exploitable resources at a feasible cost isn't really thinking this through and/or isn't being real about how big and empty it is.
