Just around the corner from John Quiggin has posted “No planet but this one” at Crooked Timber (link below). His first two paragraphs:
The Voyager 2 spacecraft has just passed through the heliopause and into interstellar space, forty years after it was launched.
On the one hand that’s a stunning technological achievement and a reminder of the wonderful universe we live in. On the other, it’s a reminder that humans will never go out to explore this universe, or even leave Earth in significant numbers.
He then goes on to justify that second paragraph, with various people offering comments, generally intelligent and civil (comments are moderated there).
I don’t know what I think about this. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 is the first event that was both important to me personally (I was 10 years old) and important in world history. By the time we actually and put humans on the moon I was in a rather anti-establishment frame of mind and so was indifferent to the event (as far as I can recall, which isn’t very far). Then, years later around 1998 or 99, I was working a trade show in Orlando, Florida, and decided to go over to Kennedy Space Center. I took a tour and stood somewhere near the launch pad where Apollo 11 was launched. And I saw a full-sized Saturn V hanging from the ceiling of an enormous shed.
I felt that I was on sacred ground. It was from THIS earth here, this patch of land, that humans actually traveled to the moon, got out, and walked around. I’m pretty sure that if I went back there, I’d feel the same way.
So where does that leave me on the question of human space travel? Faster-than-light travel sounds nuts. Returning to the moon, going to Mars.... If we want to expend the resources, yes, we can do that. Should we? That’s a different question. As for permanent colonies, only if the great bulk of materials we need can be mined and transformed on site. And for all I know that may be possible. How comfortable will it be? Well, how comfortable are they in Antarctic? I’d assume they spend most of their time indoors and I figure that’s how it would have to be on the moon or Mars, though quite possibly we’d build enormous structures so the people might be able to walk comfortable for a kilometer or three in a straight line. But outside those enclosures, not so comfortable as outdoors in Antarctica.
Maybe permanent habitation doesn’t make sense. But, as several have pointed out, we have robots and they’re surely going to get better. Just how good, I don’t know. Good enough to mine asteroids and ship the stuff earthward? Maybe. Who knows?
Perhaps every ten years we send a party of humans out and back, as a ritual act, one acknowledging that strange boundary: YES, we CAN leave earth and travel the solar system, but just barely so and at great cost. Too superstitious you say? Do you really think we’ll EVER be free of ritual gestures, of the need for ritual gestures?
If I were a science fiction writer....
That is to say, this is a problem for THE IMAGINATION, and I don’t see that we’ve really grappled with the enormity of the moon landings. It’s easy to say, “Oh, that was just an enormously expensive fluke” and comfortably conclude, “never again.” It’s also easy to spin stories, Wild West stories, of colonizing first the planets and then the stars. After all, we had those fantasies and told such stories before we set foot on the moon.
How do we register the fact of the moon landings, those events? How do we allow them to change our being in the world?
Our sun grows incrementally hotter year by year- one day some hundreds of millions to billions of years from now the surface of our planet will be rendered uninhabitable by solar heat. Later it will be engulfed by the red-giant phase of the sun's evolution and then its game really over, unless we can move out to another planet further out. The universe doesn't care whether we live or die, so we have to.
ReplyDelete