The curse of the elements...
Dec. 27th, 2005 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearThere's talk of going back to the moon, as part of the research in new space-safe gear to manage a longer-term trip to mars in our lifetimes. But I still see things in space continuing to slow, depressingly so, in the short term.
The trouble is that the comparison to the great Spanish explorers (and their later English sailors inspired from Spanish stories and Spanish captures) is utterly inappropriate to space exploration.
And science is to blame.
Cosmology is nice and all, but it never will pay the bills. All science has successfully shown is that the far-distant universe is filled with exactly the same 92 atoms of crap that our own earth is full of (actually one more, because Technetium exists out there naturally where it doesn't here on earth), and the near universe doesn't have enough of anything we either need or want that we can't get more efficiently here. The moon? Iron. No shortage here, especially if we increase our recycling. Mars? Silicon and carbon, but not in a useful state over what we can process ourselves. The comets? Curiosity potential in that they have the same organic compounds we have, and they might have contributed to us and all, but its not like we have a shortage.
In short, what drove the Europeans to cross the great ocean, in the search for spices at first and then GOLD upon failing to find the spice, was profit. The explorers weren't going for their health or for their curiosity, they were in it for the money, like anybody else.
And all science has managed to show us is that there's no money out there.
Trust me, if asteroid "Vangelis" out there (yes there's a mini-planet named for the composer) was full of gold or platinum (or even oil for crying out loud), corporations would be sending probes out by the hundreds and divying up the mining rights.
But there's no gold out there. There's nothing out there that's so valuable that it would be better to go there to get it than to keep exploiting our own planet.
Until that changes, either directly (discovering some gold on an outer moon) or indirectly (getting "warp" drive so going further afield won't be so costly or time-consuming -- OR we start running out of useful stuff here, though that'll be hard because outside of nuclear reactions, the atoms are constants and throwing enough of the right type of energy at a molecule can extract anything), we're never going to really leave this planet.
So get used to the view. In our lifetime, as long as profit is more important than knowledge, its all we're ever going to see...
The trouble is that the comparison to the great Spanish explorers (and their later English sailors inspired from Spanish stories and Spanish captures) is utterly inappropriate to space exploration.
And science is to blame.
Cosmology is nice and all, but it never will pay the bills. All science has successfully shown is that the far-distant universe is filled with exactly the same 92 atoms of crap that our own earth is full of (actually one more, because Technetium exists out there naturally where it doesn't here on earth), and the near universe doesn't have enough of anything we either need or want that we can't get more efficiently here. The moon? Iron. No shortage here, especially if we increase our recycling. Mars? Silicon and carbon, but not in a useful state over what we can process ourselves. The comets? Curiosity potential in that they have the same organic compounds we have, and they might have contributed to us and all, but its not like we have a shortage.
In short, what drove the Europeans to cross the great ocean, in the search for spices at first and then GOLD upon failing to find the spice, was profit. The explorers weren't going for their health or for their curiosity, they were in it for the money, like anybody else.
And all science has managed to show us is that there's no money out there.
Trust me, if asteroid "Vangelis" out there (yes there's a mini-planet named for the composer) was full of gold or platinum (or even oil for crying out loud), corporations would be sending probes out by the hundreds and divying up the mining rights.
But there's no gold out there. There's nothing out there that's so valuable that it would be better to go there to get it than to keep exploiting our own planet.
Until that changes, either directly (discovering some gold on an outer moon) or indirectly (getting "warp" drive so going further afield won't be so costly or time-consuming -- OR we start running out of useful stuff here, though that'll be hard because outside of nuclear reactions, the atoms are constants and throwing enough of the right type of energy at a molecule can extract anything), we're never going to really leave this planet.
So get used to the view. In our lifetime, as long as profit is more important than knowledge, its all we're ever going to see...
