Hello and thank you for joining me for yet another installment of my blog.
Today I would like to talk about our space program, or lack thereof, and humanity’s misspent time, energy, and money. I want to write about this because space exploration, travel, and colonization have been interests of mine for a while. I feel very strongly about this issue, and I think I know a little bit about it. Besides, it’s just freaking fun to think about and write about. I will put in a little disclaimer that I’m not an expert, but I do think I know enough to write a post on this and I hope that you enjoy it.
Before we get too far into this, I’m going to say that I think our priorities as a species are completely backward. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, then you know this already. This time I mean it in regards to our interest in space. We spend countless resources on killing each other but we haven’t been able to put a person on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972. In my humble opinion, that is completely and utterly messed up. What the fuck is wrong with us, why aren’t more of us outraged, why has this been so normalized so that we don’t even question it anymore?
If we as a species will ever progress to the next stage of our development, then we need to start thinking beyond the world we originated on. The only logical next step in our development as a species is in space. Not only is a human diaspora wise, it is necessary if we are going to ensure our long-term survival. At any moment we could be wiped out by a catastrophic event, and that would be it for us. We have all of our eggs in one basket, and if a gigantic asteroid or an especially aggressive solar flare comes our way, that’s it. It’s gonna be omelette time because all those fuckers are getting broken. But it’s an apocalyptic omelette rather than one of those cheesy tasty deals you can get at greasy spoons.
With that said, is it really such a surprise that we would rather war than explore? The entire space race was just a way for the USA and the USSR to flex their muscle in the first place and was just an extension of the cold war. Let’s be honest, they weren’t up there to push the boundaries of human knowledge and investigate the mysteries of the universe, they were just there to show the other side up. Honestly, it’s kinda sad.
As I mentioned before, there is a perfectly good reason to explore space: ensuring our survival by hedging our bets. But, there are other reasons for it too, reasons that make it so that I cannot quite wrap my head around as to why we aren’t more interested in space exploration. Even in our greedy, shitty society, we should be interested in the potential gains of space exploration. The chief reason here, which is a main reason people tend to do anything, is profit. There are resources, primarily rare heavy metals such as gold and platinum, that we could mine from other planets.
The conclusion I come to here is that there are two main flaws that make it so that the potential riches of space don’t inspire us. One: we are too short-sighted to see that the investment we put in here could pay back in dividends beyond our wildest dreams. Two: the end goal here is not the same as what it should be. In my post about automation I spoke about how automating the labour force could be good for mankind (I also touched on how it could be awful, but that’s not pertinent here). I discussed how automation could increase our general quality of life, free people from mundane and unrewarding work, and provide the abundance to grant everyone a basic living allowance. Now, if the world were being run from the point of view of “let’s make things as good for as many people as possible” then I think we could all agree that things would be quite different in general, and particularly in regards to space travel.
You see, we don’t want too much abundance in our current system. We don’t want too much abundance because we still function under a shitty and broken capitalist system which relies on the relation of supply and demand. If you don’t have scarcity of resources, then those resources lose their value. Essentially, you need people to need things in order to control the people. Because, at the end of the day, we need a way to get people to use their time towards the ends that the people in power want them to use their time for. A population that is constantly worried about having to go to work, is not a population that can look around and think, what the fuck are we doing? Why are we bombing each other? Why do children starve while a select few have more wealth than they could spend in a million lifetimes?
What I am proposing is that we start looking at it from the point of view that we need to get out from under this yoke of oppression. Wealth is only valuable if it creates a quality of life and if you are never happy with the wealth that you have and have an unending desire to constantly pursue more more more, then it isn’t wealth. Rather, it has become a narcotic and you are nothing more than an addict. We should be demanding that the end goal as a species is that we provide a high quality of life for all members of our species, and even ideally for all living things that we interact with. But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself here, let’s just try to focus on ourselves first, self-interest is something most people can get behind.
So, let’s say that the end goal was in fact to provide the highest quality of life for everyone. We know it isn’t, but let’s say that we as a people got our thumbs out of our asses and stopped eating Cheetos long enough that we actually did make that the end goal for our society. If that was the end goal, then the draw of the abundance that space and the exploration and utilization of other worlds could provide would be perhaps enough to entice us to invest in those ends. We would also perhaps lose interest in spending our resources on killing each other in droves since that definitely does not provide a high quality of life, or really any life, for the parties involved.
“But, Ben,” you say, “how do heavy metals provide us with the abundance you speak of? You can’t eat gold.”
Well, no, we can’t eat gold, and although we can wear it, it won’t keep us warm. However, circuitry and any sort of complex electronics require gold due to it’s amazing properties as a conductor. You see, gold isn’t just valuable because it can be made into pretty bangles and chains, no no, it has an actual practical value. Remember my whole post about sustainability and energy and renewable energy, well, couple that with the potential for mass automation, couple that with a space program that is actually a space program and not a bunch of jack-offs launching themselves into low-Earth orbits all the time, and we might actually have the basis for some sort of society that we could be proud of. A society that could provide abundance and begin actually locking into a fraction of the potential of our species.
Okay, I’ve talked a lot about how our approach sucks, but I haven’t actually talked much about space exploration. Sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I think drawing attention to the underlying motivations and some of the reasons, at least as far as I see them, for why our space program has been so stunted is important to this overall discussion.
One thing that really gets me with the whole space exploration bit is that we keep using these super primitive rockets that rely on chemical reactions for propellant. We burn off massive amounts of fuel, which if Kerbal has taught me anything actually limits our crafts because the fuel itself is fucking heavy. We have to pack extra fuel just to carry the fuel that we are going to burn off. Our ships are limited by this archaic form of space travel and it’s essentially the same sort of stuff we’ve been doing forever. The actual spacecraft, the shuttle part, is such a tiny part of the whole unit we send into space. This limits how far we can go, this limits what we can send up and how many instruments the shuttle can have, how many crew members can go on a mission. It sucks. This system of rocketry sucks, that’s what I’m getting at here.
But what’s the alternative? Well, nuclear power for one. I actually think that this is one of the best potential uses for nuclear energy and I’m surprised we haven’t adapted it. On Earth, I’m kind of torn on nuclear power. There’s lots of living things here and radiation kind of fucks with living things. We have little protection from catastrophic nuclear events like meltdowns that occur within our atmosphere. However, our atmosphere protects us against a shit ton of radiation that’s out in space all the time. Our ozone layer particularly manages to disperse a lot of stuff that would dice our DNA up like a 2 year old’s spaghetti.
NASA actually did some R&D on craft with nuclear reactors way back in the day. The program was called NERVA and it stood for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. They developed a rocket that utilized a reactor core that would superheat liquid hydrogen which would then be expelled as a propellant, and it was pretty fucking cool. They never actually launched one of these rockets, but they did work out many of the logistics of such a design. They found that in a vacuum they could get twice as much propulsion out of such an engine, they also found that the mass of the craft, including the fissile materials and liquid hydrogen, would be considerably lighter than all the fuel they’d need in their chemical reaction reliant rockets. As far as the safety factor, even a catastrophic event within our atmosphere held a fairly low risk as the dispersal of the material would mean it wouldn’t be localized enough to cause huge damage and with the kind of reactor core they were working with it was unlikely radioactive material would even be released in a failure. I’m not saying there was no risk for things going wrong, it just wasn’t the huge red herring some people may think it would be.
Here’s the other thing with ships utilizing this kind of tech too, maybe you don’t feel comfortable launching craft that utilizes fission. I can understand that. Setup a colony on Mars then and launch craft with nuclear engines from there. But, then we’d have to actually be serious about our space program and not just looking for any reason to continue splashing around in the shallow end of the pool.
This gets me to my next point, what should our goal with space travel be right now? It’s been a while now since the Kepler telescope was launched. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s like the Hubble space telescope, but newer, better, and it’s looking for habitable exoplanets. Kepler was launched back in March of 2009, which means that for nearly a decade now it’s been scanning the skies and looking for terrestrial planets (that’s to say rocky worlds like our Earth) that lie within what is known as the goldilocks zone. We all know the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, well, the goldilocks zone is the same thing but for solar systems. There is a certain distance around suns (it varies from sun to sun) that is ideal for life. It’s not too hot, not too cold, it’s juuuuust right. So, Kepler is looking for rocky little worlds like our own that are in this ideal zone.
So, this must make us think that our goal should be interstellar travel. Hahaha, no. We aren’t anywhere near this goal. To understand why I would be so discouraging, I want you to consider a few things with me. The closest sun to our solar system (other than our own) is Proxima Centauri. For those of you who are saying, “Nu uh, it’s Alpha Centauri, dweeb!” I say, nu uh, it’s Proxima Centauri, aka Alpha Centauri C. Alpha Centauri A and B are commonly referred to as Alpha Centauri, they’re a binary star system, Proxima Centauri is actually fairly close to them, some scientists think that they should be classified as a trinary system, but I digress. For arguments sake, Proxima Centauri is the closest and is ~4.2 light years away. So, why is this important?
It’s important when we consider the actual limitations of our spacecraft at current. We have found a bunch of exoplanets, but we aren’t going to get to them anytime soon. As far as we know, faster than light travel is impossible. So, we need to figure out a way to get up to a reasonable fraction of light speed. If we could do that, then interstellar missions begin to become possible, although long and arduous. Light speed is 3.00 x 10^8 m/s, or 1.08 billion km/h. So far, our very fastest spacecraft ever was the New Horizons probe, and that sucker could only move 58,000 km/h. That’s like 0.0054% of light speed. At current max speeds, and mind you we’ve only achieved this with a probe so far and not a manned craft, we could reach the closest star to us in just over 18,500 years.
Essentially, we aren’t going anywhere outside of our solar system for a little while. If we could get our speed up to 0.5c or even 0.25c then maybe we could start thinking about interstellar travel, and I think we all know that’s the gold standard, but until then, we need to be thinking about exploration within our own solar system.
Now, for most people, I think the idea of finding alien life and another ready-made planet is the most appealing thing. But, let’s be realistic here, it’s not within our reach at the moment. So, let’s not just ignore the whole prospect then and keep bombing each other, let’s do what we can where we’re at. We have a vast solar system. We have a neighbouring planet that we could potentially terraform. We have a moon we could terraform. We have moons of gas giants that we could explore and colonize. The potential within our own solar system is there, and we’re not just going to develop ships that can make interstellar journeys by continuing to launch these bullshit missions into our own orbit. I mean, I’m sure the ISS guys are doing important work up there, but each time we launch something into our own orbit we do run the risk of it coming down somewhere we don’t want it to, *cough cough* Tiangong 1 *cough*.
If we were to begin exploring our solar system and developing a reasonable little space empire in our neck of the woods, then inevitably we would eventually be able to branch out, but this is where we’re at now. It’s been over 45 years since we’ve even been to our own moon, we may not be able to reach the stars yet, but certainly we can do better than we have been.
Bloody Well Write 