When In Doubt, Listen to Carl Sagan
Oh the Places We Won’t Go: Humans Will Settle Mars, and Nowhere Else, Lou Friedman
“Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther. That is, they will never travel beyond Mars.”
Keith’s note: While Planetary Society Co-founder Lou Friedman proclaims that humans will never go beyond Mars, a stunning video, posthumously narrated by Planetary Society Co-founder Carl Sagan, certainly suggests otherwise. I’m with Sagan on this one. Watch this video full screen with the sound turned up. Ad astra, y’all.
The Planetary Society Is Against Human Space Flight, earlier post
It’s a great video, but I’m pretty sure no one is going to be walking on Europa’s atmosphere in just a space suit, or riding a blimp in a fur coat in Saturn’s atmosphere. 😀
More seriously, though, do you think there’s a limit to how far what we would recognize as “humans” will go? I’m pretty skeptical that baseline biological humans will ever travel to other stars, although robots or possibly some modified transhuman descendants might go.
Modified transhuman descendents…ummm…isn’t that what we are already?
Er, somewhat less hairy bipedal cousins of chimpanzees?
Good one.
A) Sagan. Damn that guy could poetry. We are spoilt with sci&space popularisers… until you go back and listen to Sagan… and realise we are now condemned to watching mice stumbling in the footprints of a giant.
B) If we focus on human settlement/colonisation of Mars we certainly will go no further than Mars. But we won’t colonise Mars either, won’t become that “multi-planetary species”. The very act of focusing on Mars will prevent us from taking the steps that would allow the eventual colonisation of Mars.
Listening to Dr. Sagan, I know that we suffer now for lack of leaders.
As I kid I wandered the mountains of Colorado alone for weeks at a time with nothing more than a bedroll (and sometimes a horse), imagining each topped ridge never trod, even by native Americans. This is what stirs the human heart. Carl Sagan never lost that sensibility.
I coulda used GPS on occasion, though.
Apart from the mistake about Europa, the rest of the video is awe inspiring. Its the video that so nicely encapsulate’s how I’d like to see humanity’s next one hundred years in Space.
I have lived on Devon Island several times for a month and for a month at Everest. I have friends who spend a large portion of every year in Antarctica. There are people who’d happily live in these place with families provided the basics. In fact they already do.
Romantic,beautiful, very entertaining. Unfortunately the video resembles little of the true nature of deep space: it is more vacuum than any vacuum you can produce in the lab and the only thing that matters is not even matter, it’s called dark energy!
There is a permanent town – Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island a few minutes away from Devon Island. There are permanent residents in Antarctica. People live year round a few miles from Everest Base Camp at Gorak Shep, Dengboche, Pherice, etc..
Genetic adapt-*cough* engineering.
Perfection.
I think Freidman was being seriously misleading.
He took the whole volume of the visible universe (which is mostly intergalactic empty space) and divided it by the number of stars. This led to his statement:
“…we find about 25 stars per trillion cubic light-years. …
The point of playing with these unimaginable numbers is to illustrate that interstellar travel is a subject of science fiction, not ready for prime time—at least not for humans“
Well, a vastly more reasonable number is the stars near us. My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows a density of not 25, but 4,000,000,000 stars per trillion cubic light-years.
A million here, a million there. Will the final number matter? I’d expect that as a conscious, technological species evolves, those avoiding destruction anyway, the ability to spread beyond a home planet would appear to primitive races to be “magic”. What was that saying about any sufficiently advanced technology?
The Victorian era lingo about electricity, forces and sparks and “-ism’s” galore comes to mind. Here was this magic that our understanding was turning into science in leaps and bounds.
In a universe of dark matter, where we haven’t even figured out the broader reality in which quantum mechanics and relativity are merely specific, limited points of view, it’s a safe bet we’re not even asking the right questions.
Yep. Thinking back on Dr. Friedman’s surprisingly inarticulate comments I was thinking the same thing.
There’s so much unknown about the Universe we find ourselves inhabiting. Your list touches some of the largest issues, none of which have offered even a hint to puny humans.
Interstellar flight? Yes. One day.
Clarke’s Three Laws are three “laws” of prediction formulated by the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
2 is my favorite
And I think law #1 applies to Lou Friedman, above.
He is ignoring the Moon, the asteroids, and possibly some Jovian moons.
I suspect that the only reason there are no communities with permanent residents in Antarctica is the treaty system that effectively bans development of Antarctic resources. Lift those treaties and communities would follow quickly. People can be found to live any place it isn’t physically impossible as long as they can make a living. Tierra del Fuego and Point Barrow, for example.
Exactly.
Actually there are two communities in the Antarctic that date to before the treaty system.
http://www.atlasobscura.com…
Villa Las Estrellas has only 14 homes; one banker, a post office. a small school with a total of two teachers, a gym, a church, and a modest souvenir shop. Everything you’d expect from a typical tiny Chilean village—except this Chilean village is not in Chile, not even close.
and
http://www.atlasobscura.com…
Along withVilla las Estrellas, a Chilean colony with twice as many people, Esperanza is one of the rare examples of a community that chose to inhabit the desolate winds and snowy tundras down south—the other settlements are all military or scientific bases. A treaty established in 1959 bars member nations from establishing territorial claims, but both Esperanza and Villa Las Estrellas were established before the treaty, and therefore immune.
Imagine being a kid growing up in Antarctica…
It is a perfect analog for life on Mars (or the Moon).
Choices people make about preferred domiciles can be confounding for sure. I’m a confirmed denizen of tropical Florida, wondering why those early settlers from England didn’t simply move south when beset by early and awful winters.
My sister lives back in Colorado, saying she can’t stand the heat and humidity.
Eskimos brave stunningly difficult environments.
While this scale is a subset of the possibilities, it’s still instructive. People live at home, wherever that might be. Future humans will long for deep red skies.
Why even discuss it? If his point is the impossibility of human interstellar travel, which is true now, then why argue it is wrong? Friedmann and Cowing will be dead for generations before anyone knows, or cares, or remembers who was right.
He likes the idea of Mars settlement. That will take up enough of humanity’s BEO efforts for a long time to come. Anything beyond will remain a daydream for a long time, whether he says it will always be impossible or Sagan says it will be.
Hard to imagine though, as far as the next few generations go, that with Mars settlement, spacecraft don’t get better and faster, and that it doesn’t open the door to the resources of the solar system. He does not address this plausible next step. He just skips straight to the impossibility of the interstellar, skipping everything else that is beyond Mars orbit but within reach. Asteroids, comets, and the outer planets.
Interstellar; his unimaginable distance numbers can be matched our unimaginable time figures. The time it has taken to get this far, and that remains in the universe. but who would waste his time arguing that interstellar is not ready for prime time, duh.
So realizing technical limits is simply the task of a generation. We cannot limit what future generations will be capable of. Every generation will work within its own limits.
Why did you post more words than I have written on this topic if it is all pointless?
Your short OP was merely a response to it’s headline. If you are going to respond, at least argue the merits and the faults of the article.
You are in attack mode against the Planetary Society, I get that. I can disagree with them but at least I can read/listen to what they have to say.
There is far more in common between you and them (desire to explore the universe) than that which you don’t have in common or agree with.
Ah great, you can download it now. The author said it would be downloadable soon, but I checked back and it wasn’t yet. Now it is and I’m saving that! Great video.
Leaders maximize gains; Managers merely minimize losses.
When the human race is finally extinct, it will be because of spreadsheets, for, with a spreadsheet, you no longer need to kill millions to make statistics.
We are being moved towards a poorer world where dreams are being killed because they disrupt a carefully planned landscape. As dreamers are disempowered, consider how myopic our vision becomes.
When you hear that it is a lot cheaper to pay for an episode of, say, Babylon 5 or Star Trek than to launch even an exploratory satellite, we have fallen into the trap of ST:TOS’ “Talosians”.