I have some real concerns about moon exploration. While I see the value of it being a nearby practice stage for techniques to be used on Mars, the two bodies are really, really different, and going to the Moon will cost us money that we could be using to go farther.
The “practice stage” argument has been swaying me, and I’ve taken the silence of those who know better than I do as an indication that there’s more to it than I know, but no longer. Buzz Aldrin, of the first moon landing, has come forward, saying what I’ve been saying: Let’s go to Mars instead.
But that’s only the part that I already thought of. More importantly, he’s saying to “Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons” and share research between parties. You know, actually work together as a planet. We get to distribute costs, we get to learn at a greater rate, and we get to fucking cooperate, already.
A codicil from Wikipedia:
On September 9, 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel, a proponent of the Apollo moon landing hoax theory, confronted Aldrin outside a Beverly Hills, California hotel. Sibrel said “You’re the one who said you walked on the moon and you didn’t” and called Aldrin “a coward, a liar, and a thief.” Aldrin punched Sibrel in the face. Beverly Hills police and the city’s prosecutor declined to file charges. Sibrel suffered no permanent injuries.
You know what I’d like to see? More unmanned probes. Do you have any idea how much more actual science you can do per dollar with probes? It’s scary.
Oh, and an addendum: Aldrin is noticeably shorter and skinnier than that Sibrel fucker. There’s even video, and it’s pretty impressive.
OK, so, I’m getting chats on this, too. They’re kinda changing my mind.
Mars exploration might be a long way off. It’s very far away and very weird and we wouldn’t be able to get home if something went wrong.
Agreed.
What I’d like to see is a huge swarm of robots going to Mars for every conceivable science experiment. We’ll learn how to make better robots as we go. Ideally, there will eventually be robots that can make their own decisions about implementation of their instructions so the latency becomes less of an issue.
I see a couple of ways for us to get there.
Work on the “Getting There” part:
Go to the Moon as a united Earth effort, as Aldrin suggests. Learn about living outside of Earth. It’s really hard, and it’s way better if it only takes a couple of days to get emergency supplies to you, instead of months or years, depending on where the planets are at the time. Use that time to learn how one would live on a spacecraft and within an artificial ecosystem for years while we have some wiggle room.
While doing this, send a swarm of robots to Mars to learn about the specifics of the place. We know a lot about a couple of dots on the planet, and we know what it looks like from hundreds of thousands of miles away, but we obviously need to know a lot more about it before we try to live there. “Go and come back” isn’t really a “thing”. No one’s every been away from all the things we need to live for that long before. As Ben pointed out in a chat the other day, we don’t actually know how ecosystems work. We’ve got Aristotle-level understanding of a Von Braun-scale problem.
Work on the “We” part:
We keep sending robots, improving our telepresence capabilities and automated decisionmaking capabilities until “we” are effectively there. I don’t think this is any less science fictiony than figuring out how to make an ecosystem. They both have to do with figuring out ways to do things only nature does, as far as we know. They’re both extremely complex systems with imperceptibly subtle emergent behaviors.
Either way, we do the same things: learn the shit out of that fucker, ourselves, and nature. In short, do science. We can figure out from what we’ve learned later what to do next.
youre right,
yes,