Poll: Americans Want NASA To Focus More On Asteroid Impacts, Less On Getting To Mars (npr.org) 127
An anonymous reader writes: Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That's according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. Two-thirds of respondents said monitoring asteroids, comets and "other events in space that could impact Earth" was "very or extremely important." According to NASA, which watches for objects falling from space, about once a year an "automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere," but it usually burns up before it hits the surface. And the instances of larger objects actually making it past Earth's atmosphere and causing any damage happen thousands of years apart, NASA says. The poll also found that Americans want NASA to focus on conducting space research to expand knowledge of the Earth, solar system and universe and they want "robots without astronauts" to do it. If you want to build capabilities for dealing with dangerous asteroids, asteroid mining should be the technology we prioritize, because there's a lot of crossover there.
Nope! (Score:3, Interesting)
Mars, please.
Thanks!
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Well, it's not like we can move to Mars if that happens. Nothing we do to Earth will make it half as inhospitable as Mars, and at any rate it would likely take at least many centuries to relocate the population, assuming we dedicated most of our industry and energy to the task.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to create our first serious self-sufficient offworld colony - but the challenges will be far greater than Europe colonizing the Americas, and the Americas couldn't have hoped to support a mass e
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Space bugs have this idea that they can travel to a world like the ones depicted in Star Trek, and they will be in the landing part and not in a red shirt.
The truth is that traveling and living in space can be best modeled on earth by purchasing an RV. Travel in the RV to places, but never, ever again, leave the RV. That cramped space is your habitat now. For the rest of your life.
Re: Nope! (Score:3)
Hardly, if your RV leaks you won't die. You can can talk about to people all over the world in real time from an RV but not from another planet. Your RV will protect you from the dangerous radiation that can harm you on Earth (solar UV) but no habitat of man-made materials can do that for you on Mars, unless you burrow underground you're getting bad dose.
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That reinforces my point. Living the rest of your life in space would be even suckier than living the rest of your life in an RV with the door welded shut.
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Statistics has nothing to do with it.
Statistically yes, there's no hope of preventing them from entering an Earth-collision trajectory. But we could spot them when they do, and then divert them.
Claiming otherwise is like claiming that statistically there's no way to make a box colder than the surrounding room. Technically true - yet there's still a refrigerator in every house in the developed world.
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> Right now, there are much bigger problems on Earth to deal with. One is the invasion of third worlders attacking the USA's southern border. A similar one is the swamping of Europe by third worlders. Another is the totally unsustainable population growth happening in Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent India and South America. We live in a time when women can supposedly have penises, and men can supposedly have vaginas.
One of the biggest problems is that assholes who think like you can an
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Awe you fed the Ac troll. Never feed the AC troll.
Re:There are bigger problems on Earth (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it's hard for Americans to realise this, but in the event of another major eruption at Yellowstone, admittedly in some senses "overdue", it won't be a sweetness and light event anywhere in the world. But the only two countries with any real likelihood of being killed off are the Americans and Canadians. And even for them, the Arctic coast populations are reasonably likely to survive.
Mexico - they'd have a bad year, for sure. Tens of megadeaths. No big deal.
The Rest Of The World ... would mourn their Canadian friends. And sharpen their "Humanitarian Colonisation" plans for carving up the remains.
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I think you vastly underestimate the worldwide pyroclastic rain, gas release, volcanic winter, and other serious unpleasantness that would go along with a supervolcano. On the upper end of the scale it's basically an extinction level event for any mammals above the size of a mouse. On the very upper end, extinction for anything not in the ocean.
Re:There are bigger problems on Earth (Score:4, Interesting)
So, everything larger than a mouse was extinguished, in your stratigraphy, 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 630 thousand years ago?
A touch of background here - before moving onto working thousands of kilometres away, I spent the thick end of a decade steering oil wells to their targets, about half the time tracking tuff deposits from a series of eruptions from the Forties Hotspot. To me, the debris from major volcanic eruptions are just another working tool - nothing to get hysterical about.
Now, someone has primed you with a terror of "pyroclastic rain, gas release, volcanic winter, and other serious unpleasantness", and it wasn't me doing that. I don't know what your sources are but mine are the rock record, ably assisted by colleagues in micropalaeontology, occasionally by heavy mineral provenance analysis (doh! sediments eroded from mountain-root rocks nearly a billion years old include different minerals to sediments eroded from freshly fallen tuff). Speaking as a geologist, on a geological matter, you're overblowing the worries. Sure, much of the continental landmass of North America will be rendered very difficult of habitation, but in a few centuries animals will come out of refugia as they did in the previous eruptions. You certainly can see a faunal signal from the previous eruptions, but it is nowhere near as devastating as someone is making out to you.
Think, if you wish, on this : most volcanic provinces start with a roar, and taper away over a period. At the start of a volcanic sequence, there are stresses from deep in the crust, but no vent to surface. Then you get the first major eruption, creating a vent. After that, there is a fractured zone from the first vent which tends to release the pressures at lower stresses than early in the cycle.
But hey, I'm just a geologist. What the fuck would I know? Believe an arts graduate of a TV producer over me. Where do I send the invoice?
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Low speed melting of ice over centuries does not make requests for such telegenic special effects as really enhance a TV producer's CV. Always factor that into your assessment of what goes onto the cutting room floor when such programmes are bein
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Did the article you read discuss how to make the debris slew by about 90 degrees while in flight. After all, the landslide is oriented towards about N70degE from the head scarp of the landslide, while the "biblical lands" (nobody actually knows where Sodom was, or indeed, if it existed
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I prefer Timecube...
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The reason we went to the moon was because the civilian population wouldn't have tolerated funding the missile and electronics research needed to fight the Cold War.
So the government funded a 'Space Program' which had the side benefit of landing the first men on the Moon.
And I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just where they found people who are more than marginally aware that an asteroid impact is a real possibility...
Also kind of curious how many of the people worried about that sort of thing somehow have acquired the notion that the risk of an asteroid impact is actually pretty high. As opposed to astronomically low.
And then there's the people who think it's possible for the government to only do one thing at a time. Got to wonder just how many of those people they managed to locate....
In other words, they're NOT two mutually exclusive choices.
We can do:
1) Develop the hardware and expertise to go to Mars
2) Continue to look for possible impactors
AND use (1) to actually go to the rock to inspect/divert/demolish same, if found.
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Sure it is - easiest place in the solar system to colonize outside of Earth. You won't be walking around unprotected on the surface of course, it'll be far, far more difficult than colonizing Antarctica would be, but you've got plenty of water and CO2 on your doorstep, which are some of the most important bulk raw materials for building an ecosystem, and all the sand and rock you could want for building protective habitats. Lots of iron everywhere too - they don't call it The Red Planet because it's bashf
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Just where they found people who are more than marginally aware that an asteroid impact is a real possibility...
Um,...on Earth?
Re:And I wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
The average person is probably just getting their info from places like The Daily Mail, where claims of extinction level event asteroids seem to pass "closer than the moon" every few weeks.
You're probably closer to the average person than you'd care to admit.
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Also kind of curious how many of the people worried about that sort of thing somehow have acquired the notion that the risk of an asteroid impact is actually pretty high. As opposed to astronomically low.
The chance of a devastating Earth impact is a great deal higher than me getting into a rocket bound for Mars.
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Just where they found people who are more than marginally aware that an asteroid impact is a real possibility...
There was a massive advertisement campaign on this in 1998, it spoke of a certain Armageddon that would be the result of a Deep Impact.
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So, the Tunguska event never happened then? Your statement is odd considering the very real fact that asteroids are hitting earth all the time and it is only a matter of time before one wipes out a city, that time could be hundreds of years away or it could be tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So, the Tunguska event never happened then?
The chance of any particular person getting killed by a Tunguska-like event is tiny, which is what people are most concerned about.
Reasonable (Score:1)
Poll finds most Americans reasonable people, want reasonable things and prioritize in a reasonable way.
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Poll finds most Americans reasonable people, want reasonable things and prioritize in a reasonable way.
Except it isn't reasonable. Searching for earth-crossing asteroids is done with ground based telescopes. That is not what NASA does.
Nor is there any particular reason it should be an American effort rather than international. An asteroid impact affects the whole world.
It can be a very low budget operation: Just set up a server to collect images from amateur astronomers, and run some software to cross-check them for moving objects. When one is detected, pay some Indian guy $50 to validate it and calculat
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It can be a very low budget operation: Just set up a server to collect images from amateur astronomers, and run some software to cross-check them for moving objects.
And what if you spot one heading for us ?
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And what if you spot one heading for us ?
Then we deal with it.
But the chance is remote. A Chelyabinsk sized rock is not worth intercepting. It is unlikely to do much damage. Even a Tunguska sized impact may not be worth it. The 1908 impact killed zero people.
Bigger asteroids need to be deflected, but since they are bigger they are easier to detect, and we will have more time.
The asteroid Apophis [wikipedia.org] crosses earth's orbit in 2029. We now know that it will NOT hit earth, but it was on track to hit, we would have ten years to prepare. The Eros rend
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Actually it's quite likely that much of the debris would hit Earth - when you blow something up the center of mass must remain on the same ballistic trajectory due to conservation of momentum. All you've done is turn a single impactor into a shotgun blast of smaller impactors.
Now, that might mostly solve the problem - much of the expanding cloud of debris will miss the Earth, and the smaller stuff that doesn't will tend to burn up in the atmosphere, even a large number of them at once probably wouldn't be
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Actually it's quite likely that much of the debris would hit Earth
The delta-v is over 10000 km/hr. If it is a year out, that is nearly a billion km. The earth is 12000 km across. That is an extremely small target, less than 0.01 degrees.
A 150 kT warhead on a target 300 meters across is going to cause a lot more than a 0.01 degree change. The debris will be spread over an area thousands, or even millions, of times the cross section of the earth.
Space is big.
A polar moon base with full sun and ice access 1st (Score:3)
I don't know if there's a crest/rim of a crater at one of the lunar poles that sees constant (or near constant) sunshine as well as is in close proximity to the ice that lies in constant sunshine in the crater below. If there were a perfect site then that would be the first place to "grab" whoever you are... Chinese, American or Russian. I hope all this talk about asteroid impacts and Mars gets pushed further down the list; it all becomes somewhat easier once you've got the resources available off a low escape velocity body that's relatively close. Close enough for 80's web access even.
Maybe there's all this silly talk about the other current "targets" to throw the opposition off in the race for this prime lunar real-estate?
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Whoops:
constant sunshine --> constant shade
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There are indeed a few "peaks of eternal sunlight" near the Lunar poles, and there may well be some eternally shaded craters nearby. But consider for a moment the logistics of actually harnessing those resources: Only the very peaks of the mountains stay in sunlight, and you're probably talking far steeper and more jagged mountains than anything on Earth, thanks to the low gravity and lack of weathering.
You probably don't want to build a base there, since the only way to to navigate them will likely be fl
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Keep an eye out for a plateau or table-top mountain site then... it could happen... a gondola (or two opposed more likely) to run from rim to ice field. Don't need to "rocket" everywhere, not that efficient, wastes resources and dusts the crap out of everything with regolith.
But like you say... trying to set up shop on the pointy bit might be problematic.
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Eventually? Absolutely. But building a multi-mile gondola system that can survive the moon's extreme temperature swings across extremely hostile terrain is probably not the the sort of simple, low-infrastructure endeavor you want to engage in as one of the first lunar construction projects. While a short range rocket "hopper" is relatively simple to build on Earth and ship to Mars.
Non-Scientists Have Opinions on Science (Score:5, Insightful)
With all due respect to the Americans that actually understand the probability of a catastrophic non-Earth object colliding with our planet, most peoples' understanding of the risk comes from the movies Deep Impact, Armageddon, and absolutely nothing else. Thus, this very general attitudinal survey is of no real value. We shouldn't suggest that public opinion is a sufficient substitute for professional opinion.
And for the record, ya, I agree that we should probably be watching the skies more and planning trips to genuinely uninhabitable regions of space until we get a little more of our house in order, but NASA really shouldn't be governed by my opinions either. I may have a much better understanding of probability, astronomy, and astrophysics than most Americans, but even I would defer to your average astronomy/astrophysics PhD.
Re:Non-Scientists Have Opinions on Science (Score:4, Insightful)
About three minutes after I made my post above, it occurred to me why they did this poll, and why the results came out the way they did...
The President (Trump) called for going to Mars.
Therefore, a certain demographic will oppose the idea, no matter what.
This poll presented two mutually exclusive choices so as to gauge the size of that "certain demographic".
In other words, this has little or nothing to do with people's perception of the real possibilities of an asteroid impact, but it has a lot to do with next year's elections....
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Depressing, but I tend to agree.
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With all due respect to the Americans that actually understand the probability of a catastrophic non-Earth object colliding with our planet
I posit that the probability is "five nines" ... almost 100%.
You arent the only poster here trying to suggest that the probability is small. Its anything but small. Its almost certain.
Re: Non-Scientists Have Opinions on Science (Score:4, Informative)
It is actually 100% of course, and will in fact happen multiple times in the future as it has for billions of years. We could even say asteroid impacts with energy that could level a large city happen once a thousand years though odds of hitting city are small.
It's a very rational concern
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We could even say asteroid impacts with energy that could level a large city happen once a thousand years though odds of hitting city are small.
The odds of an asteroid hitting a particular city is much smaller than the odds of that city getting destroyed some other way such as war, volcanic eruption, earthquakes or floods.
Damage unlikley? (Score:4, Interesting)
VERY frightening: Asteroids hitting earth. (Score:4, Interesting)
This Asteroid Has a 1-in-7,000 Chance of Hitting Earth This Fall [space.com]
Will an asteroid hit Earth? Your questions answered. [planetary.org] Quote: JPL keeps an online list of all asteroids with any probability of hitting Earth [nasa.gov]. For example, one of the highest probabilities currently is an approximately 37 meter diameter asteroid called 2000 SG344 that has a 1 in 1100 chance of impact in 2071.
Also, mod Mars down. From Wikipedia, Colonization of Mars: [wikipedia.org] "Human survival on Mars would require living in artificial Mars habitats with complex life-support systems." Or dying.
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The other big problem is that we currently have no proven way to deflect a dangerously large asteroid even if we did detect it years before impact.
As for Mars - complex (technological) life support systems are only required if we choose to go that route. Farms/gardens do the same job without all the high technology, you just need a lot of them to do it. Which probably means finding or engineering extremely radiation resistant plants so that we could get away with cheap inflatable "bubble greenhouses" to c
Normalites are scared little pantywaist cowards (Score:2)
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Football!. It's called Football you fucking "abnormal".
And why aren't you on Mars yet? Haven't you grown the balls?
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Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
...a significant fraction of Americans have trouble finding Canada on a map*; not sure we should take the scientific direction of NASA by public poll.
* know a COLLEGE GRADUATE working professionally for a global auditing firm who thought Hawaii and Alaska were literally in a box in the ocean down SW of California because that's where they were on all the maps she'd ever seen. AND SHE'D BEEN TO ALASKA BEFORE.
I am neither kidding nor hyperbolizing. She was laughing about how stupid it was that the flights to Alaska always ended up with layovers in Seattle "because it's not even on the way!".
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What's sad is that she's working for a global audit firm making one wonder quite how reliable those audits are, really?
Oh, and she's probably making $100k/year too.
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but if an asteroid does wipe out Earth, your ghost will regret insisting that NASA not get us some kind of planetary redundancy.
The chance that I will be selected for transport, and that Mars actually turns out to be a nice place to live, is close enough to zero that I can safely ignore that option.
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OR even more pressing risks, like the one where the biosphere becomes sufficiently polluted that Earth ends up unable to support even the number of humans on it NOW, to say nothing of how many there’ll be in a few decades. You know how the Starks say “Winter is Coming?” Malthus said “Carrying Capacity is Coming.” Not as catchy, but way more scary.
Earth has a real, actual carrying capacity that is a function of watts of sunlight per square meter, times the amount of Earth facing the sun, times the tiny fraction that is arable land, MINUS the amount used up supporting OTHER life that ISN’T us... and there really isn’t SHIT you can do about THAT limit.
Yes, Earth does have an ultimate carrying capacity. Malthus had no clue what it is and neither do you.
The limiting factors for supporting human life are food, water, air, and space. Figuring out which factor is actually limiting is a very difficult and much [rockefeller.edu] studied [unep.net] problem [sci-hub.tw]. There is exactly one study that places the estimate at a trillion humans. That estimate is accurate if you posit the species going all in. It requires things like vertical farming [wikipedia.org] taken to extremes, with the entire population living
It is written....somewhere (Score:2)
But what % of asteroid hits are actionable? (Score:2)
The public is suffering from too many science fiction stories in which we save the planet from a catastrophic asteroid hit.
Pick some arbitrary level of destruction to be deemed "catastrophic". Now, of hits with that or greater impact, what % of those hits might be potentially actionable, given current/projected technologies? Since we can't currently "leave the planet" (A fine long-long term goal, though) that leaves various "blast it off course" or "blast it to smithereens" scenarios.
I'd guess there's a ver
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Why would you want to know the percent? Surely it's only the numerator that matters.
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Now, of hits with that or greater impact, what % of those hits might be potentially actionable, given current/projected technologies? Since we can't currently "leave the planet" (A fine long-long term goal, though) that leaves various "blast it off course" or "blast it to smithereens" scenarios.
I'd guess there's a very small range of object sizes for which we can perform any action to avoid catastrophe.
It's not so much the size that's the problem as it is the orbit. Earth's orbit crosses belts of cometary debris. That's where most Earth impactors come from. Launching a payload that can actually reach an inbound rock in one of those orbits before it intersects Earth's orbit is expensive in delta-v. Impossibly expensive, in most current scenarios. We don't have rockets that can do it right now. We're only sending science missions to asteroids by following ridiculously convoluted and long orbital paths
I agree. (Score:2)
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Let me know if I forgot something...
You forgot to tell us which "sustainable space faring civilization" you've met before.
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Actually, developing the capability to do something about NEO object strikes would very likely be quite good for people who want to go to Mars. It's all about delta-v.
Although on my list of priorities, solar weather is probably a higher priority.
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All I know is that if an LEO object strikes an ATM machine, that'll be the end for the world's grammar nazis.
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Or more likely *inside* asteroids. You need several yards of rock for decent radiation shielding, and a lot more than that for decent impact shielding. When agonizing near-instant death waits for you on the other side of the wall, you really want that wall to be durable.
But planets have most of the resources (the entire asteroid belt masses only about 5% as much as our moon), most of the gravity (because we didn't evolve to deal with Coriolis effects), and sky (which a lot of people like). And basically
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Umm, those aren't what's "soaking up all the air in the room" . The U.S. is by far the richest civilization the world has ever seen, in absolute numbers or per-person. What's "soaking up all the air" is that the rich are pocketing almost all of that wealth themselves due to exploding income inequality, while everyone else fights over the scraps.
Asteroid defense is important (Score:2)
But Mars is the comet defense strategy... multiple baskets and whatnot. Can't we do both?
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But Mars is the comet defense strategy... multiple baskets and whatnot. Can't we do both?
Maybe learning how to deal with asteroids *is* both!
Alternate headline: (Score:1)
Racist Earthlings want NASA to build a wall to keep out meteorites rather than build bridges to Mars.
Mutually exclusive ? (Score:3)
I don't see how the goals are mutually exclusive. A system capable of achieving a permanent presence on either the Moon or Mars, and a vehicle for asteroid mining/collision detection all seem to involve developing technologies that are inherently related.
Data and Opinion (Score:2)
Here is the link to the underlying survey data.
http://www.apnorc.org/PDFs/AP-... [apnorc.org]
I find it very interesting that of the people indicating a desire to visit Mars, half* would be willing to take a one-way trip.
I knew I couldn't be the only one, but that many is surprising.
*Within the margin of error.
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It's easy to say now, but if you're sent a ticket and the launch date is set, you might get cold feet about leaving your loved ones behind (probably) permanently.
Once settlers are actually being shipped to Mars, I wonder how many people will still be willing to go one-way. Once you're no longer one of the first, and it's just like moving to Hong Kong or something.
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Once settlers are actually being shipped to Mars, I wonder how many people will still be willing to go one-way. Once you're no longer one of the first, and it's just like moving to Hong Kong or something.
"Rugged individualists" tend to come in family groups. They won't leave loved ones behind. They'll all go together.
It's how humans settled the Americas, all three times. Four, if you count the abortive Viking attempt. And they stood quite as good a chance of dying as any Mars colonists, so none of it is unprecedented.
That said, nobody is going to colonize Mars any time soon. Elon Musk will be lucky to be landing payloads in the next 6 or 8 years, nevermind people.
thank God for Elon and Bezos (Score:3)
I have no doubt that we will be back on the moon by 2024, but, it will not be NASA's directions that did it. It will be first Elon, followed by Bezos, that get us there.
Hopefully, Bigelow and Ozmens get there as well. They will provide the needed base.
Stupid Americans (Score:2)
the pubilc is not visionary (Score:4, Insightful)
If one had taken a poll in 1492, asking the Spanish public if they should sponsor trips to the New World or focus on defense, trade, and other "things at home", they surely would have preferred the latter.
Most people are not visionary. Indeed, in the late '90s I often told people that book stores were going to mostly disappear in a decade or two, and the response was consistently "no - people don't want to read books on a computer". And here we are. Most people were not able to imagine that computers would change.
Fortunately, we are not relying only on NASA (the government) or public funding for visionary things.
On the other hand, we _do_ need a defense system against asteroids. That is an "at home" thing, and asteroids present a great threat.
Giant Meteor Politics (Score:2)
The connections of this thread back to politics seemed to be the typical illogical jump in Slashdot comments. Then I remember those "Giant Meteor" bumper stickers from the US presidential election saying to "Just end it already".
It is clearly a political issue. Please carry on with the insightful commentary as I'm still undecided in this latest poll.
https://www.amazon.com/Giant-M... [amazon.com]