I watched a Space Shuttle launch last week, the first one I’d seen in a long time. I don’t avoid them, but I don’t go out of my way to see them; this probably indicates that I’m deeply scarred from having watched the Challenger asplode on live TV 20 years ago, or something. I dunno. Anyway, it was very interesting, and it indicated to me a very important point, when it comes to the future of the human race:
We are deeply, deeply screwed.
Not because coverage of the launch was handled by a collection of reporters who weren’t good enough to handle the city desk for East Frimrip, Alberta. And not because the shuttle itself had any problems. But I realized: the population of the earth is expected to more than double within the next century or so, as it tends to do every century, and the earth itself isn’t expanding. We have limited resources, and the earth is filled with people who still believe that their job is to reproduce as much as possible. For someone that likes privacy and inexpensive real estate, this strikes me as A Problem.
There are a number of solutions, of course. We could force families to limit their baby-making ways, which is technically probably a violation of their civil rights. We could all just learn to live with less, although this would be a difficult feat for Americans who are used to eating 3 meals a day that would feed an Ethiopian family for 2 weeks. And we could try and find more space.
I’m a fan of this last idea, although it does mean that humans will continue to spread like a virus, but through the universe instead of just throughout the Earth, so it is a short term solution, if by short term you mean “several billion years.” And in that time Sol will have long winked out, so we’re gonna wanna try and get off this rock before then anyway.
I am therefore greatly concerned about the fact that we can’t get a human into space without delaying the launch for two days so visibility can improve, and every time we do so, pieces of the spacecraft fall off. And it costs something like 200 million bucks to get it off the ground and safely back home. And the possibility of maybe putting a man on Mars to eyeball the place is a twenty year project.
We’ve been working on this space travel thing for over 50 years now, and we’re still practicing orbiting Earth? C’mon, man, we should’ve had colonies on the Moon 10 bloody years ago! I should be able to vacation on one of Jupiter’s moons! I SHOULD BE GETTING HORRIBLY DRUNK WITH THREE-BREASTED ALIEN HOOKERS, DAMMIT.
Uh…forget that last bit.
Yuri Gagarin flew into outer space and said “omg d00d teh stars are so clear up here!!!!1!1! lol oops i peed in my spacesuit wtf” in April 1961. So we’ve had over 45 years of practice with manned spaceflight. The Wright Brothers flew their little canvas toy on December 17th, 1903. By 1948, 45 years later, we were using planes to bomb cities, had rudimentary passenger air services taking Indiana Jones to beat up Nazis and steal priceless trinkets, and had even broken the sound barrier. It seems to me like we’re a little bit behind, here.
I think I blame the government. Most of the early advances in flight were made by individuals or well-funded corporations, and yet until the last 10 years or so, every spaceflight effort was run by a government. Because governments are swayed by public opinion (sort of), safety has always been paramount, which means that the cost of a space mission is basically quintupled because of all the redundancy and high quality components. During the birth of flight, planes were built by mechanics who had a spare engine laying around and started nailing wood and canvas together. Sure, people died, but that’s the price of progress. And it’s not like the government is doing a particularly great job of keeping our astronauts safe; unless I’m mistaken, NASA has lost 16 or 17 astronauts during spaceflight or training operations, which is something like 5% of everyone who ever went into space aboard an American spacecraft. (These numbers courtesy some article I think I read once.) I think if private entrepreneurs had been in charge of the space program from the beginning, we might have made some progress, and we’d have more dead rich people, which is always good, from an estate tax perspective.
I was going somewhere with this, but as is my wont, I forgot what it was. Oh well.
We had a good weekend; lots of sun, so I was able to get some digging done, put new pedals on my mountain bike and test them out, and we had the Brandywiners Picnic on Saturday at which I demonstrated my volleyball and softball prowess. Oh, and drank beer. We love us some beer.
