{"id":831,"date":"2004-09-15T19:48:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-15T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2004\/09\/15\/831\/"},"modified":"2011-05-28T20:02:45","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T01:02:45","slug":"831","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=831","title":{"rendered":"THE FINAL FRONTIER"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a really good article on the Space Daily<\/span> web site about where space exploration is headed in the 21st Century. The bottom line is this: it shouldn\u2019t be like the past or the present, and it ain\u2019t gonna be like Star Trek<\/span> either. NASA wants to keep the Space Shuttle and the Space Station going, and President Bush wants to put humans back on the Moon and take them out to Mars. This article, written by a physician named Joy Shaffer, argues that the time for stuff like this is long past<\/span>. <\/p>\n

Doctor Shaffer\u2019s father was an engineering professor in Florida who taught courses at the Kennedy Space Center; you can tell that she took after the old man in her appreciation for the nuts and bolts (and economics) of rockets and space ships. She makes the point that there ain\u2019t much to gain anymore by sending people to hostile places like Mars; all the science and discovery there could be done more cheaply and safely by robots. Neither Mars, nor any other place in the Solar System, could practically support a human colony anytime soon. And just why would we want to be there anyway? A space base would use up so much energy just to keep people alive and relatively safe that there would be no economic benefit to it (as we\u2019re finding out with the International Space Station). <\/p>\n

About the only cool thing for humans to do in space, now that we\u2019ve proved that we can get there, is to look for other places that may support intelligent life. Ms. Shaffer\u2019s low-energy dream involves space elevators using carbon nanotube fibers, which could cheaply lift up huge observation equipment that could scan the heavens for planets like earth. Right now our telescopes and other sensors can pick up hints of other planets belonging to far-away stars. So far we can only pick up the big ones (like Jupiter or Saturn), and we can\u2019t tell much about them. The big ones like that probably don\u2019 t support life. With a huge array of orbiting detection equipment scanning both visible and invisible light spectrums, though, we could start to pick out planets like our own in terms of size, temperature, presence of atmosphere and presence of water. (And maybe also radio signals that would interest the SETI<\/span> people?).<\/p>\n

Next, using super-thin carbon nanotube sails and radioisotope generators \u2013 stuff that is being developed today — we could build spacecraft that would use solar wind<\/span> to build up speeds of about 1% of light speed. If we could also develop the technique of hibernation \u2013 and Ms. Shaffer, being a doctor, seems to think that we can \u2013 then we could put people on such a spacecraft, put them to sleep for 2,500 years or so, and then wake them up to land on some earth-like planet and live out their years exploring it. They\u2019d be aging at about 1% of the normal rate under hibernation, so they\u2019d be 25 years older once they got there. But, they\u2019d arguably have radio equipment and could beam signals that would reach the earth in about 25 years. So after 2,525 years, we\u2019d finally know what happened to them and if they met any E.T.s out there. Or if we poisoned or blew up our planet up before then (or if the earth just runs out of resources), well, at least someone would be carrying on the human race, somewhere out there.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shaffer seems to think that all of this would be possible before the 21st Century is over. Kids being born right now could live to see it. (But unless they also went into hibernation, they wouldn\u2019t be there when the brave interstellar explorers finally report back on what they found.) The interesting thing is that the good doctor doesn\u2019t rely on any huge revolutions in physics or energy \u2013 she isn\u2019t counting on warp drive or antimatter fuel or even nuclear fusion becoming usable for space travel before 2100. She says that we can do some really cool things based on what we\u2019re developing today; but the biggest hurdle is getting over our mindset that space travel involves a ship with a big power generator attached. So far, aviation and spacecraft design isn\u2019t really all that much different than nautical technology from about three hundred years ago. Maybe it\u2019s time for some bold new goals for space exploration based on new ways of thinking (or actually, very old ways; i.e. hoists and sailboats). I commend Dr. Shaffer for such thinking, and recommend her prophetic article to you. www.spacedaily.com\/news\/oped-04za.html <\/a> She boldly goes<\/span> where hardly anyone has gone thus far!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a really good article on the Space Daily web site about where space exploration is headed in the 21st Century. The bottom line is this: it shouldn\u2019t be like the past or the present, and it ain\u2019t gonna be like Star Trek either. NASA wants to keep the Space Shuttle and the Space Station […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/2126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}