Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.
It's hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect.
But if mankind doesn't eventually colonise other planets then we're almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us.
By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.
Why not focus on things that are problems now?
But ultimately, it's these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I'm not going to open the "what's the purpose of life" can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.
Nor telescopes, but that's beyond the point.
Mankind puts all its eggs in one basket. Our odds of survival against planetary catastrophes increase with the number of planets we colonize. The more spread we are, the bigger the chances. The timescales involved are huge but, just like someone wins the lottery every week, I'm willing to bet that, as we discuss, a civilization we know nothing of is being wiped out by an unforeseen catastrophe precisely because all of them lived on top of a single rock.
Because those problems will never be solved entirely, no matter what we do?
I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.
So I think the only real options are:
1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a
century-long timeframe, but who knows)
3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology
developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I
would bet on)Going for #3, combined with LEO manned spaceflight on a commercial basis, and then maybe a Mars or Lunar mission privately financed, would be fine with me, even if the same money in government would be more productively spent on aid to the poor or lowering taxes. Let the government spend money on purely scientific missions (with robots or telescopes), and maybe on establishing regulatory frameworks and contracts for specific amounts of space freight to cover government missions.
(If things keep going well technologically, we could have a Mars Direct mission for about 2x the cost of a series of movies about a Mars mission... at that point, it actually becomes worthwhile for private financiers to do it for the media rights.)
With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can send up AIs or uploaded humans running on rad-hardened processors.
It goes back to the discussions about terra-forming. Is it better to adapt an entire planet (which is big, by the way) to human needs, or is it better to adapt humans to just live in that environment as-is?
Oh, and this sufficiently advanced technology gives you some other side benefits, including practical immortality, so that is worth pursuing by itself.
Brain uploading. I don't know if Kurzweil's "$1000 computer by 2035" prediction is right, but we'll certainly have it by the end of the century.
Accelerando features a good exploration of this. Your interstellar spaceship is a laser-propelled computer the size of a soda can, with everyone's brains simply uploaded into it.
(Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)
Think of all we've learned by putting humans into space. Think of all we'd have to learn to put humans permanently on the moon - from long-term temperature regulation to ecosystem habitats and materials science.
It's not the destination of the journey that matters. It's what we need to figure out in order to get there that does.
But say you're a Libertarian and have some ideas about how society ought to be structured. Meanwhile, society is clearly structured a certain way which (according to your worldview) is not consistent with that (e.g. the US government, undue tax burdens on the private sector, and bureaucracies like NASA) and it's not particularly likely that you're going to see massive restructuring of it in the near future.
Why would that stop you from taking issue with specific irrational policies of those bureaucracies? If space travel (or carbon-reduction or whatever-you-want) is clearly a goal of society, then you might as well try to cope with reality and at least try to make sure they go after that goal as effectively as possible, and limit the damage it's going to do.
Agreed. But there are other things being looked at in space in the commercial realm (ranging from tourism to resource extraction to energy generation) that require humans.
There is also an argument for positive externalities. I don't think anyone concretely foresaw the technological developments shot off the side of the Apollo missions. That's not a sufficient justification. But if one has two nations, one pursuing manned space missions and one not, the technological developments will happen in one and not the other. A more cosmopolitan perspective would be if you had two universes, one with a species that did this and another without...
In this entire discussion I'm not bringing up national pride, either, which has real-world significance in terms of how it affects the flow of intellectual talent, i.e. the brain drain.
It all depends on your kind of science. For an astronomer, manned space travel is pointless. In fact, space travel is pointless unless we invent some kind of FTL propulsion that can actually put a probe close to some interesting phenomena or allow us to look from another direction.
OTOH, a thousand rovers will tell us nothing about how human societies would organize in artificial habitats. A machine cannot tell how it feels to be able to hide Earth from view with your extended hand.
That's what manned space travel is for. It's not to bring back measurements or soil samples. It's to bring back stories that reminds us how extraordinary we can be.
And to inspire us to be extraordinary.
I, personally, am looking forward to a Kickstarter from a credible private team to start work on a space elevator. And I'm only half-joking.