Comments on: Space: Why Bother? https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/ Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:51:01 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.25 By: Mike https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/#comment-12559 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:46:08 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=33828#comment-12559 Ted –

Thanks for commenting. 🙂

So do you believe that human beings are going about getting into space the wrong way, or that they shouldn’t even try? (The first comment seems to suggest the former, the second comment the latter).

And why do you think human beings couldn’t relocate to a sufficiently Earthlike planet somewhere else?

]]> By: Mike https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/#comment-12558 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:43:59 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=33828#comment-12558 Lora –

Cheers. 🙂

And that’s the challenge, yes. When space travel isn’t reliant on massive amounts of fossil fuels just to get off the ground, we’re onto a winner.

For that reason, I’m a big fan of the highly speculative “space elevator” concept, little more than solid science fiction at the moment but with a firm grounding in hard science – a mindboggling long cable connected to a large body in low orbit, so spacecraft don’t have to waste fuel getting out of Earth’s gravity well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

When we have one of those, spacecraft can just be physically hauled up and we don’t need millions of tons of exploding fuel to do it.

But at the moment, pipe dreams. We’re a long way off that yet!

]]> By: Ted Brady https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/#comment-12527 Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:26:21 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=33828#comment-12527 . . . . And another thing. Homo Sapiens are a part of Earth; we emerge from the very molecular structure of Earth. We are not visitors who can just move to another galaxy far, far away.

Humans moving away from Sun to another star is absurd folly. The Sooner we forget about it and start acting accordingly the better the chances are for our great grandchildren to survive to age 20.

]]> By: Ted Brady https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/#comment-12525 Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:14:05 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=33828#comment-12525 Naww. Space is NOT worth it as we do it. Our active space program has given us Spam (the meat kind), dangerous Teflon(TM) and Tang orange-style juice drink. Oh, and also a whole lot of military technology that so far is fired at mostly brown people who live on top of our strategic oil reserves.

With the exception of the Hubble Telescope, perhaps nothing that we have built and shot into space should have been done. Humanity cannot afford it and the US certainly can’t.

]]> By: Lora K. https://ecosalon.com/space-why-bother/#comment-12423 Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:15:33 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=33828#comment-12423 Space is worth it. Even if there are imperfections to the way we go about studying space, that can be improved. The cost of not learning about it is too high. Imagine if someone said sea exploration wasn’t worth it? Here’s to hoping Branson and NASA / MIT etc. figure out a way to make space travel, exploration and studies totally green! Cheers (raises glass of rocket fuel to ya)!

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