Friday, July 20, 2012

The virtue of Curiosity and the seven minutes of terror


As a socially-awkward young lad, I grew up reading more than a little sci-fi. For many years, stories of the real life exploits of astronauts just didn't cut it in comparison to the realm of the imagination. Yet as I've come to appreciate a little more of just how complex, demanding and risky working in space actually is, so my respect for rocket science has grown. It is indeed rocket science, after all.

At the same time, I've become increasingly suspicious of pinning any of our hopes on the (for many) cherished dream of one day colonising other planets. Indeed, the two developments reinforce each other. Learning more of the challenges raises both admiration regarding what has been achieved and the barriers to the Star Trek interstellar techno-utopian dream. Not only are interstellar distances staggeringly large, but the technical challenges at every stage are enormous. This video gives a sense of the many difficulties involved in just one step in an operation to get an unmanned rover to our second-nearest planet, a project we've been working on for forty-odd years (with many failures and some stunning success).

I don't begrudge the space programmes their funding. I think Curiosity is a great name for this project; curiosity and wonder are at the heart of knowledge's raison d'être and learning about the cosmos needs no further justification. Furthermore, even from a purely instrumental perspective, NASA's work with satellites looking back at our own planet has been one of the vital ingredients helping us raise our sights from local to global impacts as we've sought to grasp the scale and pace of changes wrought by human activities. So I will be holding my breath in the early hours of 5th August waiting for news of a successful landing (ok, maybe I'll be asleep, but holding my breath in spirit). I too am curious.

But as we seek to understand more about the worlds beyond our world, let's not get carried away by unlikely dreams. Those other wonders of astronomical investigation, telescopes, may have been revealing a growing list of earth-like planets throughout our galaxy over the last few years. Yet the nearest of these, Gliese 581g is still something like 192 trillion km away. At that distance, the fastest space craft we have yet built would take a mere 87,000 years or so to reach it.

For some, the idea of interstellar travel is an inspiring long term goal. In principle, I have no particular problem with this. Yet I get the impression that as the magnitude and proximity of our various ecological threats becomes increasingly apparent to more people, so the dream of escaping from here to start a new life elsewhere has grown. In this form, as potential salvation from our self-inflicted termination, the idea of colonising exo-planets is an illusory psychological defence mechanism, a dangerous distraction from the task of caring for our neighbours and preserving what we can of a habitable world. Yes, perhaps with some currently unimaginable silver-bullet technical breakthrough perhaps we'll be jetting off at significant fractions of the speed of light at some stage. But let us acknowledge that as a way of keeping (a tiny fragment of) the human race alive in a cosmic insurance policy, it is, quite literally, the longest of long shots.

We look to the stars, but our feet remain on the only planet we can realistically inhabit in the timeframes relevant to our self-destructive trajectory.

12 comments:

Anthony Douglas said...

...and you managed that whole post without a single reference to Wall-E. Well done!

byron smith said...

No Wall-E.

But in case you thought I'd miss an opportunity to mention climate change, here is a great quote from a new book by astronaut Dr. Sally Ride:

"[From space,] I could see how fragile Earth is. When I looked toward the horizon, I could see a thin, fuzzy blue line outlining the planet. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then I realized it was Earth’s atmosphere. It looked so thin and so fragile, like a strong gust of interplanetary wind could blow it all away. And I realized that this air is our planet’s spacesuit — it’s all that separates every bird, fish, and person on Earth from the blackness of space. …

"To a person standing on the ground, our air seems to go on forever. The sky looks so big, and people haven’t worried about what they put into the air. From space, though, it’s obvious how little air there really is. Nothing vanishes “into thin air.” The gases that we’re sending into the air are piling up in our atmosphere. And that’s changing Earth’s life-support system in ways that could change our planet forever."
(source)

byron smith said...

Cracked: Six reasons space travel will always suck.

byron smith said...

Guardian: Curiosity and the Martian climate. Here's one of the things that the rover may help us understand better.

byron smith said...

Conversation: If only we had more curiosity about life on Earth.

As most of the comments so far have noted, the final sentence is something of a non sequitur.

byron smith said...

Xkcd explores the energy requirements of getting billions of people out of the earth's gravity well. This isn't to get to anywhere else, just off the planet.

byron smith said...

SMH: Curiosity's dirty little secret. Powered by plutonium that has caused quite a mess to make.

byron smith said...

Do the math: Why not space? A post that examines some of the numbers behind space travel and just how unlikely it is anytime soon. And he doesn't even mention the gravity well problem (see two comments above).

byron smith said...

MSNBC: Curiosity has news, but NASA isn't telling us yet.

byron smith said...

Guardian: Forty years on, how the Apollo legacy has shaped the world.

byron smith said...

VSauce: Will we ever travel to the stars?

byron smith said...

Guardian video: If I die on Mars.