Jaquandor points us today to an opinion piece by comic-book writer and novelist Warren Ellis on the public’s waning enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. Ellis is a bit more curmudgeonly than myself — I know, difficult to believe, but as misanthropic as I sometimes get, I can’t quite bring myself to suggest that Twilight fans “could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser.” The woman I love reads those books, you know, and I’d rather not see her turned into Gro-Mor. Go figure.
I also don’t share Ellis’ concern with getting people into space as a hedge against extinction. This is a good reason for colonizing other worlds, to be sure, and it’s one many people believe ought to be paramount, but I myself have never been able to warm to this particular line of thinking. I’m just not enough of a doomsday-ist, I guess; I am less inspired by fear than by nobler sentiments.
Which is why Ellis’ rant doesn’t start to echo my own thinking until right about here:
Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it’s in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.
We’re almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We’re just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.
In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.
Here, here. I have a lot of respect and affection for those Mars rovers that Ellis sneeringly dismisses as “skateboards” (actually, I think I’m guilty of calling them that myself), but it’s the idea of human eyes looking out on those fantastic, literally unearthly landscapes that fires me up. Being human means you do some things simply because no one else has ever done them before, and somewhere along the line, I think we’ve lost touch with that aspect of our nature. I couldn’t care less about the latest cell phone, myself. Buttons, touchscreen, telepathic interface… who cares? It’s a phone. But crossing the horizon, just to find out what’s over there? Now that‘s exciting!
The “hedge against extinction” argument is very strong, for me. Spreading human civilization across the stars is the best possible guarantee that what we’ve produced will endure.
I don’t disagree at all, Jaq. I just find that such appeals don’t inspire me, personally, so much as the “explore the next horizon” stuff. I think they’re both important reasons for going Out There.
IMHO, the “value of human wonder” argument, while exciting, is not the argument that gets us back into manned space flight. And neither is the “human extinction” argument.
The one that works is the business case. Where is the list of all the benefits that space travel has generated here on the ground? Where are the planned experiments, private traveler programs, and other straight-forward revenue streams that mitigate the enormous cost of undertaking the effort?
This may not be the sexy stuff, but it’s what gets the project funded. The “sense of wonder” stuff is the fringe benefit you get after you go through all of the above.
Political leanings aside, I think the country (and its leadership) is finally moving into the “we can’t afford to do everything we want, even if it’s a good idea” mode. Without defined benefits, manned space travel doesn’t stand a chance in that political climate.
Brian, your remarks more or less mirror an email conversation I’ve been having this week with Cranky Robert. Believe it or not, I am not naive about the practical side of this issue, even though I keep rambling on about the high-minded sentiments that excite me personally. I know the “human wonder” thing that I get worked up over — Captain Kirk’s “risk speech,” if that reference means anything to you — isn’t enough to open Congress’ purse-strings or convince people with more prosaic perspectives than my own that spaceflight adds any value to our lives down here.
As I noted in a comment on another post, the problem isn’t that there haven’t been any practical benefits derived from the manned space program — there are actually quite a few — but rather that they haven’t been adequately advertised. In short, NASA has done a lousy job of selling itself. And that’s got to change moving forward. Pro-spaceflight PSAs running during American Idol would be a good beginning, for example.
I agree that the time has come for somebody, whether that’s NASA or the president or Richard Branson or whomever — to make a detailed case for manned spaceflight, laying out a specific, easy-to-understand goal (or a series of goals that build on one another toward bigger and better things), along with some honest talk about the expected costs and the anticipated (or at least hoped-for) ROI, whether that return is in genuine revenue or scientific knowledge. That’s not going to be an easy case to make these days, but I don’t think it’s an impossible one, either. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, this country managed to accomplish huge feats of engineering, and I think we can do it again. You want a practical benefit for people back here on the ground? How about a whole lot of jobs in a revitalized space industry? That’s a selling point that remains frustratingly moot most of the time.
That said, however, can I just note that I hate how everything nowadays is inevitably defined in terms of how much money can be made off it? I know, I’m an idealist and this is a practical world, and there’s only so much money to go around (although this is a question of priorities, really — and priorities are where politics come into the picture). But still… I find it disappointing that so few people find the thrill of exploration enough reason to do cool things. Which was, of course, my original point.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that profit is the only motive for manned spaceflight. I’m saying profit is the means by which you achieve the other motives (to boldly go….)
Without getting too political here, I think our recent round of “we’ll return to fiscal responsibility after these important messages…” has got everyone in a mode of “we simply can’t do everything we want to do, so we need to pick the most important things.” Healthcare reform, for instance, got the last push it needed when the CBO said it would save money in the long run, rather than cost money (even if that isn’t true – the fact that someone made the case cleared the political hurdle for action to occur).
Manned spaceflight has given us advances in medicine, technology, communications, farming, nutrition, and dozens of other areas (and, of course, Tang). What needs to start getting said, and said often, is that exactly none of these advances were planned for in advance. They came out of necessity and/or discovery while we were trying to get to the moon, or to the space station, or even just get into orbit. The “undefined” benefit needs to be quantified, so our leaders have the political cover to make the investment.
That’s the commercial that needs to run on American Idol, not the James T. Kirk speech…
Excellent point about the “undefined benefits,” and I completely agree. I’ve often had the same thought but haven’t quite managed to articulate it. And it gets at the heart of what bugs me about our society’s current obsession with ROI, namely, you can’t always — if ever — predict what you’re going to get out of research done for research’s sake. Sometimes you run across something that can be easily packaged and monetized, and sometimes you just learn something, and who’s to say which is ultimately more worthwhile? But people don’t seem to get that, and I think you’re right that a reminder is in order.
That said, I do understand (and generally support) the need for fiscal responsibility and cost-effectiveness. And I hope you didn’t think I was blasting you personally with my remark about profit. I wasn’t; that’s a larger issue I have with our society in general. As I said earlier, I tend to be an idealist, and that’s not always an easy position these days…
Beating the dead horse just one more time….
The key word in the last sentence of my penultimate paragraph was “quantified,” not “undefined.” There is no such thing (IMHO) as an unpredictable benefit – just differences in the degree of certainty with which the prediction is made. Even though we don’t know exactly what manned spaceflight will yield us, we can still put a number on it based on past experience (even if it’s +/- 50%). Without that, it’s just “Congress spending money” all over again. “Research for research’s sake” should have an expected ROI, even if it’s hard to predict.
And no, I didn’t take anything you said personally. Good discussion…