I can think of lots of candidates for the worst job humans could do. Commercial fishing is incredibly dangerous, and requires exhausting effort in miserable conditions. Stoop labor, like what we compel immigrants to do, is going to mess your body up in the long term, with chronic pain in the back and limbs, as well as being degradingly disrespected. You probably have your own examples of work that you would never want to do. But in my opinion, there is one job that is the ultimate worst.
Human beings are not adapted to microgravity and high radiation. We’ve got enough data now on the consequences of long-term living in space (where long-term is a matter of months — no one is going to be able to live their lives in space).
Human bodies really can’t handle space. Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head, which may be pathological for the brain over the long term—among other things.
It’s a devastating combination of effects with long-term consequences. A short hop into space, like billionaires like to play at, is one thing, but staying up their long enough for your physiology to try to adapt is another. It’s a long gamble in which you try to determine which systems fuck up first.
She also wants to figure out how to help astronauts’ faltering immune systems, which look older and have a harder time repairing tissue damage than they should after spending time in space. “The immune system is aging quite fast in microgravity,” Schrepfer says. She sends biological samples from young, healthy people on Earth up to orbit on tissue chips and tracks how they degrade.
Vision and bone problems are also among the more serious side effects. When astronauts spend a month or more in space, their eyeballs flatten, one aspect of a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, which can cause long-lasting damage to eyesight. Bones and muscles are built for life on Earth, which involves the ever present pull of gravity. The work the body does against gravity to stay upright and move around keeps muscles from atrophying and stimulates bone growth. In space, without a force to push against, astronauts can experience bone loss that outpaces bone growth, and their muscles shrink. That’s why they must do hours of exercise every day, using specialized equipment that helps to simulate some of the forces their anatomy would feel on the ground—and even this training doesn’t fully alleviate the loss.
Perhaps the most significant concern about bodies in space, though, is radiation, something that is manageable for today’s astronauts flying in low-Earth orbit but would be a bigger deal for people traveling farther and for longer. Some of it comes from the sun, which spews naked protons that can damage DNA, particularly during solar storms. “[That] could make you very, very sick and give you acute radiation syndrome,” says Dorit Donoviel, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH).
Then there are the big questions.
And an even simpler ethical question is, “Should we actually send people on these sorts of things?” Green says. Aside from incurring significant risks of cancer and overall body deterioration, astronauts aiming to settle another world have a sizable chance of losing their lives. Even if they do live, there are issues with what kind of an existence they might have. “It’s one thing just to survive,” Green says. “But it’s another thing to actually enjoy your life. Is Mars going to be the equivalent of torture?”
Yes.
Wow, it’s always nice to see a grand ethical question that can be answered so easily.
But is the pioneer way of life virtuous? I don’t think so. We have our own on-planet example of the American westward expansion, which was not at all about heroic, noble adventurers pushing back the foreskin of the wilderness. It was all about colonizers ripping up the environment, killing any people who stood in the way (at least we don’t have to worry about that in space), and suffering hellishly. I think you need to be a psychopath to want this way of life.
On this question, science-fiction scholar Gary Westfahl casts doubt on space travel’s inherent value. In his vast analyses of sci-fi, he has come to view the logic and drive of the enterprise as faulty. “I inevitably encountered the same argument: space travel represents humanity’s destiny,” he says of the impetus for writing his essay “The Case against Space.” Space explorers are often portrayed as braver and better than those who remain on their home planet: they’re the ones pushing civilization forward. “Philosophically, I objected to the proposition that explorers into unknown realms represented the best and brightest of humanity; that progress could be achieved only by boldly venturing into unknown territories,” Westfahl says. After all, a lot of smart and productive people (not to mention a lot of happy and stable people) don’t spend their lives on the lam. “Clearly, history demonstrates no correlation between travel and virtue,” he writes. “The history of our species powerfully suggests that progress will come from continued stable life on Earth, and that a vast new program of travel into space will lead to a new period of human stagnation,” he concludes ominously.
The article also talks about the Biosphere studies, which is a cartoon version of space exploration. It’s on Earth, so no peculiar gravity regimes or bombardments by radiation, and they’re swimming in plentiful air and water, so all they’re really testing is the human psychological response to prolonged isolation. It messes people up.
Kowalski’s talk at the Analog Astronaut Conference at Biosphere 2 was called “Only Eight Months.” The goal of those eight months was to study the medical and psychological effects of isolation. She and her teammates regularly provided blood, feces and skin samples so researchers could learn about their stress levels, metabolic function and immunological changes. Researchers also had them take psychological tests, sussing out their perception of time, changes in cognitive abilities and shifts in interpersonal interactions. Inside they had to eat like astronauts would, guzzling tubes of Sicilian pizza gel and burger gel. Kowalski would squeeze them into rehydrated soup to make meals heartier. Via their greenhouse, they got about a bowl of salad between the six of them every three weeks.
Kowalski missed freedom and food and friends, of course. But the real struggle came with her return to the real world once the isolation was over: “reentry, not to the atmosphere but to the planet,” she told the conference audience. She didn’t remember how to go about having friends, hobbies or a job and had trouble dealing with requests coming from lots of sources instead of just mission control. In the Q&A period after the talk, Tara Sweeney, a geologist in the audience, thanked Kowalski for talking about that part of the experience. Sweeney had just returned from a long stay in Antarctica and also didn’t quite know how to reintegrate into life in a more hospitable place. They had both missed “Earth,” the real world. But it was hard to come back.
These effects were reported at a conference of space enthusiasts. You can guess how they responded.
Still, the Analog Astronaut Conference crowd remained optimistic. “Where do we go from here?” conference founder and actual astronaut Sian Proctor asked at one point. On cue, the audience members pointed upward and said, “To the moon!”
I think maybe the real psychopaths aren’t the extreme loners who go out into the dangerous frontier, but the well-off people who send them there.
I’m with the audience.
I really don’t get these people. Most of the problems discussed are engineering issues. Obviously, long-term zero-g is not the way to go; we’ll need rotating habitats to generate artificial gravity, as well as living on large masses that have some intrinsic gravity of their own. Radiation will require shielding. Food and nutrition will have to be more palatable and effective than goop in a tube.
The psychological issues are more complicated, but it’s as though nobody has ever gone off with a small group of people and stayed away from home for months or years at a time. Clearly impossible! And yet …
Will it happen tomorrow? No. But someday, sure. ‘Never’ is a long time.
Let the naysayers stay home, and let the ones who want to explore find out what’s out there.
While the Mars colony is an obviously stupid idea on many levels, I do think it’s quite possible to send some astronauts to Mars for a research mission at some point in the future.
Above are a few reasons why we maybe shouldn’t.
Personally I hope for progress in robotics to yield some probes to Mars and other targets that can send back much more information than our current technology. Even the most complicated probe imaginable will also be cheaper than sending humans to other planets.
Everytime PZ gets on this hobby horse, I have a fantasy of the first amphibians laboriously struggling onto land and some PZ fish shouting at them, “Guys! Where are you going? We’re adapted to the ocean! You’ll be crushed by gravity without buoyancy! You won’t be able to breathe! You’ll dry out in the sun!!”
Fortunately they didn’t listen. If they had, there never would have been a real PZ.
P.S. We’ve known how to create artificial gravity since the time of Tsiolkovsky. Low gravity is not an excuse to stay on Earth forever.
Radiation is just a mater of technology providing better shielding.
Gravity is just a matter of spinning the ship to provide centripetal forces equivalent to it. If there are no windows and the viewscreen orients itself to be stable automatically, the people inside would barely notice. As an enclosed structure on a planet, we just need a true “artificial gravity” but again that’s just technology.
That alone eliminates almost all the physical aspects of the travel. Mentally it’s a matter of enough people with you and possible VR/Holodeck to give the brain a taste of home frequently.
These do not seem insurmountable by a long shot, so where is the issue?
Wake me when we have a self-sustaining colony on Antarctica, and on the seafloor, say, near an expanding coastal plate boundary, where the mineral resources are rich and untapped. Because if you can’t make that work, you can’t make long-term space habitation work. Period. You want to bootstrap a biosphere on Mars out of regolith but can’t grow enough wheat in Antarctica to feed the 10,000 people that live there throughout the year?
Personally, I don’t think canned monkeys are ever going to do well in space. Problems like radiation shielding aren’t technical problems of shield design- gamma rays are gamma rays, you can’t invent a better way to block them. The best you can do is to put enough mass between you and space, which is going to mean you need vast quantities of fuel to do anything.
That said, I do think, eventually (on geological timescales), things from Earth will spread out through the universe. I just don’t think they’ll be humans. The whole amphibian analogy that @Silentbob makes is actually quite telling- you notice that the first amphibians didn’t colonize the land by building bubbles of water and carrying them with them; they had to be fundamentally changed in order to survive on land. What is going to colonize the stars will be something that can live freely in space without needing to carry around a fragment of a terrestrial atmosphere with it. Which further raises the question: if you can survive in space, what do you even need with planets anyway?
Finally, if we’re doing anything nearterm in space, it shouldn’t be permanent habitation on anything. It should be harvesting NEOs for mineral resources. I’m not personally in love with extractive industry moving into space, so I wouldn’t say I’m recommending this, but it’s just the obvious thing to happen under capitalism. The next step would be the asteroid belt. If we’re dreaming up colonial plans, Ceres, not Mars, should be our target. The delta-V to get off of Ceres is far lower, and you can transfer your orbit to other asteroids cheaply, giving you easy access to the mineral resources (including carbonaceous asteroids, which could be used to supply the raw materials to keep your biosphere running).
It’s not an engineering problem. The engineering side is eminently soluble.
It’s a biology problem. That’s not easily fixed.
The argument that I’d be yelling at the fish crawling onto land isn’t as persuasive as you might imagine. First of all, the naysaying fish were right: fish are a far more successful clade than tetrapods are.
Secondly, the organisms that succeeded in populating the land stopped being aquatic fish. This kind of transition does not perpetuate the root stock — to thrive in space, our descendants would have to stop being human. I think that’s fine, I’m all for that kind of change and evolution, but it’s not going to benefit Homo sapiens at all, so don’t try to tell me that this is necessary to save humanity. It won’t. Either humans will continue to exist solely on Earth, or we’ll go extinct and be replaced by an expanding population of weird, alien creatures that look at us the way we look at fish.
“Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head”
I’ve already got most of those things going on. Am I an astronaut?
As was illustrated in the quotes, we already have people who live for protracted periods in isolation, both for researchers in Antarctica and both ships for research and the Navy itself.
Exploration is conducted closer at hand with robotic probes and in the deep sea, one sure as hell isn’t going outside under those pressures, so even on the rare submarine, it’s manipulation by robot arms.
Spin gravity emulation works well, if of the proper large size. There ain’t no such thing as artificial gravity, so any suggesting it on a planet needs to smack themselves with a wet trout.
Radiation shielding is a function of mass barriers, such as polyethylene, which is used to shield submarine nuclear reactor compartments.
That all said, long term permanent colonies on the moon or mars are non-starters. Our bodies aren’t built for that low of a gravity, save for short term research expeditions. Leave the long term colony, shift researchers in and out and use robots for most of the long range exploration, the colony’s only the lab and robot control center. It’ll still be dangerous, but not extremely so, as one can bury a colony under a few feet of regolith to shield from radiation. Where the biggest risk is is logistics. Something happens to the food, they’re screwed, so double down on consumables and spare parts, with at least twice what’s needed to account for accidents, with those spare stores stored distant from one another so that an accident won’t take out their supplies.
Nope, can’t do a mars city or tranquality city, but one can have a long term base to conduct research for short periods in, with the moon being a bit longer time on site, due to the much shorter travel time.
I now see why Ralph Kramden’s admonition to his wife Alice (“To the Moon!”) was scientifically prophetic.
Silentbob @3:
Wow, channelling Carl Sagan*. Yeah, the first amphibians were bold explorers going where no fish had gone before. I don’t think that’s how evolution works.
*Didn’t he write something about our ancestors gazing in wonder at distant horizons, blah blah? Rather than, you know, just going where the fucking food was. Twit.
Lava tube caves will fix the radiation problem. But the habitats will not look as spectacular as the base in ‘Space 1999’.
PZ, your thumbnail photo is from James Hogan’s “classic” science fiction novel, “Inherit the Stars.”
I was taking a 3-week system internals course in LA back in 1980, living the high life of a corporate jet setter at a Travel Lodge in Anaheim (home of Sleepy Bear), and in a city of 100 million didn’t know a soul. So, I spent my evenings reading programming manuals or science fiction books I bought at a local bookstore, where I discovered James Hogan. (Picked up the book because of the cover art, of course.)
Hogan’s novel was as refreshing as when I discovered Clifford Simak. A gripping yarn of evolution and space travel. Epic!
Footnote, Hogan was a software engineer working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for which I forgave him being an HP guy, myself. Nevertheless, I was chuffed that one of the clan made it big!
And this is the answer to the “Fermi Paradox.”
We can rather safely assume that all life in the universe begins on a planet or large planetlike body. We HAVE to assume that this world comes with a specific set of interconnected environments to which life there adapts in particular. This means that no organisms likely originate from space, and no organism adapts to it. The only possible way for this to happen is some organisms small enough to be carried on dust or water vapor into the highest upper atmospheres of a world where some adaptations to handle certain space-adjacent conditions could be useful. And you’ll forgive me for being unable to imagine a Stage 6 cyanobacterial civilization.
So no matter the world of origin, no life form is “adapted to space.” Only the most unlikely extremophiles are likely to adapt even some amount of “space tolerance.” And the dangers of space aren’t just “oh, it’s more arid” or “It’s colder,” it’s stuff that rips life apart at a molecular level, and is all-pervasive. It’s not like the glib “fish coming onto land” thing, Because those fish were still slithering around in shoreside mud and already had lungs to begin with. A more apt comparison would be pulling some comb jelly out of the marianas trench, plopping it on top of Mount Everest and going “live!” No matter what you’re just going to end up with a dead comb jelly (and surely the jelly, as much as one of its kind can feel things, did not enjoy the experience)
So, space is extremely hostile to life. No life adapts to space. We can rather safely assume then that almost any technological civilization that pokes their nose (or whatever) into space, learns of this, and what a massive hurdle it is. And decides it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the cost in lives, it’s not worth the cost in resources. So they “stay home.”
Our galaxy is possibly littered with dozens of civilizations like our own, and probably has thousands more waiting to appear. And we’ll never know, unless, perhaps, by chance, our unmanned probes happen to cross by each other.
remyporter: why do you demand a self-sustaining colony? We hardly have any of those on earth anywhere. Maybe the Andaman islanders, sort of, though they’re known to use the detritus that washes up on their beaches.
When it comes to expeditions or outposts that can last months or even years on stocks, we’ve had plenty of those in modern times.
I’d volunteer for a space trip
iff I were a lot younger, and
iff I were to be send up out of our galaxy’s plane, and
iff on a space ship ever accelarating with slightly above 1 g (to experience to be travelling), and
iff accompanied by enough people I can connect to (amicably, intellectually, sexually, …), and
iff accompanied with the sight and smell of enough greenary, and
iff [fill in the gaps]
I would love to see our pale blue dot in its position in the Milky Way.
Going to happen? No Way.
As worst jobs go, well astronaut is about the best. Along with Cosmonaut & Taikonaut..
@11. Rob Grigjanis : Not a lot of food up on Mt Everest / Chomolungma. People climbed it anyhow.. To name just one example – &, of course, people were climbing other mountains and inhospitable places long before.
@numerobis – To be a colony, you need to be able to feed yourself. We’re talking about colonial prospects and permanent habitation. Outposts can stock for periods of time, but they’re not meant to be a permanent settlement, and frequently the costs of stocking an outpost are massive (because getting food to the outpost is hard), and only deemed worthwhile because of the value the outpost can provide, and when things go pear shaped, the outpost can be abandoned.
If you want to be a colony, you need a secure food supply that isn’t heavily reliant on trade. In the modern world, we’ve got these wonderful trade networks and supply chains stretching around the globe. That’s fine and good, but building a supply chain to Mars is an entirely different order of magnitude. So, I can amend my statement: we either need self-sustaining colonies on Antarctica or the deep ocean or we need to prove that we can build a supply chain that sends goods to and from Mars on a regular and reliable basis. If you can get ten tons to and from Mars every three months, then I’ll believe we could possibly start a colony there.
@17. That’s Chomolungma a.k.a..Sagarmāthā natch. I know its that other “s” name – I just can’t recall how to spell it (even more so than usual for me) or exactly how it goes.
Humans have a desire to explore and learn that’s been a part of our nature since humans arose I think. Polynesians, Vikings, everyone from Ibn Battuta, Ferdinand Magellan, Zheng He, Rene Caillié, Charles Sturt, Sally Ride and so many more from all sorts of very different cultures and places.
Curiosity, a desire to see and learn and an attraction to exploring drives both scienceand, well, exploration as well as art and more.
I happen to be reading this SciAm article as I was going to sleep last night. As a boomer growing up in the age of “We will go to the Moon” and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s disappointing to realize that, while not impossible, there are very many difficult problems. The only solace is that I’ve read before about the effects of long term stints in space, so it wasn’t news.
I have one more menial job to add to the list of terrible jobs: cleaning portable toilets at construction sites in south Florida. Not only is it gross work in miserably hot and humid conditions, but some construction workers can be jerks, particularly to a long-haired hippie in mid-70s Florida.
mamba@4 as I understand it sci fi style artificial gravity probably isn’t possible. There won’t be a gizmo under the floor that produces Earth level gravity. Even rotating a spacecraft to simulate the forces of gravity is apparently quite complicated.
In the late ’60s NASA developed a plan to send a manned spacecraft flight past Venus, using upgraded Apollo program technology. Fortunately this never happened. as the proposed 1974 flight window coincided with a July 1974 coronal mass ejection from the Sun that would have killed the crew.
@3 Silentbob & mamba : Seconded by me.
@19. Of course, all of those explorers also had other motivations, rationalisations and reasosn for why they were out there and were often sent out by the rulers of their societies too. Rulers who also had other ulterior motivations as well. However, curiosity and the desire to learn and discover are big drivers of human expansion, human progress, exploration in the geographical and now astronomical senses of the word.
Are there problems and issues? Obvs! Are there people determined and ingenious and brave enough to overcome those obstacles? Also obvs as history including those examples cited and so very many more shows and will – I’ve no doubt – keep showing.
Let them go if they want. Spending their own money, not taxpayer money. I have been a fan of science and science fiction for over a half-century. but, I am working on enough fascinating, challenging, positive programs right here. I’d rather not have to fight a losing battle to stay alive just to see the ‘blue marble’ in all its celestial glory or have to vacuum moon/mars dust off everything all the time.
StevoR @17:
Yeah, mostly white people who didn’t need to worry about their next meal. When we’re well-fed and bored, we tend to do stupid things.
@24, shermanj
You mean “not-enough-taxpayer” money ISN’T taxpayer money?
I need a BIG irony mark here.
Per Doc Bill @13: I read the book for which that illustration was made. It was a very gripping work of scientific detection, and, IMO at least, as realistic as one could get from the story’s premise. The act depicted is two US lunar colonists finding a humanoid skeleton inside a spacesuit, which is soon found to be over 10,000 years old. Then a little datebook/diary and other documents are found on the dead guy, and the race is on to translate the written language and numerals and find his homeworld’s solar cycle (NOT the same as Earth’s), and the personal and political circumstances that landed him on Earth’s moon.
There’s a sequel, “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede,” which I didn’t finish and don’t recommend.
“It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.”
— (attributed to) Prince Henry the Navigator (not recommended as a role model)
There’s a recent documentary out entitled the The Longest Goodbye which investigates the psychological impact of long term spaceflight.
Link to Sundance premiere.
Link to BBC player.
The ability to hibernate may be needed for longer space trips to keep people sane,
@ Rob Grigjanis : “Yeah, mostly white people who didn’t need to worry about their next meal. When we’re well-fed and bored, we tend to do stupid things.”
Tenzing Norgay was Nepalese or Tibetan not white.* ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzing_Norgay )
There are mountains on Pluto bearing his name now FWIW.
Yes, people do things when they’re well fed because when people are starving, well, that obvs makes it harder to do anything –
and also desperate to also do even stupid things to get food. Many explorers have ended up starving** and kept going and done “stupid” things – and thereby got places and learned stuff that they wouldn’t have otherwise achieved.
Mileage varies on how “stupid” climbing Chomolungma / Sagarmāthā / Everest is but who are you to tell other people what they should dream of and attempt and maybe succeed or maybe fail in doing here? Who are you to say people who want explore or travel in space or go to Mars or wherever else they wish to are “stupid” just because that’s your personal view?
Your point?
Were Polynesians “stupid” for venturing beyond their home islands eventually ending up throughout most of the Pacific including Aotearoa / NZ? Were Vikings “stupid”for settling Greenland and Iceland and Vinland?
Is anyone “stupid” who decides to do something exploration wise that’s daring and risky and also potentially leads to discovering and learning about new places in your view? Does the idea of boldly going where none have gone before mean anything to you or is that just “stupid” in your view. Sheesh dude, really?
.* You missed my mentions of Ibn Battuta, Zheng He & Polynesians in my #19. Exploration is certainly NOT limited only to white people. Eeven if history and in my case, my education and background and life makes them more prominent & better known, indeed known at all, to me due to my personal historyand baises.
.** Some to death. Quite a lot to death. But others not. We tend to remember those that didn’t die – exceptions like Ludwig Leichhardt aside assuming he starved and wasn’t speared or died of thirst or who knows what else, anyhow. It is a risk it doesnt always pay off and people do die doing and attempting their dreams. This is “stupid” and wrong? Says who? Why? Provided they choose to risk their own lives in hopes of accomplishing X whatever that might be & obvs context matters here but still.
The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!
StevoR: Tenzing Norgay started out as a porter for white climbers.
Some reasons for ‘exploration’ in the past:
Population pressure.
Forced exile.
The opportunity to loot and trade in slaves.
Opening up trade routes to become rich.
Vikings (and Anglo-Saxons kicked out by Normans (who also started out as looting Norsemen)) also travelled long distances to become mercenaries.
All very noble innit.
As a lifelong science fiction fan, I’d love to see us building Star Trek-type settlements all over the galaxy. As a realist, I have grown increasingly pessimistic about even getting to Mars with reasonable levels of safety, much less building settlements on it. Radiation by itself is an enormous threat. I can see a lunar settlement, but no long-term occupants, and it will have to be deep enough underground to prevent radiation poisoning. Mars would take a massive, extremely expensive effort just to put a small group of humans there and keep them alive. :You can’t just have a few scientists, but engineers to deal with all of the potential problems and a full medical team to handle those issues, which inevitably will occur, and they’ll need an ample supply of medicine and medical products from Earth just to survive, much less prosper/grow.
On another point, the Europeans settling the Americas were occupying lands that the Native Americans had already curated. They had roads/paths connecting many areas, had developed or adapted plants for food (corn likely started as a weed), domesticated some wildlife and learned to hunt/cook others, and explored pretty much everywhere. They had even adapted physically to living in some places, such as up in the Andes mountains. So Europeans were not really exploring or settling, just taking over the products of 10s of thousands of years of pre-existing settlement.
Is no one going to react to “pushing back the foreskin”? Worst exploration metaphor ever?
I think all the time about William Shatner, having finally flown in space, breaking down into tears because “it felt like funeral” for all the beauty of life on Earth. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/oct/11/it-felt-like-a-funeral-william-shatner-reflects-on-voyage-to-space
Space exploration / settlement is used all the time, consciously and probably unconsciously in some cases (a source of false hope), as a replacement for fixing the problems the serious problems we have here on Earth. Moving away and leaving your mess behind is a child’s approach–although I actually think a lot of children know better. In 12-Step Programs, they call it “the geographic solution,” which isn’t a solution at all.
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine talks about the conservative impulse to deal with problems by “wiping the slate clean.” (Often wiping away people, institutions, cultures, animals, ecosystems, etc., in the process) Of course, the goal is to profit from chaos and dissolution and suffering – all under the guise of creating a better world. She’s a much better — clearer, more realistic, more humane, and more moral — thinker than, say, Heinlein with his libertarian maunderings about how “when a society requires an ID card, it’s time to leave and find a new home.”
@27 Raging Bee
I, too, found “Gentle Giants of Ganymede” OK but not as gripping as “Inherit the Stars.” I think I pushed on with Hogan’s third book and found it a stretch. Sadly, in later years Hogan moved to Crankville and basically disappeared down a rabbit hole.
On the main topic, though, I do not share the enthusiasm for either the spotlight or human space travel as do de Grasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Bluntly, I think it’s stupid to send biology into space in general and humans in particular. Sure, I understand all the jingoism of planting the flag and jumping up and down, “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!” but it’s a complete waste of time and energy, and the Universe she don’t care.
Why imagine that we can colonize the cosmos when we can’t even wear a mask during a pandemic? Just don’t see it happening.
@13 DocBob – I loved your recollections of the early SF. You will be disappointed to learn that my very first PC was a DEC Rainbow. My 5 Mb hard drive was the envy of all my friends!
@34 catballou – yeah, that was…uh…striking.
oops DOC BILL! Sorry!
wzrd1 @9:
Sure there is. All you need is a magnetic field B such that the gradient of B² is large enough to simulate gravity. It’s just technology (the sound you hear is the feasibility can being kicked down the road).
Some of you might be interested in the book, Interstellar migration and the human experience, which came from a 1983 conference at Los Alamos.
https://archive.org/details/interstellarmigr0000unse
The same psychopaths have convinced most of the planet that living with a freely-circulating level 3 biohazard is perfectly OK, I don’t think some wonky eyeballs or a bit of bone loss is going to put them off.
@hillaryrettig1 from aka DocBob
Two true stories. First, I had a vendor who called me Bob for years. I let it slide the first time then never bothered to correct him because it wasn’t that big a deal. So long as he paid for the Lemon Chicken I was cool!
Second, my first “pc” was a Mac Plus that I still own. Boots up fine running System 7. I set it up as a countdown timer on New Year’s Eve, Y2K and it ticked over to Jan. 1, 2000 just fine. I bought a 20 Meg hard disc for it for $1200 and had to pay an extra $50 for the SCSI cable and terminator that I thought was outrageous! Ah, the simple times.
But but but wasn’t the whole of the universe perfectly designed by the Creator for human beings…..?
Candyland horseshit is what SF is pretty much 100% made of, as we see here in the “Universe or Bust!” crowd there (and here, though naturally a smaller crowd).
I am 100% in favor of space exploration, but humans in space, even semi-permanently on the Moon, much less Mars? What adolescent bullshit that is. The crowd that shouted “To the Moon!” are far more ridiculous (and impotently obsessed with fantasies of personal greatness) as Ralph Kramden threatening his wife.
This sort of enthusiast is literally one step removed from the “reasonable” UFOlogists. They want to be heroes in a teen fantasy, but with robots (probably robots from “Heavy Metal”)
Science, knowledge, etc. are covers for that (sometimes, as the would-be cosplayer ages, deepening into something real)
Can humanity grow up? The news today says it can’t, given Musk, T—p, Putin, etc. are its leaders.
I do hope I’m wrong.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? Torture is torture because it’s not voluntary. If you can choose to do any old thing instead, then it ain’t torture.
People are lining up for the chance to be astronauts. It’s a choice they’ve made. They spend their whole lives training for it. Might they regret it? Might they be miserable? Might it somehow lead to an ugly death? Of course, obviously, yes, but the same things can be said of literally any other choice you might make.
I’ve been trying to think why PZ’s posts about space stuff bothers me so much, aside from the obvious wrongness in this one, and this afternoon it finally dawned on me: the arguments are exactly the same as the arguments that regressives use against anything that threatens the status quo.
‘Things have always been this way! It’s unnatural for things to be different! You’re a mentally-defective deviant if you want things to change! Here are all the horrible health problems you will deserve for violating
God’s LawThe Natural Order (laden with the implication that such things don’t happen to those who obeyGod’s LawThe Natural Order)! We should give up, never try, and those who disagree are monsters!’I don’t know if space travel is a worthwhile endeavor. There was a time when I thought it would be the life for me, but I eventually decided that I wasn’t willing to dedicate my life to it unless I was guaranteed to get to meet knew life and experience new civilizations. I was still sorely tempted to try, and I envy those who’ve made the trip beyond, to experience wonders that few humans have had the privilege to live.
Yes, going to space comes with a lot of unpleasantness but, again, that’s literally every life choice for most of us. I’ve never been outside the atmosphere, but my eyesight is crap, my circadian rhythms have been out of sync with the rest of humanity for as long as I can remember, my microbiome is a wreck, my immune system has been trying to kill me since birth, both my brain and my heart have been knocked around a few times (and come out the worse for it), and my muscles and bones don’t work near as well as they did twenty years ago. Oh, and given my family history, it’s virtually a certainty that I’ll get cancer sooner or later, assuming I don’t do something really dangerous first, like lay in the grass and die of anaphylactic shock.
So you’ll have to forgive me if the ‘horrifying’ list of effects of outer space on the human body doesn’t impress me much. As long as no one is forced to go, and to my knowledge no human being ever has been, I say more power to those who are willing to take the risks.
I’d sure as hell rather be around any of them than the regressive naysayers.
I have mixed feelings about human space exploration, but I think that some of the charges leveled against people who support it are lacking in merit. The most inaccurate accusation is the idea that proponents of human space exploration don’t care about earth and want to trash it and abandon it. I’ve never seen any space exploration advocate make this argument – it seems to show up only as a straw man. The general attitude I’ve encountered reading and listening to human space exploration enthusiasts is much more akin to that of the late Carl Sagan. Sagan might have been too idealistic and starry-eyed about humanity exploring the solar system and beyond, but he was also a strong environmentalist. In fact, I believe he was one of the first public figures in the US to start talking about the dangers of climate change back in the 1980s.
@ 32 Rob Grigjanis
Lol, cherry pick much? I understand the consensus is all modern humans come from a small population in Africa ~100,000 years ago. They spread to every continent bar Antarctica. Indigenous Australians (very far from Africa) arrived tens of thousands of years ago. Suggests your ignoble list is not exhaustive.
Cue PZ’s kryptonite, Carl Sagan… ;-)
Silentbob, Rob ain’t claiming anything contrary to your posted rebuttal.
What he wrote was well summed up: “All very noble innit.”
That is to say, it was not about whether or not that is the consensus, but that the reasons were more likely than not to be pragmatic and contingent rather than, as Sagan wanked about, “the Numinous” or the spirit of exploration or whatever.
I’m not a wanderer, but I did wonder why your featured video splash shows “We Are Wanders”. I can easily infer how, of course, but can’t know for sure.
—
About that general sentiment of “we are X”, it very nearly always should be “some of us are X”. Because, you know, coprophiles exist.
(Litttle bugbear of mine, the distinction between existential and universal claims)
@ 17, so the colonists to mars will need to bring Sherpas to carry their supplies. Odd kind of solution, but likely if the pay is good enough, some would probably go for it.
@ 18, only one problem with trade with mars. What would mars export, dust? Yeah, really don’t see that happening. I could see eventual robotic asteroid mining, if the price of the precious metals rises high enough. Europan ice for fuel and water for probes, again could be robotic, as people won’t fare well in low G and radiation.
I could see orbital cylinders or wheel stations, but again, when we have trouble getting a crew of 3 into orbit due to expense, a big assed space station and the shielding and supplies for it just isn’t going to happen. Hell, we don’t even hear Musk suggest such a thing and he suggests all manner of off the wall moonbat nonsense.
And then, with that magical space station, logistics murders it, as what trade goods would be coming from it, other than vacuum? Maybe metals from the asteroid belt, harvested by robots, but somehow incapable of being dropped to earth without having to stop at a space station? Oh, I know, space manufacturing, because one can hand wave away the pollution created, which is a problem on earth and would be beyond an immense problem in orbit.
Oh, I know, “Come to our orbital colony, the temperature’s survivable here”.
But, being bored and isolated is done routinely, Antarctica based researchers and support staff and Naval forces do that routinely. Hell, I considered taking an Antarctic posting, as the pay was rather good, but the kids were young, so that was a no-go and now, well, with my health these days, playing Russian roulette with a howitzer would be more survivable for me.
A tropical depression is heading this way. Checked to see if I needed to batten down the hatches and noticed, my apartment is fresh out of hatches. Did get some milk, but I was out of milk anyway. Got a month’s worth of food, which is typical, as I loathe daily shopping. Since I loathe getting rained on, guess I’ve got a good excuse to make another gallon or so of pasta sauce. Got enough supplies to make 5 gallons of that, largely because I caught a good sale on the crushed and pureed tomatoes.
Hmmm, now that is actually a trade item, just nobody would want to pay the cost of orbital retrieval… ;)
Oh, worst job, elevator repair. I remember watching a man working on the brand new elevator, in our brand new building, whose cable had failed (the wiring inside of the cable had failed). Elevator shafts rarely have heating or air conditioning, so in Louisiana summer heat, he was stringing that cable and was utterly saturated with perspiration. A friend acquainted me with a job he once held, shoveling out shit from a factory farm chickenhouse. The ammonia being murderously high.
Then, of course, there’s the proctologist. Oh, a bit of trivia for those who wondered why the purging before endoscopy, patients have died from intestinal methane explosions during the procedure when that wasn’t done.
Medical professionals in general, who routinely can get stuck with sharps of all sorts that are contaminated with some very uncompromising organisms.
Linemen, who can literally have their limbs blown apart by high voltage, high current discharges.
Explosive ordinance disposal teams, around every 5 years or so, one in Germany will be blown up trying to dispose of a WWII blockbuster bomb.
My father was nearly buried alive in wet concrete while putting in the Philly International Airport fuel farm and a retaining wall collapsed due to a lightning strike. He was also burned two meters below ground in a tank hole, when gasoline in the soil ignited from a spark struck by his shovel. He was also thrown two meters and change when a backhoe operator carelessly overcontrolled and struck him with the steel bucket.
One of his other backhoe operators struck an electric main with the backhoe bucket, severing it. It was marked by the electric company as being 5 meters away.
Being military in combat, about as safe as streaking through a BSL-4 facility while they’re working with a highly contagious and lethal pathogen. Had my ribs broken twice by being shot in my vest, hearing badly damaged from IED’s, been exposed to heaven knows what in burn pits, had to find a nuclear warhead that was blown across an incident site and those are only the things I’m allowed to talk about.
All do these things and accept the risks, mitigating them to the best of their abilities, when they accept the job or sign their contract.
Just as astronauts do.
Actually some astronauts have spent years inspace successfully :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Duration_records
There;s alist there of the longest duration spaceflights by various astronauts, cosmonauts and others atleats fifty having spent over a year inspace albeit not necessarily consecutively. Of course, astronauts won’t just be living in space but also on the lunar, martian, asteroidal and other worlds surfaces experiencing various levels of less than earthly gravity wells with I’d guess varying effects.
@ wzrd1 :
<
blockquote>@ 17, so the colonists to mars will need to bring Sherpas to carry their supplies. Odd kind of solution, but likely if the pay is good enough, some would probably go for it.
Well, I dunno ’bout that. Lighter gravity would make it easier to carry stuff mind even if inertia remains.Sherpas would probly also make pretty good astronauts / cosmnonauts / taikonauts FWIW if that’s what they choose to do.
,b>Knowledge
Science, adventure, tourism maybe?
More I suspect although we may have to get there first to find out.
Seems likely some things can dbe done inmartian gravity differently and better than Earth’s grav just as same applies for microgravity.
Serendipity. is a thing..
Not to rain on anyone’s fantasy foreskin exposure, but simple economics kills this whole idea of human space exploration.
Musk has a lot of money and he isn’t all that bright, but he also likes his money and he isn’t quite that stupid.
Don’t look to government to provide the funding, their concerns lie elsewhere along with their political survival.
This sort of thing requires a united world.
Have you seen one of those lately?
@32. Rob Grigjanis :
“Noble” is your word choice not mine. Also a subjective term. Your list of reasons for past exploration isn’t exclusive with other reasons or complete or always the case for all explorers & expeditions. Others did go with better motives including scientific exploration and, in the case of arguably Humanity’s greatest feat of exploration of all, going in peace for all mankind (sic) – notably they didn’t put a plaque on the Moon claiming it as theirs or boasting of American victory over the then USSR. Admittedly the Cold War and Space Race thing was a huge factor but ..it s complex and not all or nothing and finer aspirations and values can be applied and at play here too. When we’re talking about future exploration e.g. going to Mars we can do it for good reasons as well and that may well be the case.
StevoR:
Again, you miss the point.
Whether or not you think the reasons good, do you dispute that it won’t be good for any people who undertake the journey for the reasons given in the OP?
So. What sort of necessity is there to spend all those resources on making a can with provisions for apes who will deteriorate on the journey, when one can make a sleek automated remote/autonomous vehicle instead?
No need for provisions. No need for a two way trip. etc.
Bang for the buck, baby!
—
You do get the whole trope is based on days of yore, when exploration meant actual apes about, no?
These days, technology has advanced to the point where apes are just an impediment to proper exploration.
So. Harmful and inefficient and expensive for no particular gain.
Why again send canned apes up?
I feel like rovers/robots running an A.I is the future of space exploration? No need for air, food, water, living space. Train them on earth, then send them off on their missions. If we want to extract resources… robots and A.I. I think the idea of “we need humans to explore” is an outdated way of viewing things.
@ ^ Alt-X : There are still things humans on the (martian & lunar) ground can do quicker and more flexibly and better than robots.
Compare the amount of science that was done on the Moon with the Apollo landing vs the amount achieved even by robots – for example the amountand quality of samples returned.
@ John Morales :
Well, kinda, in terms of yeah, there might be the issues noted in the OP but then we’re also working on ways to make that less and the damage isn’t terminal or as bad and the people doing thsi are volunters wh are willing to risk it becuase it’s what they want to do with their lives. If they decide its worthwhile then why not?
@ 54, exploring and trading between continents wasn’t very good for the sailors, guess Europe should’ve abandoned long distance sailing then, let the spices follow the land spice route of the ages, right?
@ 55, we made more advancements in lunar geology by sending one actual geologist to the moon than the trained test monkeys that were the test pilot astronauts on a handful of landings previously. You can’t beat an SME by sending a non-SME someplace. Otherwise, we’d have military medics performing advanced surgeries in our wars, the physicians at the other end of the radio and our cemeteries overflowing.
Which is going to give one superior results? A trained biologist with a microscope and lab viewing a novel microorganism or Joe Sixpack, with a few weeks of training? Joe won’t understand trying different staining, only what narrow training he had, the biologist likely will try novel methods of staining to better view the organism and its structures. The same is true in most other fields, the right tool for the right job. Going out into the environment, that largely is the job of a robot, analyzing the samples still is better accomplished by a professional, as is selecting samples to tell the robot what to bring back to the lab.
Now, that could be accomplished via sample return missions, but that delays results by years, whereas having an outpost with a full lab would get results in days to weeks.
BTW, astronaut radiation injuries aren’t unique, they’re shared with commercial aircraft pilots, who fly. especially in northern latitude routes, in a much higher radiation level environment daily. If space is no good, guess we need to also ban airplanes and level mountains, lest people live there and risk radiation damage. We’ll also have to prohibit some high natural background radiation areas on earth, after all, it’s too dangerous, so I can think of two cities that’ll have to be evacuated and walled off. Both cities in areas with higher uranium levels in the bedrock and all risks are evil, so we need to eliminate all risks.
Upside of that is, by the time we’ve eliminated all risks, it’ll be a much smaller world…
Or on a more serious note, two factors impact astronauts a bit more than most others, radiation is a third long term issue, but overall survival rates into elderhood remains largely reflective of their peer age groups, atmospheric pressure and composition and microgravity. It’s a shame neither could possibly be addressed, it’s impossible to emulate earth’s atmosphere off of earth, magical jujubes can’t be transported off the ground or something and wheels aren’t possible above sea level and cans can’t exist off of a desk chair. Radiation shielding is theoretically possible, but nobody’s tested that, which is why all open air nuclear reactors need such a large exclusion zone around them, otherwise we’d stick them in aircraft carriers and submarines, but those are impossible, as metal corrodes in a salt water environment, which is why our ships are made of wood.
As for risk of endeavor, let’s benchmark occupations. Per capita, comparing astronaut with a civilian occupation. We lose more medical and EMS workers per capita than astronauts by an order of magnitude, both due to infections and mortal injuries, why aren’t we closing hospitals and firehouses?
Continued : “Why again send canned apes up?” – JM.
Because they can do some extraordinary things and want to go and do them?
Because we can learn more from this in many ways that go beyond just those risking their lives to do them?
I had a venture capitalist tell me, once, that his was a difficult and dangerous job. All those meetings, flights, the stress of wondering if an investment was going to return a thousand-fold, the expense account dinners, and mostly the difficulty of keeping track of all of the exciting things he had going on.
I didn’t say anything, but I silently prayed for the San Juan de Fuca plate to shift at that moment, and wipe out Seattle, even if it meant I died too.
springa73 @46:
As I recall, that accusation has been made against those twits (not among the commentariat here AFAIK) who assert that the future of our species is in space, not on Earth. I don’t recall anyone here saying that manned space exploration and concern for our environment are mutually exclusive. Of course, my memory may not be accurate…
@1 nomaduk
I generally agree with your assessment, except for two things:
1. Early projects, at least until we get something like a facility in actual space, and some sort of mining that can be done there, instead of on earth, to produce between ships, is going to result in something closer to submarine travel for the foreseeable future, than Star Trek (even the NX-1).
Unless the people developing the ships are from countries that also plan cities, with thought towards the mental and physical health of the people living in them, the sort of ships everyone else, is likely to make will overlook, discount, or just flat out intentionally leave out (as cost saving measure), critical things that we need to remain healthy and sane. Why? Because they never bother to think about those things at all, or plan for them, even now, on our own planet.
So, yeah, short of term, actual space exploration, especially if it went corporate, would turn into hell. Longer term, they would have no choice but to address such things, but would probably still “minimalize” the needed changes.
Not that I am at all cynical….
I’ll just leave it at this. Cynics will be cynics, and I’m as cynical as they come, but I still believe this; it is, perhaps, one of the few things I do find worth believing in.
Now, let’s start by getting one thing straight. I’m not a do-gooder. If you’re a bum, if you can’t break off of the booze or whatever it is that makes you a bad risk, then get out. Now, I don’t pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive, because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day — soon — Man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future. And those are the days worth living for.
— Star Trek, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ (Edith Keeler’s speech), 1967.
A more realistic scenario is to wait until AGI is around (a century? 50 years?) to do the heavy lifting (If they consent to do it).
Shielding a compact AI from radiation is straightforward, long transit times just requires a reduced clock rate or a shutdown.
The problem will be to provide mentally stimulating tasks in between melting regolith for iron and excavating sub-surface habitats.
Until then, there will be some few volunteers to go do the stuff our more primitive robots are not fit for. But it is not something you should spend 40 years doing.
BTW I notice the polymath Stanislaw Lem was not very enthusiastic about Mars or the Moon. His stories in those settings were not at all as optimistic as those by Asimov or Clarke.
Well, one reason to not be optimistic about trying to work and live on mars or worse, the moon is, getting around outside of the habitat.
Astronauts spend a hell of a lot of time on their face and back on the moon – rarely by intent. Damage the environmental control unit and well, you’re screwed. Vacuum exposure for all test animals was approximately 90 seconds before resuscitation was always ineffective. Blood gas exchange works in reverse in a vacuum, with all gases in the blood exchanging out into space, leaving zero blood gases present in seconds. Unlike Hollywood’s love for exploding mammals, skin is tough enough to withstand a vacuum, but if the respiratory system is exposed to vacuum, all gases go away, the body’s reserve going to zero.
Lose pressure in the torso, one cannot move air into the lungs, as one cannot develop a pressure differential without mechanical assistance (there was one experimental space suit where the astronaut’s skin was exposed to a vacuum, held under pressure by basically Spandex and it was effective, but nearly impossible to don and doff in reduced gravity.
wzrd1 @58:
1– “Let’s” means let us [do it], it does not mean mention it and then not doing it.
2– Do we really? I very, very much doubt that claim.
3– Because they’re a bit more necessary than pointless ego trips.
StevoR @56, 59:
So, no. You do not dispute that it won’t be good.
Instead, you point out they want to do it and it can be done, so it’s all good.
Would you have answered the same if I’d asked you whether you dispute that smoking is not a healthy habit? I doubt it.
But sure, spend orders of magnitude more resources at more risk so that people can go, instead of getting value for money and better and quicker exploration outcomes.
In reality, Mars rovers are a thing, unlike in situ areologists — cost/benefit being the reason.
Putting question marks after your speculative assertions does not help.
What more do you imagine we can learn, and what extraordinary things can they supposedly do that can’t be learned without physical presence there?
(Other than the trivial answer of what the undertaking does to the apes)
Remember the recent episode of the Titanic dive wreck?
Similar thing. Did people really need to physically go there to explore it?
If we’re ruling out Mars, what about Venus? I’ve heard some ideas about partially terraforming its atmosphere by dropping some sort of primitive algae or other plant life. There’d still be all the sulfuric whatnot to deal with…but at least Venus has both Earth-level gravity and a thicker atmosphere than Mars to block most harmful radiation. I’d say it’s at least worth looking into…
Raging Bee, heh.
Yeah, I remember.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men for an example.
Were you trying to be serious? Were you addressing Sagan’s speculative aspirations (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530)? Do you have any idea of the timeframes involved, even if the mechanics do do it were available?
Also, point being that the topic is space travelling (astronauts, though of course it’s planetary, not star travel) and its effects on people. This is before one gets to the settlement/colony aspect once having made the journey.
That is, the topic is the actual astronauting, not the eventual terraforming.
@ ^ John Morales : Big difference between the Titanic and Mars. Opposites in some respects eg. pressures.
We can gain more more quiickly and learn moe by sending people as #57 wzrd1 has noted and just compare the impact – scientific and cultural of the Human Moon landings versus the Robotic ones. Comapre even the impact of Apollo 8‘s Earthrise image – which is famously described as ““the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” :
https://my-earth.org/research/
Versus the first robotic craft photos of our planet. That Earthrise photo also shows yet again that it isn’t either / or – Space or Earth, Humans or robots but both / and.
Both exploring space and other planets and working on environmental and other issues on Earth,
Using robots and also having people go as well.
It is a false dichotomy and flawed zero / sum either/ or , B & W thinking that’s the problem here.
We can do many different things at once and learn from using multiple complementary methodologes and technologies.
Learning about how hostile other plenets and space are and how hard it is to get ecologies working beyond Earth will help us understand our our planet better and emphasise its value as well as teaching us so much else.
NASA being actual rocket scientists here has information online explaining why they send people into space as explorers :
Source : https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/why_we_explore_main.html
& from another page & backing up what I’ve siad above :
Source : https://www.nasa.gov/feature/human-spaceflight-technologies-benefitting-earth
I think it might also be worth pointing out that for all the hazards noted in the OP and elsewhere here when it comes to space travel (hazards that NASA & other space agencies know about and thus are prepared for and able to work on addressing) we have quite a lot of old astronauts now who are still pretty healthy and mentally with it – exhibit A : Buzz Aldrin now 93 but also Frank Borman who is now 95, Jim Lovell also 95 and so many others who lived into their late 80’s and 90’s and above the usual average lifespan. Clearly space travel ain’t that deadly.
Of course, virtually every job contains some risks – even sitting working a desk job can lead to morbid obesity, RSI, eye strain, etc.. Astronaut (Cosmonaut, Taikonaut) generally has pretty good pay and conditions too – much better than say being, say, an illegal immigrant farmworker or menial labourer doing back breaking work in dreadful conditions here on Earth getting far less for much more physically demanding and damaging work.
As for “unnecessary” jobs with high risk of causing bad health, there’s football players & other athletes who put their bodies on the line often retiring early due to injury, damaging their brains in avoidable impacts and falls and totally needless providing entertainment that we could easily substitute for automated machines or virtual games. Whether sports fans would think it was the same and an adequate replacement for real people really doing the sports balls stuff is a wholeother story natch..
“Necessity” is a subjective term really beyond having food, water and shelter to physically survive. Temporarily – do nothing at all and people will eventually still die anyhow just dying really bored and unfulfilled..
So, yeah, the idea that ästronaut ((Cosmonaut, Taikonaut) is the worst job is just ludicrous and bizarre in my view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two
(1982 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke)
[OT]
What I think is a deliberate homage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
(science fiction novel by British writer Charles Stross, published in 2003)
Also might have shared these in similar threads before but :
Source : https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/feature/Going_to_the_Moon_Was_Hard_But_the_Benefits_Were_Huge
Plus Here are 15 ways the space station is benefiting life on Earth :
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_ways_iss_benefits_earth
Also :
https://www.planetary.org/video/is-space-exploration-worth-the-money
The answer (spoiler!) is an emphatic YES!
As Phil Plait of bad Astronomy blog and book fame has written and stated many times (paraphrasing frommemory) “remember the money spent on space exploration is spent “down here on Earth” (providing jobs, industry, opportunity, economic benefits, new tech, etc..) and “A ship is safe in harbour – but that’s NOT what ships are for.”
This allseems poretty obvs to me and it kind a saddens me that otherwise smart and good people that I generally strongkly agree with, respectand admire don’t see it this way. I also wonder why they don’t criticise things like the LHC and other esoteric fields with similar vehemance and I’m tempted to say unimaginative, quasi-Luddite-ism.
Were you trying to be serious?
Why are you directing that question at me, and not at any of the other commenters who are doing nothing but lazily snubbing any idea of space travel being either feasible or beneficial to humans?
That is, the topic is the actual astronauting, not the eventual terraforming.
Funny, you never said that in response to any of the comments about living on the Moon or Mars. Who died and made you the conversation police? ‘Cuz you’re doing a shitty job of it.
As for what are really the worst jobs, well, see :
https://www.careeraddict.com/worst-jobs
For a list of thirty examples. Spoiler – Astronaut is NOT on that list at all. As it concludes :
Then there’s the worst jobs ever in history of which there’s a whole TV series about – see :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Jobs_in_History
Plus there’s videos on youtube here which, again, well, I don’t think astronaut is included!
Of course, “worst” is a subjective term anyhow.
StevoR, the appeal to emotion is futile. It’s technically an informal fallacy. This:
See, whether or not it saddens you, you are not disputing the claim of the OP.
Astronauting is the opposite of good for the human body. Our tech is still too primitive to avoid that.
What you cannot possibly dispute is that exploration will be done much much better, faster, cheaper, safer, reliably if canned monkeys are not required.
Again: you clearly have this ≤C20 idea that optics and other sensors are not as good as a bit of clear glass, or that telepresence can’t be a thing.
Reality, again: Mars Rovers, yes. Mars monkeys, no.
—
Raging Bee, oh dear. Quite the reaction.
Um, you realise that you are actually policing my comment much more so than my comment was policing yours, no?
What a weird perception, anyway. And an evasion.
But fine. I still have no idea whether or not you were being serious about this proposal regarding the terraforming of Venus via dropping primitive plant life there.
Anyway, I made a joke about it, I asked if you were serious, I offered some speculations about the topic which you yourself introduced.
(Your reaction is interesting)
John: Why would I be less serious about terraforming and colonizing Venus than anyone else here has been about the feasibility, or benefits to Earth, of space-exploration in general? I’ve heard ideas of such a venture floated elsewhere, so why not mention them here? Your question is, quite frankly, kinda weird.
Raging Bee:
Because at this stage it’s more aspirational than possible.
I doubt you have any good idea of the sort of resources and scale and timeframe required for such an undertaking.
Because it’s what Sagan speculated about (specifically) in the article I cited.
Because (sorry if this seems like thread-policing to your paranoid perception) the topic is space travel specifically, not terraforming.
The former is doable and is being done, the other speculative and not being done.
Those are some reasons why.
(sigh)
(Wikipedia)
Why is it weird to ask if that was to what you referred?
Again: “Were you trying to be serious? Were you addressing Sagan’s speculative aspirations (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530)?”
@ 77 John Morales
If StevoR “cannot possibly dispute” it Juan Ramón, how about the guy who was Lead Scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover program?
Steve Squyres: Robot Guy Says Humans Should Go To Mars
Of course, pursuit of knowledge is not the only reason for species to expand their habitat. There are resource reasons, technological spin-off reasons, sociological reasons, mental health reasons, long-term survival reasons… “Of what use, Madam, is a newborn baby?”, etc., etc.
P.S. Appeal to Emotion is not inherently a logical fallacy, it depends on context. When you think about it, all of morality is an appeal to emotion.
Heh.
Juan Ramón smirks at your stupid question, since you misnymed him quite deliberately.
Tell ya what, give me your own birth name so that I may thus address you, as you address me. Then you will get some sort of snarky reply to your stupid question. That will be your reward.
(Was the Lead Scientist really made out of lead?)
Is he really a robot? Heh.
Point being, the topic is how it’s fucking unhealthy to spend lengthy time in space, the most unforgiving environment of all, and certainly beyond Earth’s magnetosphere in case of, um, events.
The case being made is that “humans have a key ability to inspire, that robots do not”. A very, very, very, very stupid case to make, but all he has.
I mean, sure, spend (say) 100 times more on a mission to send two people for a week to Mars and back than to send ten missions with rovers and repeaters (comms stuff) and whatever else.
No need for apes in cans, that’s the point.
(Desire, sure. But that’s just ego)
Good grandmother’s eggs!
How much more context can one need than the use of the definite article where the subject matter is a direct quotation?
(‘the’, not ‘an’)
—
It’s so obvious you’re a poser, bub.
[meta]
Relatedly, sixth-generation fighters are on the way.
Biggest new features: optionally unmanned, able to network a number of UAVs.
One strike force, one pilot (optional).
I mean, Biggles and all that (or, more impressively yet real, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader ) are very inspiring.
I propose that being a manned vehicle pilot during a hot war is perhaps not the safest of occupations, at least compared to being a drone pilot.
Machines are easier to replace than people, no?
Why put people in danger unnecessarily?
Expensively!
Pragmatics.
Current war in Ukraine is spurring on a lot of development of unmanned — and more and more autonomous — methods of exploring, and of delivering supplies.
(High explosive supplies, in this case)
[Grr. Should’ve written ‘uncrewed’ rather than ‘unmanned’]
(can’t resist)
The capsule falls to the ground with a thump, and in time settles and unfolds.
Steve and his fellow Marsnaut walk out of the capsule.
No way home for them, of course — it was a one way trip.
But very inspirational. Yay!
They will now try to spend a week in their spacesuits and have a good week where they can explore every bit as much and more as those rovers really did in five and a half years.
Surely they can carry enough water and food and air for that, after all, the gravity is significantly lower than on Earth.
I personally think one week in a spacesuit on Mars might be kinda unpleasant, but I suppose someone sufficiently motivated could manage.
(Shame people can’t be recharged by solar panels, eh?)
@ Juan Ramón
Remember when you claimed a thing cannot be undeniable if a single person denies it?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/09/07/that-israel-is-an-apartheid-state-has-become-undeniable/#comment-5235763
So all StevoR has to do to prove your claim wrong that he, “cannot possibly dispute” a thing is dispute it. And you claim this is “impossible”. X-D
Funny how hyperliteralism applies to everyone else, but not to you, eh?
Almost as if you’re a troll.
Right. You are so obsessive that, since over the nearly two decades wherein I’ve been commenting on this blog I’ve mentioned by natal name, you have decided to use it. Very poorly and ignorantly at first, but I finally schooled you after your due protestations that you were the expert over my personal circumstances in a different time and a different milieu.
Anyway, I do notice, and of course I don’t ignore it.
Now, if you want best practice (you’ve so quick come so far already!), be aware that Juan Ramón is even better. I most certainly used to hyphenise it back in the day, when I was a lad.
So, what was your natal name, StinkyBlob?
I just want to emulate your fine style, and ignore the nym you use for your bireth name, but unlike me, you are not generous enough to provide it.
That speaks to your character.
It reiterates to me that you grew up not in an honour culture, unlike me.
Remember they who wrote “it depends on context”?
Different context, bub. You write the words, but don’t walk the walk.
In this case, it could not have been clearer; @77:
“StevoR, the appeal to emotion is futile. It’s technically an informal fallacy. This: [specific quotation as part of an ongoing exchange]”
I then proceed to make a specific explanation of how it works.
(You, of course, are operating on the level of some Limited Language Model where a juxtaposition of terms triggers a chinese room response)
You quite evidently studiously ignore that for near two decades I have noted I write comments to the people to whom I address them, and you keep on making pratfalls when it comes to those. Not my fault you don’t get it, my credit that my interlocutors do.
It’s OK, I know damn well you’re not trying to white-knight our space cadet, you’re just using him as a rhetorical device to try to illustrate your misapprehension.
Context, bub.
You are not StevoR. To his credit.
Funny how the one and only person who ever refers to “hyperliteralism’ has been you. I’ve already asked you to explain how that differs from literalism, you’ve already slunk away. Elseblog, but still.
Go on, tell me how I am beyond literal.
Definitely as if you are obsessed by me. Bub.
(You are getting perfunctory about it, whereas once you were performative and vehement. I reckon maybe a demidecade or three hence, you might tire of it.
But I may be wrong)
—
So. Space travel.
PZ: Bad for the travellers.
Me: Expensive and inefficient for exploratory purposes.
StevoR: Glorious!
You: Some robot dude and you’re a troll.
Me: Heh heh heh.
(Sometimes, I get into the mood, and you are perking up at the perfect time, bub)
Terraforming is something that will take centuries (för minor changes) or millennia (för major changes).
Just keeping exploratory crews alive and healthy us enough of a challenge for now.
Because at this stage it’s more aspirational than possible.
And going to Mars isn’t?
I doubt you have any good idea of the sort of resources and scale and timeframe required for such an undertaking.
Actually, the initial algae-drop (along with satellites and other probes to monitor progress or lack thereof) would be relatively cheap and easy. And as for the time-frame, the longer it takes, the more time we’ll have to make whatever technological progress is needed to make terraforming and colonization possible.
Terraforming a planet without a magnetic field, especially in the inner solar system is an immense waste of time, as any useful atmosphere would be eroded away by the solar wind.
Terraform venus, get mars 2.0 in fairly short order, after a brief earth-like interlude.
As for manned exploration, let the humans do what humans do best, run labs at a habitat, mobile or fixed, although fixed would be more protective. Robots can do what robots do best, do the dumb work, traveling, retrieving samples, surviving a high radiation, essentially absent atmosphere environment, added bonus is someone’s onhand if we want to retrieve and fix a broken robot.
A fully equipped lab with a human will always have more flexibility than a fixed purpose robot. That said, human duration on the planet would necessarily be brief, as travel time to mars is rather lengthy, the return trip equally lengthy.
Just as asteroid mining in science fiction was done by miners and even mining families, utterly impractical, robots could do so continuously far better and just containerize and rocket back the minerals for working in lunar or earth orbit, or if you really want gravity to simplify processing in ways we’re more used to, on the lunar surface.
This is topical, context aside.
[Again, crewed/uncrewed works better for me, for the obvious reason]
…as any useful atmosphere would be eroded away by the solar wind.
Good point — but does Venus’s current atmosphere show any sign of being eroded by the solar wind?
[quick check]
NASA: “Magnetosphere
Even though Venus is similar in size to Earth and has a similar-sized iron core, the planet does not have its own internally generated magnetic field. Instead, Venus has what is known as an induced magnetic field. This weak magnetic field is created by the interaction of the Sun’s magnetic field and the planet’s outer atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the Sun excites gases in Venus’ outermost atmosphere; these electrically excited gases are called ions, and thus this region is called the ionosphere (Earth has an ionosphere as well). The solar wind – a million-mile-per-hour gale of electrically charged particles streaming continuously from the Sun – carries with it the Sun’s magnetic field. When the Sun’s magnetic field interacts with the electrically excited ionosphere of Venus, it creates or induces, a magnetic field there. This induced magnetic field envelops the planet and is shaped like an extended teardrop, or the tail of a comet, as the solar wind blows past Venus and outward into the solar system.”
So. If it had no atmosphere, it would have no magnetosphere, but it does, so it does, so it retains an atmosphere. Right?
@77. John Morales :
“See, whether or not it saddens you, you are not disputing the claim of the OP.
Astronauting is the opposite of good for the human body. Our tech is still too primitive to avoid that.”
Well, I did point out in #71 that actually we have a lot of now old astronauts who have lived very long lives and are still mentally with it & physically great for their age (e.g.Buzz Aldrin) and so it isn’t that bad or harmful. I’m not saying radiation, etc.. aren’t problems but I do think they have been overstated and that adequate protective measures can be taken.
The arguments as cited by Phil Plait that “money is spent on Earth and not space” and that “ships – including spaceships – may be safe in harbour but that’s not what they are for” are separate. One is an appeal to economics the other, well, okay, I’ll grant that is an appeal to emotion as well as to definition. Are emotions and logic enemies or complementary? Does using an emotion and even appealing to it ( e.g. this will make people happy, provide wonder, awe and understanding) even rule out it also being logical or make X incompatible with logic? I don’t think so.
Cheaper? Yes. Faster? Yes. Safer? Yes. better – umm, no. Not necessarily. As noted the human astronauts on our Moon accomplished a huge amount more in terms of science than the robotic explorers did. Ditto, some experiments and work done with the International Space Station as well as Mir, the various Salyut</> stations, Skylab & Tiangong which in many cases deal with humans living in space and thus can only be done on, well, humans living in space. Sometimes we learn by going and doing and trying things. As long as those experimenting here are doing so voluntarily – and they are – then there really shouldn’t be an issue here I think.
Some things require “canned monkeys”or humans to do. Others are helped and made better and easier by having them eg if an astronaut had been collecting samples from Bennu they could have made sure the lid was properly shut and samples weren’t leaking out* and got many more better samples and learnt and done more than the robots with their limitations can. When a lens cap lands in the wrong spot or gets stuck an astronaut can shift it or free it.** When an antennae sending signals and info back to Earth fails to unfurl properly as happened with the Galileio probe to Jupiter an astronaut could go EVA and fix it.. The Hubble Space Telescope famously benefitted from repeated human repair and upgrade missions by astronauts and wouldn’t have achieved anywhere near as much without those “canned monekys” working to make it better. Something all Humanity benefitted from.
Of course, those astronauts also require life support and more cost and effort etc.. Yeah, there is that trade off. Some things robots are best for and some things humans can still do better. Which is why I stress again, that both have roles to play and that they complement each other rather than necessarily being opposed.
.* See : https://spacenews.com/asteroid-samples-leaking-from-osiris-rex/
.** See : https://uk.pcmag.com/robotics/67021/life-on-venus-or-just-a-stray-lens-cap
.*** See : https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/galileo-antenna-deployment-problem-under-analysis
PZ rightly mentions, as he notes that “pioneers” a century and a half ago were killing indigenous people, ripping up the environment, and living in misery (and these reasons are why colonizing space isn’t virtuous), that at least there are no indigenous people to kill.
But he misses that there’s also no environment to rip up. Most of the things we’ve found that have surfaces are lifeless.
So what we’re left with is the question of whether it’s virtuous to colonize space even though the colonizers will lead very difficult lives, with the consideration that some of the difficulty with radiation() and bone and muscle loss can *already be mitigated through means he does not address.
And I think the answer is Yes. First of all, because it allows humans more options, and I think allowing more options is a good thing (even if many choose not to take advantage — which, since we agree it would be a hard life, we can agree that many will choose not to). Secondly, because we’re getting increasingly good at developing powerful ways to fuck up the planet that also seem to be increasingly difficult to unfuck if we make a mistake; it would be nice if we had the option to move those industries to dead rocks where there is no environment to impact, which requires that humans have a sustainable presence in space. We would finally be able to conduct experiments on some of the most interesting (and hazardous) substances and phenomena without the risk of soiling our own nest, or putting the rest of humanity involuntarily at risk. And finally, because as far as I know, intelligence is the only way that dead rocks will ever bear any sort of life; it seems somewhat ennobling to our species to think that we’re the only chance the Moon has to ever have growing petunias (and/or potatoes) on its surface, as far as we know.
I don’t think we’re ready to do this in a serious way tomorrow, and maybe not even for a century or two of steady technological progress on this front — but in the meantime, we’re exploring gradually. I think that’s the right approach.
It’s possible to reasonably disagree with any or all of my opinions, of course. I just thought I’d throw out some details that I think are missing in the OP.
(*) And no, we don’t need to spend gobs of fuel on bringing enough shielding for the entire habitat. We can use material at the destination for shielding. We can even arrange to have it all in place before the humans show up, and only worry about shielding a relatively small section of the vehicle they use to get there.
@77. John Morales :
Mars monkeys not yet but one day. I think Humans will go to Mars & I’d love to see it happen in my lifetime.
Yeah, telepresence is a thing but people walking round is even better and certainly faster. An astronaut / cosmononaut / taikonaut on Mars can do things like step over dangerous rocks, see and immediately take the easiest patth in real time without time lag delay and free rovers from Martian sand traps. We do that with bogged cars on Earth – on Mars gravity is lower so it might be easier!
As for the clear glass depends what its attached to and part of..(Not sure what you refer to there.)
@80. Silentbob : “Steve Squyres: Robot Guy Says Humans Should Go To Mars.”
Good article and quote there thanks. Of course NASA, ESA, the Chinese space program and most other space agencies again do both – robotic and human space travel and exploration. Not just one or the other because why limit ourselves needlessly or pit apples and oranges* against each other when you can have a fruit salad metaphorically combining both?
@ 84. John Morales :
It could a one way trip or not depending on the mission plan. It certainly doesn’t have to be and Musk aside most planned Mars missions aren’t. See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crewed_Mars_mission_plans
Also landing isn’t quite the same as falling – which one do you want planes to do – and most Mars missions use the landing approach. With retrorockets and landing legs or on pre-constructed runways for spaceplanes like the Shuttle.
Or have vehicles with them and even work with robots there to help do that carrying thing..
Yes – and there are lots of people keen to try and to go out and explore. “Pleasant” is, of course, something where people’s metaphorical mileage varies.
.* Always struck me as a really weird saying that one since apples and oranges are both types of fruit thus eminently comparable. Why not use things that much less similar in such analogy like an apple and an F1 car or even, if sticking to foodstuffs, pizza and oranges?
@86. John Morales :
I don’t think I actually used to word “glorious” but I’ll take it. Also wonderful, useful, awesome, extraordinary, informative, something that advances our understanding and perhaps the one thing unique to Humanity out of all species that have lived on Earth in terms of doing so deliberately and going beyond our planet. It seems we are the first species to do this that we know of that can do space travel and I think that is something epic and special and something that we gain from immensely. See links in #74 upthread.
@92. Raging Bee : “Good point — but does Venus’s current atmosphere show any sign of being eroded by the solar wind?”
Yes.
Source : https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011JA016749 (Emphasis added.)
Of course, given the problem the Cytherean atmosphere poses for planetary habitability iand its excessive denseness and GHG trapping properties it would perhaps be really nice if we could acelerate that erosion and get it down to a small %-age of its current state enabling temperatures and pressures to drop significantly.
Or find a way to switch Venus’es orbit with the Martian one perhaps making both worlds habitable albeit take a while for cooling down there.. Mars of course lacks mass but if it & Venus had been swapped in their places then it occurs to me we could have three currently habitable planets now. (Maybe add some mass to Mars from Venus, ah if only we could..)
Hmm.. Thought experiemnt but maybe in the far distant future when we have the right tech to do so and as a real long term project we could direct some impactor(s) into Venus Big Splash style blasting away its atmosphere and soem amss and by careful timing and direction depositing some of the Cytherean debris onto Mars increasing its mass & creating a more massive Mars with a thicker atmosphere and a less massive Venus with a thinner one.
Of course, any life existing on either world would make this arguably unethical but currently seems there’s not.
There’s also the small matter of the rotation rate in the Cytherean case – something Pamela Sargent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Sargent ) advanced tech magicked away in her Venus terraforming trilogy – which BTW I’d highly recommend.
Primitive and parochial thinking.
If one has magical future tech, one probably doesn’t need, you know, planets as lebensraum.
(Orbitals, ringworlds, virtual worlds)
@ 98 StevoR
So, celestial billiards. ;-)
Silentbob, not at all.
The rotation rate is the relevant referent, not the orbital trajectory which cosmic billiards would entail.
(Gotta work within the conceit to be properly droll)
Satellites don’t have to be brought back, don’t require life support systems, and failure is seen as a monetary loss, not a disaster that makes people gunshy. Some may not agree with my view, but human space travel has always been first about Cold War nationalism, then later about vanity (“space tourists”). It has never been about doing science.
Long term interplanetary travel is one of the best uses for Artificial Intelligence, letting it make decisions and solve problems in seconds or minutes what might require hours or days to accomplish through radio communication. AI might even be capable of doing its own repairs, something we can’t do now.
Intransitive @ 102, there are a few problems with your theory.
First, satellites kind of suck at analyzing mineral chemical content. Can’t analyze or even see many smaller rock samples that otherwise could be retrieved and analyzed.
I agree, to a point on Cold War my missile is bigger than yours is bullshit, save for the later Apollo missions, once they started sending a scientist along. More was learned by sending an actual geologist, who found samples just laying on the surface that the “trained astronauts” (read; test pilots) missed. Also, how many space tourists have walked on to moon to date?
AI fixes everything. Again. We don’t have AI that can pilot a spacecraft, let’s hand wave it away. You’re talking GAI, and we’re nowhere near to that yet. Maybe we should wait for AI to develop all new technologies, including AI? Until such is actually invented, you’re wanting to rely upon Harry Potter’s magic wand, which equally exists – not. Shall we also wait for GAI to develop the next antibiotic? Maybe we can wait for GAI to fix climate change too.
Just enjoy the boiling oceans, as you both starve and suffocate waiting.
What AI we have is great, it’s wonderful, can’t tell black faces apart, but sure is great ad IDing white folks, well, save when it makes a mistake. ChatGBT is wonderful – if you like confabulated fiction for answers to complex subjects.
We can’t yet replace people with any AI. We can only augment people, so people with a lab should be who go to places like the moon and mars – augmented with robotic ancillaries to do the blundering about in the hostile environment beyond their habitat unit – for fairly short periods, as the lack of gravity and lower atmospheric pressure do take a toll on we meat bags.
Or, we can simply quit all research and wait for Harry’s wand or AI to be invented.
In the news:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230927-what-a-long-term-mission-in-space-does-to-the-human-body
John @101: You’ve never heard of giving a billiard ball some “English”?
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38397/why-is-putting-some-spin-on-a-ball-described-in-some-circles-as-giving-it-some#:~:text=Etymology%20Online%20says%20the%20following,been%20around%20since%20before%201900.
No, Rob, I haven’t never heard of it.
And I’ve also heard about the nap of the cloth.
That’s almost droll, John.
:)
Velikovsky is the one for cosmic billiards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision
(Black holes are far out and solid)
@ Intransitive :
Actually it has been about science – maybe not as the sole factor but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also about science and goo d and useful science doesn’t get done.
Source : https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/20-breakthroughs-from-20-years-of-science-aboard-the-international-space-station/
From the International Space Station alone – and there are fifteen more of those.
Then there was the stuff we larned from the earlier Skylab space station :
Source : https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/skylab#hydrogen-alpha-telescopes
Plus as noted here :
Source : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8807369/
Then there’s also this :
&
Source : https://watermark.silverchair.com/42-3-3.33.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAA2UwggNhBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggNSMIIDTgIBADCCA0cGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMmXFaiifY0eeGNg25AgEQgIIDGMNpK68sVx-yo4dn2MjBMvtf_U6UDixxkl6VM9iCSXRBrY0mKEwrOgMensL7-KQTZkCA66pZham8KA_Lw2oOigzUmth69uiDpvAM__1ezHrmeuBx2FMX2NN9P4DodjsCfdnyNjBRyxzJNAyl3ufAUxo4101KgwIB3U9e5Bgx3Ed_DHq0fyy-hAk8-wGw2GvnDY-TiZo2N-OQ8tdo9NEmus-1yeNI4RABfsJkGeEBNqVZL4rfan-rPBZZ-EkcBb3bNvfK-Q0_hcyiN1L8iOUYjosstP9Lgk2fTqZQuJORnRRTrQsXN5e_HYGY8qLmKuarPhxYBv4toI6ed6ra2WJ9QP47JSd-yBWfimyquqAA_Luc3AtLMlh4_kAfK9YVYISpnR_eS7kKZ6RFMcIN1_wvquT2KeTnWw1IV8KeA79y1Y2Lk_L2VcWgTPM1K4ZGjJo0iuLxoC6YvQNVV1LiZthVqBVAIpP6uF128vrud7PJXlSa18McoOq966MBe8AMYIDDEpRbIKBcOavNwBhnrt_f7x6xpcqc_Yhbt2pryxPgCyLqujTKb8E3ZoS9oEwftPQ1YzAjtekwBcyF2ZsR6ykJSVLhOkmsfSUmaksoLbOVqFXrZ9VtiYMGWHiIS1R9A78zPgfrevPIGHxn8wsf8fkR0a3uxNJcSn3s-I3TeIrwPcxjcSXtlIi3SFeRzU1DbZ1tWRaa5ZBuoMea7tjhocVEQ3JouoF7fPhNl_pbYsR_MoDYgCZ0DoFY2mEW20HjMUklg6AOe_dKDNW6pAjOASVsRks-VBMFKjz54Rxvtzxn9acjzWLFfeC0gEgngT1wh3Lt2vtLxyi7zLHceg_tiKwjmrYHoKzqbYgGpXj2SJOC2NzpPWbY5f_6JZjEgmslJmbbuUIvUKcMOqgo138h5H-ymqDS2nZ22WS-ao_h2E76WQaldLbpubLZNosRM7xKNx_VV88onnH1OEg32WY2Id6bDeX59muTmljmUCe9Zlbp75qZdj9ao3P_xvK1eZZmLG-NrqoMDIgPhqMYZKZix9WMDJJXtnie_cSePA (Apologies for the long link there – not sure how / where to shorten it & still have it work.)
@ ^
Link doesn’t work man. What’s the web page? Like how did you get to this document?
Nevermind, Google suggests it’s here:
https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/42/3/3.33/300764