{"id":3481,"date":"2022-03-26T19:37:32","date_gmt":"2022-03-26T19:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3481"},"modified":"2022-07-22T10:07:53","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T10:07:53","slug":"dont-stick-your-butter-knife-in-the-toaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3481","title":{"rendered":"Don’t stick your butter-knife in the toaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading The End of Astronauts by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees for the Times, 26 March 2002<\/a><\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, is now sitting on the launch pad. It\u2019s the super heavy lifting body for Artemis, NASA\u2019s international programme to establish a settlement on the Moon. The Artemis consortium includes everyone with an interest in space, from the UK to the UAE to Ukraine, but there are a few significant exceptions: India, Russia, and China. Russia and China already run a joint project to place their own base on the Moon.<\/p>\n

Any fool can see where this is going. The conflict, when it comes, will arise over control of the moon\u2019s south pole, where permanently sunlit pinnacles provide ideal locations for solar collectors. These will power the extraction of ice from permanently night-filled craters nearby. And the ice? That will be used for rocket fuel.<\/p>\n

The closer we get to putting humans in space, the more familiar the picture of our future becomes. You can get depressed about that hard-scrabble, piratical future, or exhilarated by it, but you surely can\u2019t be surprised by it.<\/p>\n

What makes this part of the human story different is not the exotic locations. It\u2019s the fact that wherever we want to go, our machines will have to go there first. (In this sense, it\u2019s the *lack* of strangeness and glamour that will distinguish our space-borne future — our lives spent inside a chain of radiation-hardened Amazon fulfilment centres.)<\/p>\n

So why go at all? The argument for \u201cboots on the ground\u201d is more strategic than scientific. Consider the achievements of NASA\u2019s still-young Perseverance lander, lowered to the surface of Mars at the end of 2018, and with it a lightweight proof-of-concept helicopter called Ingenuity. Through these machines, researchers around the world are already combing our neighbour planet for signs of past and present life.<\/p>\n

What more can we do? Specifically, what (beyond dying, and most likely in horrible, drawn-out ways) can astronauts do that space robots cannot? And if robots do need time to develop valuable \u201chuman\u201d skills — the ability to spot geographical anomalies, for instance (though this is a bad example, because machines are getting good at this already) — doesn\u2019t it make sense to hold off on that human mission, and give the robots a chance to catch up?<\/p>\n

The argument to put humans into space is as old as NASA\u2019s missions to the moon, and to this day it is driven by many of that era\u2019s assumptions.<\/p>\n

One was the belief (or at any rate the hope) that we might make the whole business cheap and easy by using nuclear-powered launch vehicles within the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Alas, radiological studies nipped that brave scheme in the bud.<\/p>\n

Other Apollo-era assumptions have a longer shelf-life but are, at heart, more stupid. Dumbest of all is the notion — first dreamt up by Nikolai Fyodorov, a late-nineteenth century Russian librarian — that exploring outer space is the next stage in our species\u2019 evolution. This stirring blandishment isn\u2019t challenged nearly as often as it ought to be, and it collapses under the most cursory anthropological or historical interrogation.<\/p>\n

That the authors of this minatory little volume — the UK\u2019s Astronomer Royal and an award-winning space sciences communicator —
\nbeat Fedorov\u2019s ideas to death with sticks is welcome, to a degree. \u201cThe desire to explore is not our destiny,\u201d they point out, \u201cnor in our DNA, nor innate in human cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trouble begins when the poor disenchanted reader asks, somewhat querulously, Then why bother with outer space at all?<\/p>\n

Their blood lust yet unslaked, our heroes take a firmer grip their cudgels. No, the moon is not \u201crich\u201d in helium 3, harvesting it would be a nightmare, and the technology we\u2019d need so we can use it for nuclear fusion remains hypothetical. No, we are never going to be able to flit from planet to planet at will. Journey times to the outer planets are always going to be measured in years. Very few asteroids are going to be worth mining, and the risks of doing so probably outweigh the benefits. And no, we are not going to terraform Mars, the strongest argument against it being \u201cthe fact that we are doing a poor job of terraforming Earth.\u201d In all these cases it\u2019s not the technology that\u2019s against us, so much as the mathematics — the sheer scale.<\/p>\n

For anyone seriously interested in space exploration, this slaughter of the impractical innocents is actually quite welcome. Actual space sciences have for years been struggling to breathe in an atmosphere saturated with hype and science fiction. The superannuated blarney spouted by Messrs Musk and Bezos (who basically just want to get into the mining business) isn\u2019t helping.<\/p>\n

But for the rest of us, who just want to see some cool shit — will no crumb of romantic comfort be left to us?<\/p>\n

In the long run, our destiny may very well lie in outer space — but not until and unless our machines overtake us. Given the harshness and scale of the world beyond Earth, there is very little that humans can do there for themselves. More likely, we will one day be carried to the stars as pets by vast, sentimental machine intelligences. This was the vision behind the Culture novels of the late great Iain Banks. And there — so long as they got over the idea they were the most important things in the universe — humans did rather well for themselves.<\/p>\n

Rees and Goldsmith, not being science fiction writers, can only tip their hat to such notions. But spacefaring futures that do not involve other powers and intelligences are beginning to look decidedly gimcrack. Take, for example, the vast rotating space colonies dreamt up by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill in the 1970s. They\u2019re designed so 20th-century vintage humans can survive among the stars. And this, as the authors show, makes such environments impossibly expensive, not to mention absurdly elaborate and unstable.<\/p>\n

The conditions of outer space are not, after all, something to be got around with technology. To survive in any numbers, for any length of time, humans will have to adapt, biologically and psychologically, beyond their current form.<\/p>\n

The authors concede that for now, this is a truth best explored in science fiction. Here, they write about immediate realities, and the likely the role of humans in space up to about 2040.<\/p>\n

The big problem with outer space is time. Space exploration is a species of pot-watching. Find a launch window. Plot your course. Wait. The journey to Mars is a seven-month curve covering more than ten times the distance between Mars and Earth at their closest conjunction — and the journey can only be made once every twenty-six months.<\/p>\n

Gadding about the solar system isn\u2019t an option, because it would require fuel your spacecraft hasn\u2019t got. Fuel is great for hauling things and people out of Earth\u2019s gravity well. In space, though, it becomes bulky, heavy and expensive.<\/p>\n

This is why mission planners organise their flights so meticulously, years in advance, and rely on geometry, gravity, time and patience to see their plans fulfilled. \u201cThe energy required to send a laboratory toward Mars,\u201d the authors explain, \u201cis almost enough to carry it to an asteroid more than twice as far away. While the trip to the asteroid may well take more than twice as long, this hardly matters for… inanimate matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

This last point is the clincher. Machines are much less sensitive to time than we are. They do not age as we do. They do not need feeding and watering in the same way. And they are much more difficult to fry. Though capable of limited self-repair, humans are ill-suited to the rigours of space exploration, and perform poorly when asked to sit on their hands for years on end.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that automated missions to explore the solar system have been NASA\u2019s staple since the 1970s, while astronauts have been restricted to maintenance roles in low earth orbit. Even here they\u2019re arguably more trouble than they\u2019re worth. The Hubble Space Telescope was repaired and refitted by astronauts five times during its 40-year lifetime — but at a total cost that would have paid for seven replacement telescopes.<\/p>\n

Reading The End of Astronauts is like being told by an elderly parent, again and again, not to stick your butter-knife in the toaster. You had no intention of sticking your knife in the toaster. You know perfectly well not to stick your knife in the toaster. They only have to open their mouths, though, and you\u2019re stabbing the toaster to death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading The End of Astronauts by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees for the Times, 26 March 2002 NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, is now sitting on the launch pad. It\u2019s the super heavy lifting body … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[222,227,318,597,783],"class_list":["post-3481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-mars","tag-moon","tag-robots","tag-space-exploration","tag-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3483,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481\/revisions\/3483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}