As Star Trek reminds us, space is the final frontier. But is it the "final frontier"' of earthbound conflict - perhaps a power struggle between the United States and China?
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson spends a lot of time looking and thinking about space. He is the author of Space Chronicles and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Neil and I spoke about geopolitics and space.
Here's the transcript:
Fareed Zakaria: In this article in Foreign Affairs you talked about the fact that we were withdrawing from space - limiting our ambitions at the very moment that China was amping up its program. Are you really worried that we will actually lose the kind of leadership of space?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, yes, but more important, space is like proxy for a lot of what else goes on in society, including your urge to innovate. I mean, if you remember back in the 1960s and early 1970s where it was just expected that innovations would sort of transform the world.
People dreamed about tomorrow and who brings tomorrow into the present, if not the technologists, the scientists and the engineers? So that was coincident with the time and we had these great ambitions and a rather turbulent decade, of course.
The 1960s, the most turbulent since the civil war, for sure, with the Civil Rights Movement and the assassinations, hot war, cold war. The once shining beacon in that period was the moon missions. And everything was possible.
The World Fair was in that decade. That was all about tomorrow. So if you lose your space edge, my deep concern is that you lose everything else about society that enables you to compete economically.
Of course, we went to the moon because of a military motivation and that's why we stopped going anywhere beyond the moon because we saw that Russia was done. They were not going to go to the moon.
The dreamers back then were thinking that we went to the moon because we were explorers and if that were the case, of course, we would have continued on to Mars, but we didn't. It was obvious in retrospect why we didn't.
I would argue that today if we think of China as competition, economic competition, which they surely are, then to pull back on our space ambitions is a direct sort of lever arm on our capacity to compete economically.
Fareed Zakaria: One of the things you talk about in that article is that this is part of a general decline in science and engineering and decline of the kind of sexiness of science, but also the amount of time, energy we're putting into it. My question to you is why should we use this indirect path to science? If we want to fund science, why not fund science?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That's a common question that always gets asked. What happens is when you approach the world that way, you find a problem, and you say, "Well, let's put some money to do more what the solution is to that problem."
What they amount to are like Band-Aids on each little problem. So today we need more scientists so let's make better science teachers. Put a little Band-Aid there. We want to keep our jobs. So let's make incentives for corporations to not move their manufacturing plant, a little Band-Aid there.
You go around and you put all these Band-Aids down, and you are ignoring a deeper engine that could be operating that would solve all those problems simultaneously.
Fareed Zakaria: You worry a lot about the fact that people are getting very cost conscience and really cutting back, and you tell the story about the Hubble Telescope. Explain why it's important and what happened.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, in that particular case, the Hubbell telescope as you may remember, when it was launched, the mirror had the wrong curvature to it. Images were fuzzy. So it would be a little while before we could get that repair with corrective optics. So what do you do?
Fareed Zakaria: Because it's up there in space.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: You got to mount a mission to go work on it. Be clever about how you design the corrective because that problem was not anticipated before Hubbell was launched. So you had to be really clever about what you pulled out and what you swapped in.
And so there was some time - downtime, if you will - where you could get data, but it was kind of fuzzy data. What do you do? You don't want to waste it. So an algorithm was invented - developed to extract as much information as you possibly can from these fuzzy images of stars.
And that exercise, that was shared with a medical doctor who specialized in breast cancer research, and he noted that finding these dots of light in an otherwise sort of fuzzy environment was exactly what he does visually when he is looking for early detection - early detection of breast cancer in the mammograms.
So check this algorithm, apply it and now they are finding early detection of breast cancer doing a better job than the human eye was able to do. You can't script that. That happens all the time - this cross pollination of fields, innovation in one, stimulating revolutionary changes in another.
If you only want to put money to a problem, you can tend to make evolutionary changes, small increments, but the big changes come about when all the - I'm not saying just through space: You need all the sciences. Quick note, all the machines in a hospital that have an on- off switch brought into the service of diagnosing the condition of the human body without cutting you open? They're all based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. From the x-ray machine, one of the earliest of these diagnostic tools, to the entire Department of Radiology, to –
Fareed Zakaria: It's all about light waves.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That and energy out of the atom. With MRI, the CAT scans, physicists just doing physics. If you say, " I want to be healthier, let's put more money in the medical community." No, you have to put money everywhere, but in the school system and in the culture of society, what drives ambitions?
There's nothing that drives ambitions the way NASA does and today's NASA portfolio taps biologists because we're looking for life on Mars, chemists and physicists and electrical engineers, mechanical engineers.
All the traditional stem fields - that is science, technology, engineering and math - are stoked when you dream big in agencies such as NASA, and it's not that much money. Right now, it's a half a penny on your tax dollar. I say double it to a penny.
Then we go to Mars in a big way in the short-term. It becomes a big, visible project. School kids know about it, and who is that first astronaut class. Today in middle school, why select them now, and then we all concentrate and see how they're eating well or getting through grades. That's tomorrow's Mercury 7.
Fareed Zakaria: What would we learn? What is your hope about the Mars mission? I mean, part of it is symbolic, but part of it you think there's a lot to learn by going to Mars.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, as a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids in the moon because I'm a scientist, but I can tell you I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
NASA was created in a geopolitical climate. We were spooked by Sputnik. Sputnik itself was a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile with a radio transmitter. Everybody said, "It's going beep." The military knew the implication of this.
The space station itself - the initial impetus was "Russia is building their own space station." So don't have a problem with geopolitical arguments for going into space. Let all the reasons reveal themselves. Tourism, let the private sector go take care of that. I don't have any problems with that. Scientists, send me to Mars.
Fareed Zakaria: Would you go?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I would so go to Mars - to low-earth orbit, no. Boldly going where hundreds have gone before? No. If you are going to go where nobody has gone before, sign me up. I'll bring my whole family and sign me up.
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If you want to create a divergent human popluation that wants to come back to earth, then yes.
I would recommend requesting input from geneticists and evolutionary biologists.
Without your recommendations, noone would have thought of it.
hehehehe...
Yes, go to Mars, we might develop a new species of mankind there!
Yes, their perspective would be out of this world !
RZ -hehehe...
SO... SOMEDAY THE MARTIANS WILL INVADE THE EARTH, JUST LIKE WHAT WE ARE DOING WITH CHINA NOW.
I totaly agree in what he says. In fact moving forward depend on those big projects that only a large state can support. Think all the voyage of discoveries of the 1th and 16th centuries, they would never have happened if some enlighthened rulers had not funded them. And one of the big outcome was Marco Polo and all the ideas he brought back from China.
If we go out there we will stumble on things that don ' t exist on earth, different phenomenons because the conditions are different. We can find new laws, new isotopes, new molecules, all sorts of new things.
More important we will learn to fly in space, and one day we will colonize another planet that is compatible, and our chances of survival will be increased
Send the zionists, see if god really favors them.....
send the muslims, they have lots of children for martyrdom.
Don't get confused, Patrick. Your cult is an equally pathetic product of human frailty.
Are you saying that Atheists are the best alternative?
Seek psychiatric help and please, don't breed!
Send the Chinese to Mars. When the time comes they will have a bigger economy and be much better able to afford it. The US will need to spend its money rather on maintaining its military for wars here on Earth.
Realistically, Mars will not happen. Their's not enough money printing to accomplish that.
Any chance we could save Earth?
There can be little, to no justification for sending a manned mission to Mars, when robots/unmanned vehicles are perform the same science for less than 1 percent of the cost. American science and industry would be far more advanced by putting these funds into domestic science and research, rather than embarking on such adventure, which would contribute little relative to other science based investment/research opportunitues. The opportunity cost would be to divert funds from more relevant science, and investment, and other countries would surely notice Americas weakness, and purse competitive advance to Americas detriment. I am Australian, and I would prefer for America to maintain its scientific lead, as America shares it competitive advantages (ie the Panama Canal and Nuclear Technology), it would be best for Amercia to hold the scientific lead rather than more opportunistic nations.
i don't think you understood what he was saying. If you have a mars mission with the world and kids watching, it would draw KIDS into thinking big. My generation (i am 27) have nothing at all to compare to this.
I listened to JFKs call for a mission to the moon, then watched in dismay as NASA pocketed $535 billion in the years AFTER the moon mission program was over, and STILL TODAY spends more than the Federal government spends on education.
And it's spelled 'STEM', not 'stem'. STEM will be the 'NASA' of Education, a huge technocrat bureaucracy, curriculum by committee, 'teaching' by rote (I'm a STEM 'teacher' which is to say, I pedant the 'Given Wisdom' passed down from the administrators, Om Manha Padme Kyoto, along with a bag of 'tricks' they've 'found' that 'work' while teaching to the test.)
Not ONE of Star Wars programs ever deployed, except for Patriot which everyone agreess is not operational, and even though some of them are still funded today, twenty five years and billions of our last life savings later. Mars isn't the 'Red Planet', Mars is the 'Dead Planet', an ice cold waterless desert with 90% carbon dioxide atmosphere and NO LIFE.
And hey, kids, Star Trek is a nursery fable. Get a life, and get your rice bowl paws out of my Social Security Trust Fund. The Space Elevator fails on basic physics. The Mining Asteroids would cost $1M per ton of ore to recovery, if you could even get it down out of orbit.
NASA had it's day ... twenty five years and $535 billion ago. STEM needs to focus on permaculture, aquaculture, energy efficiencies of food distribution, and wholistic medicine. There are 7 billion humans right here on Earth.
@Chip Nihk - "NASA pocketed $535 billion in the years AFTER the moon mission program"
They didn't pocket that money. It was overwhelmingly spent in the US on programs with a lasting scientific, operational, and inspirational legacy.
It's also not fair to relate the Star Wars (SDI) program– those were confidential military programs with an end-goal that was FAR from advancing scientific knowledge. NASA largely does its work in the public view, for public benefit. There are many experts (for example, Neil deGrasse Tyson) that show the return on investment for space exploration to exceed most other forms of government spending.
Complain about bureaucratic programs all you want, but most of the engineers I know, in the private sector, cite the Apollo programs as a significant source of inspiration. Funny enough, I meet people all the time on the low-end of the pay scale that say the same thing. Space exploration is an incredible challenge that can (as it has in the past) drive innovation. However, that's only part of the story. It can unite different cultures, cross geopolitical boundaries, and make a lasting impact on younger generations. Why would we not choose to invest in that?
I would go in a heartbeat!
La gent eftrange diuifera butins,
Saturne en Mars fon regard furieux:
Horrible eftrange aux Tofquans &
Latins,
China qui feront a frapper curieux.
You have no idea how to speak French, just like you have no idea how to express any opinion other then "allah allows me to lie, cheat and murder–join the losers' team."
Why don't you post your own opinion, instead of sniffing around for trouble. If you don't have anything to share, zip-up!
****************
The English version of my previous post, consists idioms:-
A foreign nation will divide the spoils;
Saturn in a dreadful aspect with Mars.
Terrible and strange to the Tuscans and
Latins; Chinese who will to strike.
********************
N.B., the above sentences are proverb and in some case, it speaks for itself.
Please, read it carefully. It has more meanings.
I am quite happy to let you make a fool out of yourself.
Schmuck!
We should send all current politicians to mars and start new.
Hubbell telescope? Really?
We would not have nearly the understanding of our universe that we do if it weren't for the Hubble telescope. Not sure what your comment even means but you are mistaken if you think that these things aren't important. I'm done with my comment, you can go back to your life in a bubble and forget about the real world that you are part of.
Sure. But we have to successfully land people on the moon first.
I think the astronauts should be Mormon- aren't they into ruling planets and stuff when they die?
The Chinese have a desire to have their ego moment in space just like Russia and the US. If Mars is it, good luck to them I hope they are successful. Once China and India have had their nationalistic egos stroked then perhaps the dream of Star Trek with people of all nations cooperating in space will happen.
Dr Tyson is correct though. But unfortunately the US has had a succession of short term thinkers as Presidents who pay lip service to NASA.
I WILL GO!
We have had certain people travel all around our solar in the distant past. We also had people went to another solar system not to long ago which already inhabit with people same as we are. Said enough.
Linds Posted on my only thought on the color semhce is Jesus loves His enemies? swell pics, bro very swell. (ps- you should feel special. your blog is pretty much the only one i ever check regularly.)
well a lot of them were moved to Afghanistan and Iraq and they found crap, its better to put money where it should count
He is completely right.Recent inventions like the computer,internet and the world wide web, were all created by scientists to solve specific problems and look at how they have changed our modern society.
...you mean Al Gore didn't create the internet! ...Oh, my!
I thinks it's time we do make a serious effort in colonizing another planet. We went to the moon in1969 less than 10 years after President Kennedys pledge and managed to land men on there with what would be considered today as very primitive technology why can't we go to Mars? A recent MIT study predicts a major global economic and population collapse by 2030 due to dwindling resouces which makes sense with the explosive population growth we are experiencing today. Lets do this now!
FED predicts a US political and economic collapse by 2018, so who cares what MIT panders to the media.
I think we need to resolve our problems right here on Earth before we think about going anywhere else. With so many
going hungry, homeless and without access to healthcare it doesn t make sense to spend millions sending people to Mars while Congress is trying its best to gut the safety net for our most vulnerable and remove protections for our own planet in the name of fiscal responsibilty
Mars do have a thin atmophere but you will have to produce oxygen from it water and live in a Iglo. It also have oil probly natural gas as well most likly one could grow some kind of desert plant food.
...and sand castles, lots of pretty red sand castles!
YES!!!!!! Send the following so called humans to Mars (a one way ticket): Incarcerated murders, gang members, drug cartel members, child molesters, hackers, Islamic Terrorists, Corrupt Politicians, Corrupt Wall Streeters, Top Bankers, extreme right wingers, extreme left wingers and the Dad Gum Oil people. Wow what a world we would have without them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Exactly that happened when Spain sent Columbus to seek out new lands, and England started to inhabit Australia, so basically doing the same thin again in Mars would not be something new.
The alternative of sending highly educated people with sophisticated survival equipment and the appropriate tools also makes a lot of sense. That way a better oriented progress would be insured right from the beginning.
So let's see, you want to piggy back a return space shuttle on top of a launch space shuttle and meet up in LEO with a freight train of food, water and oxygen, magically accelerate out of Earth orbit into the unprotected radiation sauna of space for six months, park in LMO, magically re-entry the return space shuttle, along with SFBs down to the surface, magically land and self-erect the shuttle up again, magically fuel it with liquid oxygen and hydrogen, magically lift off and rendevous with ooops, an EMPTY freight train of no food, no water and no oxygen, quick NASA send another shuttle!!
Magically thinking is beautiful! Science fiction is wonderful! Just draw a hard line in the red sand, and keep NASAs rice bowl paws out of our dwindling tax revenues and half-spent Social Security Trust Fund, and let them sell IMAX tickets.
We are getting to that point in our history when it is becoming necessary to look for an alternate planet, and apparently Mars is a possibility. I think that establishing a colony up there has to be one of humanity's goals. Perhaps we came from there and now we have to get ready to go back. Sounds strange but it has to be voiced one way or any other.
I would volunteer..
It's best we stay home with our problem humans and leave the rest of the Universe in peace.
Krishna Sir, Nice to hear from you about our village.Although we are away,we aylaws eagar to hear & see prosperity of Ghandruk and the Ghandruke.Thank you very much and hopeto hear from you very soon. Krishna Gurung Kot Gaon(residing in The U.K.)
Interplanetary travel within the solar system itself is a daunting task, both technically and financially. It is doubtful that any one nation can make more than one manned round-trip within a reasonable length of time (5-10 years betwen shots). Only by cooperation between nations can the enourmous cost and technical difficulties be overcome. Sadly, I don't think the planet is at a stage where we can put ego, and nationalism aside and focus on these problems as well as those of space flight. Imagine what a great world it could be if we could turn our collective resources toward fixing our problems on Earth as well as setting our sights on the great horizon out there. When I get home from work, fairly late most nights, I do enjoy looking up and seeing the heavens, and I think "Will we ever get there?" Unfortunately, the response is always the same "...Not in my lifetime."
We already have humans from Mars living in the white house!
Of course we have to send mankind to Mars.How else will we discover the Prothean ruins?
Our planet and the rest of the galaxy have to unite together if we ever want to defeat the Reapers.
I concur.
YES! And I'd like to offer a few suggestions, particularly several of the candidates for President!
Remember the Dogon tribe from Mali and Kenya they have more knowledge about our solar from ancient time than NASA have today. Bless.
I vote all members of both houses of Congress and illegal aliens in America go first.
I vote to send a Pygmy Goat.
Mars to Stay!
Mars is the place to move the medeival people of India to where they can practice body piercing to celebrate hinduism.
was there done that .... in my lego space ship ! and it only cost me $30 for the lego kit and a bit of my imagination!
Yes - Obama to Mars; Gingrich to his Moon Colony. And Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can go to Uranus
AND ... GOP CAN GO DOWN THE TOILETTE.
It is illogical
Yes,All the Worlds Leaders and Politicians
And all Alcohol users too
Wouldn't the moon be a better starting point for a journey like this? With 1/6 the gravity of the Earth, we could build much larger and more capable spacecraft ( a mothership perhaps that could orbit Mars while astronauts descend to the surface) while, at the same time, honing our skills and understanding of life outside the bubble. We have put the cart before the horse here. Yes we could just shoot people to Mars and cross our fingers, but we stand to yield a much greater understanding of things if we take a measured, global, approach to this. A great project for the world to coalesce around.... not a terrible thing in a time where we tend to focus on our Earthly partners as rivals rather than friends.
Make no mistake, a time will come when we have to get off this rock!
Compromise: permanent settlements in geostationary orbit, the Lagrange points and the moon. They would excite the imagination in their own way, provide a base for zero-g manufacturing, research and atmosphere-free astronomy and provide the data needed to make manned missions, colonies, etc on other planets work.
We should experiment first on the process of photosynthesis inside close quarters, close spaceship, and close environment.. We all know human cannot exist without air. Photosynthesis produces air. If we can produce air on close quarters, close spaceship, close environment and a safe environment then we can send man on Mars.
Photosynthesis support life. Scientist already began studying photosynthesis like that of ARPA-E the energy focus of DARPA. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/video-artificial-photosynthesis-produces-enough-energy-power-house-one-bottle-water
the guy is smart and all, but he is famous because he is black... there are Asians who do what he does everyday... but dont get the recognition he gets
Google streetview shows that you don't have to be somewhere, physically, to explore a region. Before sending humans it is a lot cheaper to just chart interesting regions with robots, using 360degr. high-resolution, plenoptic camera's, using forked exploration paths to cover the surface
No, pare che sia la versione per Wii. Intendo per il tuo sotupre per la grafica di questo gioco! Ma non mi basta, ora vado a vedere qualche video e a scoprire qualcosa sul gioco. Poi vedr se merita anche in altri campi al di fuori della grafica. Spero di si per !