Manned Missions to Space

I have to say that I used to like the idea of manned missions. Then I learned that there is only so much money to go around. I am currently thing to get funding for a number of projects, unfortunately all the projects have been canceled due to budget shuffles to get man on mars. This is hurting astronomers and astrophysics much more than many people realize. All around the country many programs and research areas are being axed to pay for the exploration.
I am hoping that the harm is not to great.

Kevin Conville said:
Continue with unmanned missions for the pure science of it but leave the people on Earth.

This has always sounded weird to me, this 'leave people on earth' thing. For how long? Until the next asteroid hits and wipes us out? Until the next super-volcano erupts and exterminates 90% of all life? Until the Sun goes red giant and incinerates every living thing on the planet?

Exploration means, ultimately, the next stage in evolution. On to bigger and better things. Man venturing into space is like the first sea creature that ventured onto land. It is taking things to the Next Level.

Staying on Earth means eventual extinction. Staying on Earth for the duration of the species is like living with your parents your whole life and never venturing outside.

I say, if we're just going to sit on this planet and wait to die off, then what is the point of even being here at all?

Well Paul,
It's always sounded weird to me why people would rather fly the coop rather than clean up the coop.

BTW, asteroids strike other planets Paul. Other planets have volcanos also. Other suns go supernova.
Your time scale is weird too, seeing as our sun has a couple of BILLION years left in it.

Our planet culturally and socially is in a F$#@*& mess and you want to start the process of colonizing other worlds? What makes you think we'll handle those issues better than the issues of the here and now? How will we fund this pipe dream and what gets foresaken in the process?

Maybe, with all that science garnered from unmanned exploration, we'll find another suitable planet (that we might actually be able to get to) that may be another home for us one day. In the meantime keep the school teachers grounded.

Oh, and Star Trek is a TV show.

For a fraction of what's been spent on military budgets over just the last year, we could send people to Mars. IMHO many of the fundamental questions about ancient rivers, volcanism, possible microbial life, etc, can only be resolved by direct human interaction. No robot lander, no matter how sofisticated, has intuition and curiosity. Besides that, I think it's part of our nobler human nature to want to explore and discover first hand.

The rover may not have curiosity but the people running it do. They are have a very suseptable nature to the harsh radiation on mars because of no magnetic field where the rovers, they don't mind that so much. Although if we are talking about spending more on manned missions with out taking away from current research I am all for it. I think we spend a rediculous amount on defense.
Eric

Good points, Eric. But, I feel their largely preprogrammed nature and the lead time for signal transmission to and from robot landers takes away a lot of the spontaneity that a manned mission would have. As to the radiation hazards, yes, the exposure to cosmic rays would be significant. Still, I'd be ready to go in a New York Second if I had at least a reasonable chance to come back alive to tell about it. We all gotta go sometime and dying on a Mars mission would be a hell of a lot cooler than getting run over by a bus or dying of cancer right here on earth.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to clean up our act here too. I just don't accept that these are mutually exclusive tasks as you seem to think. Should we just put a halt on all technological and scientific progress until we have all our political and social problems solved?

We know that the reality, of course, is that life on Earth will never be absolutely perfect. Sure, Neverland and Oz are fun to tell stories about, but let's be realistic, if we really want to wait for Nirvana on Earth before we expand into space, well we might as well just nuke ourselves now because we'll never get out there then.

>BTW, asteroids strike other planets Paul.<

Not all of them at the same time. The point is that the more environments a species has, the better chance it has to survive a disaster that strikes one of those environments.

Kevin Conville said:
Oh, and Star Trek is a TV show.

And "A Trip to the Moon" was just a movie in 1902. What's your point?