Prof. Van Allen -- the discoverer of radiation belts encircling Earth -- said "the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure."

The above is absolutely false. I have nothing against the ideology of adventure, but we have many other motivations. There are economic motivations and ethic motivations (of course I'm speaking about humanist ethics and not of other, very popular, so-called ethics).
But maybe the first priority motivation is not economic, and neither ethic.

May I suggest a small exercise? OK, it's short.

First point of view. You are sitting in front of your computer, reading this message: image to observe yourself from outside, yes, you are sitting there, drinking your coffee or tea...

Second point of view. Floating at 100 meters above your home, observe it: there are other houses around, hundreds and thousands of other people, making many things.

Third point of view. From an ISS' window, you see Earth passing under you. There are 6.5 billion pepole over there. You can't see your home, but it is there, and inside it you are always sitting at your pc. You think about that beautiful planet as your home.

Fourth point of view. From Juppiter orbit. Can you see the Earth? Not without a telescope. But it is there, and in your house -- somewhere in the universe -- you are sitting in front of your computer.

Fifth point of view. Outside the Solar System. OK, we are far away enough.

Look at that solar system. Can you call it home? Not yet. Anyway all around there not other homes. All around there is absolutely _nothing_, for thousands of light years. Inside the solar system there are many planets, moons and asteroids, but none of them you can call home.
There is only one blue planet, with an athmosphere we can breath: Earth.

Are you sure that Earth is still there?
Realize the reality: you and me (and other 6.5 billion people) live on a sand grain, lost in the universe.
Should any "cosmic broom" (an asteroid, a comet, a sun flare stronger than usual) decide to give a sweep, our beloved blue home-planet would be thrown away in the dark in few minutes: a poor dead grey thing, where the traces of the only intelligent (and stupid) life of the known universe will be erased in few decades.

Now: how can you sit there, peacefully disputing about the "ideology of adventure" and other similar fables??

Probably you are a very reasonable people, and when you buy a piece of software or hardware you check attentively to have a second source, in order to have maintenance and spare parts for a good number of years.
But you absolutely don't care about a "second source" for your (and my) cosmic home!

Believe me: we -- as humankind, before than as nations -- need at least a second source. This is the main reason for human space flight. And it is definitely not an option: it is an imperative, for an intelligent species.

Since nature didn't provide a second earth-like planet, we will have to build artificial environments outside. But we can do it: we are endowed with intelligence (even if sometimes it seems we aren't J), we have science, technologic know-how, and the hugest working potential we never had: 6.5
billion pepole. What we only need is to find water, but water seems to exist, outside Earth.

So, what are money? Money are only an accounting mean, while the real richness is the potential of work. Humankind was never so rich before. We think we are poor, only because we are stingy and greedy, we think that people are problems, while they are under-used resources, we are not able to
solve the conflicts without wars, and we keep on giving too much power to oil and military lobbies.
What are nations? Nations are politic aggregations, that people built up in order to unify their efforts. But what do nations serve, if they don't help to realize the people's goals?
The first goal of our kind is to survive and continue to grow up our civilization: 6.5 billion people cannot keep on growing up in a closed system (but this is already another motivation, and I said I had spoken about one only this night!).
US are the most technologically advanced country of this small blue planet: all the other people of the world hope they will keep on showing us the path to the stars!

And Scaled Composites, whit its great success of SpaceShipOne the June 21st, is a wonderful sample of the american free enterprise spirit.
We all -- human earthlings -- have to support it, and to help and compete, to reach the goal!

Aim high!
Adriano Autino

PS: TdF 2/2004 is on the way! You are the welcome to visit Technologies of the Frontier http://www.tdf.it/ and leaving your comments and thoughts in the public forum, it's free and open.

I agree with the below of course but do you think the space agency and
politicians could really "sell" the human expansion into space these
arguments? Sadly, I doubt it unless there was a near miss with a very
visible comet or asteroid or something. As you know, I have found the
Canadian Space Agency unbelievably resistant even to the more pedestrian social science arguments I promote.

Tom

thanks for your message.
I thought that Prof. Van Allen deserved a reply at philosophic level, more than at the politic level.
That's why in my message I didn't touch the topic of the space agencies policy.

What I tried to figure, with my small "exercise", was the extreme fragility of our cosmic home. I made the example of a colliding asteroid or comet, only because this concern is known, by the public opinion.
But, our knowledge about universe is so small, that other cosmic dangers could exist, just around the corner: an unexpected "cosmic broom" could strike us in any moment.
Furthermore, but the discussion is more difficult and long to demonstrate, the "broom" could also be a terrestrial one. The real danger is to keep growing up in a closed system, and sticking on all the possible alternatives that don't include the opening of the system and go outside. Since some years I am saying around that we do need a philosophic discussion, to focus some basic concepts, starting from humanist principles, and from the basic individual freedom values. This is very important, because we do need to form a new generation of politicians and journalists, based on solid humanist principles, and not on the ethic vacuum of the last quarter of the XXth century. We do need to found a new ideology, because without a valid ideology we will not go faraway.

There are many excellent economic motivations, that can be resumed in this statement: space tourism can be the strong industrial development line of this century; and it can re-launch, in the next 30 years, the economic growth for all the Earthlings.

I think this moment is very exciting and critical: historical events are occurring, there is an election in the US, people is acceping to discuss on the big addresses, reasoning on wide horizons.

Yes, agencies seem not to accept at all the advent of a merchant
astronautics. They can't go over their military-statist culture, and someone started to write that the only way to get another policy is to dismantle agencies and re-assemble them in another configuration (I don't agree that they should simply disappear, because a precious know-how would be dispersed). And, worse, ESA (which never had before a military setup, since European Union up to know was little more than an economic agreement) is preparing to turn to a military strategic line, in order to keep alive the big space industry, orphan of the telecommunication launches.

I wrote a small paper, that will be online in the next weeks, titled "The ideologic failure of the space agencies", where I discuss the main points of what we can finally call an ideologic failure (evidenced by the success of Scaled Composites and other facts):
1) as Dr. Patrick Collins pointed out in several papers, from the Gagarin's flight to nowadays, agencies spent 1 trillion $, without decreasing of 1 cent the cost of 1kg to orbit;
2) the percentage of failures progressively increased during last 30 years (2 shuttles on 5 were lost, Ariane 5 has 21% of failures, vs. 2,6% Ariane 4, just to mention the most relevant cases), so quality is getting worse;
3) as I wrote in my paper for 2003 IAF Congress, the quality standards -- born in the public environment, aerospace and defense -- grew up as a gigantic ensemble of self-targeted rules, more an more specialized, made by quality specialists, and not by expert project managers and technicians; the result is that none private industry, in space community nor outside, can afford quality; and the result, in the space industry, is anyway the worsening of quality, as one shown in point 2).

I think that we should try to organize an international symposium, on the space age philosophy.
This could be the right time to do it. Do you think we could find any
sponsors, to finance such initiative?

Adriano

Do you have any information about the thoughts of futurists or geneticists about the possibility of modifying humans for space flight. Instead of terraforming planets, perhaps we should change us (or do both).

Tom

a very interesting question, on a topic that I had opportunity to discuss during a recent seminar.
I don't like very much what I see around, about this topic.
To me, the discussion is very much misleaded by our religious thought, that uses to consider the human status as "imperfect", and a perfect divine status as something to aim to.
All a literature is born, about trascendency, super-human, trans-human, and so on.

As a new-humanist, I think that our current status is a transition between animal and human status.
We will not be fully human, e.g., until we keep on considering the organized killing of other persons as a legal mean to solve conflicts. We have to work a lot to go over the natural animal status.

As an astronautic-humanist, I think that we will not succeed to become really human, if we don't expand to the solar system: only in a greater echologic niche there will be room enough for a continuous economic growth, and the growth will help very much our ethic evolution.

On the biologic layer it is out of doubt that our body will change. Reduced gravity, cosmic radiations, closed artificial environments, just to mention the most evident causes, will lead changes in our phisiology and also in our way of thinking, and also in our capacity of thinking, likely.
A lot of people seems anxious to see in all this a super-human status.
I don't dislike that ensemble of wishes and ethic principles that we use to call humanism (including individual freedom basic principles, respect and tolerance for different thoughts, human rights, non-violence, etc...), and I like to think that -- being this the cultural heritage that make us aspirant to be humans -- we will bring them with us, and we will greatly enhance them, in our cosmic travel.

Since humanism grew up very much during last two centuries, together with the technologic progress (despect all what the sunday sociologists can say, about the "moral decay" and "technology grew up too much vs. morality", etc...), it will have an enormous development, togheter with the development of the space age.

Forgive me if my English doesn't support me very well, in exposing these concepts (I think I will do it better writing firstly them in Italian, and then reformulating them in English .

Trying to answer properly to your question. Giving for sure that our phisiology will be changed by extra-terrestrial conditions, should we try to anticipate such changements, by means of genetic engineering? It is difficult for me to answer. I could say: yes, if we have a reasonable sureness to do better than nature.

But first of all we should do very much better something that we don't make so much neither on Earth: to observe and analyse nature, in order to copy it. We didn't grew up very much in this: we keep on neglecting the study of nature (to copy it), on one side, and idolizing nature on the other side. A serious, pragmatic and curious scientific approach is very much needed: as Robert Heinlein wrote, "Moon is a harsh mistress", and space will give no gifts to us. For all our activities, even to breath, we will fully depend on our science and technology.
If we will not grow up, we will simply not survive. But this would be strange, considering our history: I think we will grow up.

About terraforming, I am definitely a supporter of it. Just to start, I would like to see, during my life, lunar gardens (inside bubles and artificial caverns, of course), full of playing children!

Adriano