Arguably our tendancy to kill each other is a plus to scientific advancement. At no time is new technology developed quicker than at time of war, usually in the form of weapons or weapon defences, but easily converted to more productive technologies in times of peace. A good example of this is Hitlers V2 rocket - while origionally designed as a weapon to defeat Britian,
the plans were captured by the Americans after the war and were used to build our first space rockets. NASA still uses the V2 rocket design to this day.

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"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb discussing what's for dinner.
Liberty is a well armed lamb willing to contest the majority decision!" ~ Benjamin Franklin
"Diplomacy is the art of saying Nice Doggie! while you're looking for a rock. ~ Wynn Catlin
"There are no innocent civilians." - Gerneral Curtis Lemay. A.K.A Bombs away Lemay

Intresting topic. I've seen references to nanotechnology and increased life spans. Anyone here read any Kerzweil or have a small belief in the singularity? I read a book of his on my last Canadian fishing trip, a fascinating concept if nothing else. Expondentially increasing technology opens some mind bending, and as of yet unthought of possibilities. We live in interesting times to say the least.

I read a lot of O'Neill's stuff when I was a sprout. None of his ideas on colonization required any great leaps in technology. We could have started these things 30 years ago. See Space habitat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia if you're interested.

Greetings and Felicitations,

There are many aspects of nano- and bio-tech that would assist. Of particular interest to me is the developing ability to grow animal tissue in vats to provide for the human fascination for meat. I think that crews on long term space missions will eat a mostly vegetarian diet because carrying animals for food is resource prohibitive and you simply can't carry enough food for long term journeys.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

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Greetings and Felicitations,

I combined several posts on violence as relative to space travel to eliminate the need for several replies to cover the same topic.

There are several problems with the line of reasoning that violence is a driver for future space exploration.

1. I will agree that violence and war has driven technological progress but many things that worked in the past don't work now. Just because we used something in the past doesn't necessarily mean it was the best method. Our progress as a species would have been slower if we hadn't relied on violence but that might not have been a bad thing. Perhaps if we had progressed a little slower technologically we would have had time to progress in social areas that cause a lot of problems today.

2. We have reached the point where the tools of violence have reached the point of negative return. The limits of our ability to destroy each other has reached the point where a small number of people can have a widespread impact on the live of people.

3. The expansion into space will create immense buffers between groups. Conflict within a group or within a ship will have great dangers to the crew and passengers. You simply cannot wage battles within a closed system and not destroy the system. For example, two people deciding that fighting is the best way to solve a problem will damage valuable property and endanger the entire colony.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

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Greetings and Felicitations,

I am not sure what to make of that. In most things I am a liberal. Personally, I don't think that the people who make it into space will be anything recognizable by our standards of today. Especially after the long journeys.

That is why I posed the question in the way I did. What are the changes in humanity for space travel. The current way of motivating people to move into space is counter-productive because the response is often but that is expensive and not profitable.

I think the problems with the space station stems from the problems that NASA has. NASA tends to let the managers make the decisions and ignore the engineers and scientist that have the actual knowledge. It is a widespread problem in human society.

I wonder if cooperative efforts in materials will spread into cooperative efforts in other areas.

I agree that we are at a roadblock in engine development. However, that would be alleviated in some ways by development of nuclear engines. One of my favorite sci-fi story lines is the one where the generation space ship finally makes its way to the planet of destination after a couple of thousand years to find a thriving colony because the made a breakthrough after the ship left.

There is a great deal of interest in wormholes as a means of transportation. They tend to miss the problems with gravitation stresses inherent in close proximation to wormholes. The only wormholes we have any knowledge of surround black holes. Black holes are not good for transportation because you couldn't survive getting close enough. I don't think that most people realize that the wormhole shown surrounding black holes is a mathematical construct and not an expression of actual black holes.

There is an excellent discussion about such things at:
It is part of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Public Lecture Series. It is a great resource with files available in multiple formats. I like to download them as MP3's to listen to while I do other things.
BTW: I am well aware that this places me firmly in the realm of geek but I am proud of my geekiness.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

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