Failure and Success

we are ALL misguided to one extent or another. The medical ideas of Galen held sway for many centuries, and were largely worthless, dangerous, or deadly.

Our mistakes are important to our ultimate progress, but only if and when we recognize them. If instead we embrace the mistakes as we so often seem to do, disasters proliferate.

Politics IS bewildering! But it is because so many of its' participants are extremely bewildered in contrasting ways. And they often believe fervently that their perspectives are the only rational ones, and that those on the other sides of the question are completely wrong. Things are rarely that simple.

I have stopped trying to characterize myself as a liberal or a conservative. I have come to believe that the two party system falls short of the needs of the country. But our politics are formed by complex issues and our responses to them.

We have many different crises to deal with, not just politically, but environmentally and across the spectrum of human needs. In the larger scheme of things, within our very disasters lay the potential keys to our future.

The immensity of the World Wars of the twentieth century, the incredible carnage and waste, the suffering, the direct devolution into our present strife, the roots of our eventual (possible) success(es) are within these disasters.

Before I go on with this thought, it just occurred to me that, just as numbers of readers are sharply reduced once posts are scrolled off into archives, the same sort of reductions occur with regard to comments and replies. So before continuing I'm going to copy this and put it in the main body of the blog.

In my view, the single most remarkable thing of our time is the fact that we have gone into space. Humans have gone to the moon. We have landed robots on other planets and made close approaches to the most distant planets and their satellites.

These things most assuredly would not have happened, but for the frictions generated because of the wars and the potential for even more disastrous, even final conflagrations. This is so obvious I won't even prove the point.

The efforts of the two Superpowers both in the Space Race and the mad dash toward nuclear oblivion resulted in one of the superpowers failing economically, with the other trailing perhaps only a few decades behind.

And with the downfall of the one and the multiple and ongoing disasters in international diplomacy of the other, we took our eye off the ball and allowed our space efforts to stagnate. Why is this so important? Specifically because of all the problems that we MUST deal with. Global warming and all the associated problems. Overpopulation, famine, disease, pollution, and last but not least, fanaticism in all its' many guises.

Today there are three main schools of thought about how to proceed with the space program. Only two of them have much prospect to happen. I favor the third, which unfortunately has little likelihood of happening.

The first is to establish a permanent colony on the moon. There are a plethora of problems with this, but also some very attractive possibilities. Very costly, with the potential profits, far, far off in time.

The second is to land on, explore, and ultimately set up some communities on Mars. This is considerably more ambitious, much, much more costly, and with the potential profits for humankind far further in the distant future. In other words, these two options are likely to stall and stagnate because the require such sustained sacrifice, in exactly the same way that the space effort has stagnated over the past few decades. I am not forgetting our great strides on this frontier, but in the seventies the prevailing view was that we would be much further along in space exploration, and might even have had a lunar colony by now.

Of course all of the accomplishments in space are inspiring! And the profits, in terms of advances in many of the sciences and the practical advances that have been made possible, indirectly due to the space effort are too numerous to list. But it is not obvious to the politicians and their constituents. And the space effort has been enormously more expensive than expected, or than it should have been. And since all the spin offs do not seem at first glance to be space related, and because so much of the funding has been squandered, and there is little prospect for immediate profit, we are stuck financially between a rock and a hard place.

Let us go to the third option, the one I favor. It is getting virtually no attention in the debate. I favor missions to the Amore (earth approaching) asteroids. The mining of said asteroids, and the ultimate hollowing out of the asteroids providing space for human habitation, space for industrial production too potentially polluting on Earth, and ultimately, even farming on a large scale.

Just touching on a few of the positives of this option which are really important: These asteroids, by comparison to Mars or the Moon have virtually NO gravity, comparatively speaking. That is not an inconsequential thing. To get a single kilogram off the Moon or Mars costs many thousands of dollars. We must live with the extremely deep gravity well of the Earth. We have no choice. It is where we are. The gravity wells of the Moon and even Mars are far more shallow but are still far (by thousands of times) greater than the minuscule gravities presented by the Earth-approaching asteroids. So getting there from Earth is expensive. Sending cargo back from them is VERY cheap by comparison to the Moon or Mars.

Now let us look at the cargo value. Many, if not most of these asteroids are very high in metals of the Platinum family. The fact is that in terms of near term payoff for our investment, this is the only real viable option. Instead of going into more detail, The floor is open for debate and discussion.