No good reason to send folks farther than moon
Americans have been bathing in Space Age sentimentality for the moon landing, but now that the anniversary has passed, let’s get realistic about the future of space exploration.
There is no good reason to send people any farther than the moon, but that does not mean we can’t still explore. Instead of trying to turn fantasies like Star Trek and Star Wars into reality, today’s cutting-edge technology hints at better, quicker and safer alternatives.
First, we have to admit that sending people to Mars is not impossible, just a bad idea. At its closest point, the red planet is 34 million miles from Earth. Any mission would likely take two to three years.
The longest a human has spent on the International Space Station is 438 days. While that Russian cosmonaut didn’t suffer any long-lasting health problems, experts worry about the mental health of astronauts spending months in a capsule with the knowledge that returning to Earth would take weeks or months. Claustrophobia is real.
A mission to Mars also would involve dozens of rockets. Astronauts would need to first assemble the vessel in space. Then dozens of rockets would need to resupply the ship because the humans would need 3.5 million pounds of supplies to complete the mission.
Lastly, the human body simply is not adapted for space, and the technology necessary to protect people from radiation, isolation, inactivity and mishaps is cumbersome and expensive.
A conservative price tag for a Mars mission is $1.5 trillion, which means by the time government contractors get finished, the cost will likely be
closer to $5 trillion. Yet otherwise responsible people still think it’s a good idea to send humans to a desperately inhospitable place to perform functions a machine could do better.
The Mars 2020 rover, for example, is the size of a small car, can drill into the ground, conduct chemical analysis, carry out seismic testing, gather weather data and manufacture oxygen from the planet’s carbon dioxide. All for a mere $2.4 billion.
Considering the crises with our federal debt, health care and warming climate, the government has better ways to spend taxpayer money than to send fragile humans to Mars and back.
This is not a call to end space exploration; we should just use machines instead. Specifically, we should spend our money developing advanced robotics, virtual reality systems and brain interfaces that provide humans a sense of walking on Mars without leaving the office.
This suggestion will disappoint those who believe the only way to truly explore is to put a human foot on another planet. One of the most important visionaries of our era, Elon Musk, exemplifies this bizarre contradiction in people who both love and dismiss the potential of virtual exploration.
Musk is the founder and driving force behind SpaceX, a commercial rocket company that’s working on a ship capable of putting humans on Mars. Musk desperately wants to go, and he’s promised tickets for less than $500,000 to those willing to help finance the project.
Musk also is the founder of Neuralink, a start-up company creating a brain-computer interface that would allow the human mind to inhabit machines and vice versa. Musk believes becoming cyborgs is the only way for humans to keep artificial intelligence at bay.
The two projects, though, belong as one. Instead of sending humans to Mars, we should connect our brains to robots and send them ahead. Where we need research is on solving the problem of a radio wave taking 40 minutes to reach Mars and return. That task could not be any more difficult that flying people to Mars.
The idea of overcoming the limitations of the human body reminds me of a Buddhist parable about a traveler who builds a raft to cross a river. Once across, the wise traveler abandons the raft because the tool has done its job.
Rather than emulate space ship science fiction, we should embrace the cyberpunk genre, best exemplified by “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” We should find ways to project our minds outside of our bodies, rather than carry these frail shells with us.
The benefits to humanity would be far more significant. Neuralink currently is focusing on helping paralyzed people control their bodies or prosthetic limbs. Once decoded, those brain signals could travel much farther. Anyone could become a space traveler, not just speciallyselected astronauts or the very wealthy.
Companies that can deliver the cyberpunk fantasy, which is much closer to reality, will make far more money than government contractors building aluminum-skinned vessels for human space travelers and rightfully so.