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[10ebbor10]

I heard plans that involved putting the water reserves outside the ship, in order to function as a defensive layer against radiation. It works pretty well for nuclear waste storage. Additionally , Nuclear RTG's are not forbidden, and can be used to power ion drives. Besides, nuclear reactors in space are slightly problematic due to cooling troubles.

On another note, I believe that NASA once calculated that in order to get a significant amount of people to Mars, with zero chance of irradiation, would involve constructing a ship as large as the Battlestar Galatica.

I remember reading that they were using ice to stop the radiation leakage at the fukushima plant in Japan, could they do something similar with a rocket ship? A layer of ice between the interior and outer hull. Could also help with cooling issues.

Different situation, and a different solution. The problem with the Fukushima plant is that they leaked radioactive water into the groundwater supply. In order to prevent that from spreading, they're planning on injecting Liquid Nitrogen, and freeze the entire thing solid. It has nothing to do with radiation absorbtion.

Additionally, Ice is a very good isolative agent. Which is bad, if your spaceship relies on radiating heat to cool itself.

The idea behind the water shielding is that you need to take supplies anyway, and that a water shield is also selfrepairing when a meteoroid strikes is. (Flash evaporation causes an ice clump to form, plugging the hole.)

[Scoops Novel]

I've been hearing the soil sample took place in 2012, and I've been wondering why it took close to a year to hear results. Are there any other milestones coming up?

[Descan]

Analysis takes time.

[Sheb]

And publication takes even more time. You need to write the paper, rewrite it, sendit for peer-reviewing, integrate the reviewers' comments...

[Rose]

I should have been watching this thread ages ago.

[Flying Dice]

Y'know, I can't help but wonder how much more advanced we'd be in terms of space-related technology if it weren't for the Outer Space Treaty. Think about how many dollars, rubles, and man-hours would have gone into research, development, and deployment of space-worthy projects if the US, USSR, and UK hadn't decided to ban nuclear weapons in orbit and military bases on the moon/in space. Look at what was accomplished just from national pride alone: barely 17 years between the first V2 rocket and Gagarin's orbit, only 8 more before the Apollo 11 moon landing, and those accomplishments just from what amounted to superpower-scale dick-waving. Hell, if we'd militarized space during the Cold War, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to find out that there are regular flights to and from our burgeoning base-colonies on the moon and Mars.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

No, that's folly. Space has been perhaps the greatest endeavor of peace by humanity, and it should remain so for as long as we can keep it like that.

We might have bigger space infrastructure, but it wouldn't really be better.

[Flying Dice]

Don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment. But in purely material terms we would almost certainly be better off, in the same way that so many other military projects eventually resulted in substantial advances for civilian standards of living and technological advancement. A truly incredibly amount of what we have came about as quickly as it did because it initially was pushed by the military R&D machine (like, say much of the technology that allows us to discuss this in the first place, given that we live in relatively distance geographical locations--far enough apart to not visit for a casual talk, in any case). You don't get funding and resources like that anywhere else, for better or for worse. I'm not glorifying the military in any sense, but it's foolish to act as if it doesn't affect the direction of our primary technological advancements.

Take, for example, a precursor to space travel: jet aircraft. Yes, they were initially developed as weapons of war, but now they allow rapid international travel. Are you going to argue that the world would be better if there was never that impetus to develop jet-driven fighters? What about metalworking? Is our world somehow worse because the original drive to make good iron and steel was primarily backed by military concerns?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's why we need to keep the military out of it. This is perhaps the first time we've ever had an alternative to conflict for steady technological advancement.

There's little reason to believe allowing the militarization of space will do us much good. It will, if not end, at least significantly stifle the extremely positive international cooperation in space (Curiosity itself has parts provided by Spain and Russia, of all nations). That's certainly not going to help, no matter how much money Congress throws at their orbital missile bases.

We as a species spent a long time trying to overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma. We know empirically that trust and cooperation is overall better for everybody than competition. Against all odds, in the most hostile geopolitical climate possible, we somehow managed to get the world into a cooperative position when it comes to space. The benefits that everybody has reaped from this cannot be overstated. And the last thing I want to see is us falling back into the same old patterns of paranoia and conflict when we actually managed to climb out of it for once, because of the tempting but empirically awful possibility of letting hawks and authoritarians take control of it.

[wierd]

Indeed. The primary cause behind "militarism promotes science and technological advancement", is because inordinate quantities of financial and temporal resources get allocated to feeling secure and dominant by small groups in our species, to "defend" against the others. The science fallout is just a thin, sticky residue left behind.

If even HALF the resources allocated to the dick-waving and security theater were simply allocated directly to science endowment funds and to primary, non-commercial research, the degree of scientific discovery we currently enjoy would appear miniscule. 

For an example of this, look at what the internet currently is, in terms of services and products available, compared to what it was 10 years ago.  It's current "highly comercialized state" is the result of the decision to allow corporate involvement and sponsorship in its operation and evolution. The result was "eternal september", and runaway commercial exploitation of user data.

If it were instead funded as a noncommercial project, with the same allocation of funds and resources, the internet would be a much more varied and vibrant place than it currently is, more focused toward communication and learning than toward selling herbal viagra and breast enhancement pills.

Space exploration is the new opportunity to shine. I groan about commercialism in space flight, as it is part 2 of the "comercialism screws everything up!" Experience. However, since our word cultures appear completely impervious to having reason or learning from mistakes drummed into their heads, no matter how many hard knocks they receive, it is the lesser of the two evils. (Would rather see a giant billboard on the moon than a doomsday nuclear launch platform.)

The *BEST* solution is for pure science, free from commercial fuckery or military dickery, to be the driving force of space exploration-- however, that seems to go against prevailing human nature, all the more to our deficit.

Sadly, people (and groups of people) only seem to want to invest time or resources into something they see as being able to give direct and immediate benefits for the expense. Abstract benefits like knowledge and experience are not given the gravity they rightly deserve. It's why we always make the same fucking mistakes over and over and over again as a species, and seem hell bent on refusing to learn from them.

[RedKing]

But here's the thing.

You're a scientist. You have an idea to allow for interplanetary travel at high speeds for peaceful reasons. But it's gonna cost $10 trillion dollars to develop.
You approach your government for money, only to hear a litany of reasons why they can't afford it, not to mention the intense lobbying by the existing transportation industries.

Now, take that same scientist and let him approach the government in the scenario of an arms race. Actually, he won't need to, because the government will be approaching him and saying "SHUT UP AND TAKE OUR MONEY, just build us something that gets our troops there faster than the other guys".



Or to put it another way, Congress would NEVER have approved the Manhattan Project, even if it had been billed as a wondrous new way to generate vast amounts of electricity. In today's figures, it cost $26 billion dollars, and less than 10% of that was to build the bombs themselves. Most of it was to build the infrastructure necessary to generate enough uranium to make a bomb. Think about that. As a politician, you're being asked to approve a pair of $13 billion dollar bombs, which you only get to use ONCE. Nobody in their right mind would approve that, especially coming off the heels of the Great Depression.

But with a war on....all that political calculus goes out the window.

[wierd]

The reality is not in question.

What was, is what is "ideal."  Humans are profit driven monsters. As such, even if told outright by god himself that they could gain all the secrets of the universe through science, and become gods themselves in the process, they would ONLY do so, if 1) it meant keeping "the other guys" from getting there first, or 2) it meant making them fantabulously wealthy at someone else's expense. 

The "ideal" situation is for all of humanity to reach as one for the prize, and for all humans to achieve the goal as one.

Again, the former is reality. The latter is the ideal.  Humans are not ideal.

[Sheb]

If space was militarized, it would mean the military would spend a larger slice of its budget on R&D, and that R&D would be more space and less other stuff. I can stand behind that.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

See, this is what I'm talking about. You all are falling for the same fucking trap that is going to ruin one of the best things we have ever done. The second you militarize space, our age of international scientific cooperation in that field is done. It will return to the age-old question of "how can we most efficiently kill our enemies today"? No more humanistic research for the good of our future, unless it happens to coincide with military goals.

And it is our future. It is too valuable to hand over to the domain of killing each other.

[Another]

If space was militarized we would have a swarm of tungsten rods above us ready to initiate controlled reentry on command. And some similarly looming over head stuff from USSR and later from China. With a serious chance to get a cloud of space debris at Low Earth Orbit from some exploded military satellite making it much more dangerous for any human to visit space in next few hundreds of years.