Planetary Society Is For And Against Mars Colonization Or Something
Ready for the #SpaceX presentation at #IAC2017 ? pic.twitter.com/uagp9Lnux9
— Planetary Society (@exploreplanets) September 29, 2017
+100 RT @starstryder: RT @SciBry: The highs and lows of the last week remind us why the future must be in robotic, not crewed, space flight.
— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) November 12, 2014
Keith’s note: Oddly, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye sat in the audience before Elon Musk spoke and said that no one wants to colonize Mars. Note his coworker Emily Lakdawalla’s statement. Yet his organization expects to be able to lobby Congress, NASA, and the White House to get more money for planetary science while bashing human space flight – a clear priority for this Administration.
The Planetary Society has never been a supporter of human spaceflight. They seem to think that if NASA’s human spaceflight budget was cut to 0, the money would flow to robotic systems. Nope. It would go elsewhere in the government, that’s the political reality.
I agree, but the issue they have is this…what is the solution to the Fermi Paradox? One possible explanation is that there are common extinction events that tend to stop civilizations from achieving interstellar travel. So why are we still here? Did we dodge our bullet during the iceage…or is our bullet still waiting for us? The answer may lie on Mars…if we don’t crash a crewed spacecraft on it and thus contaminate it with the ecosystem of microbes that all of us pack around in our guts.
I say that if life is to be found then science had better hurry and find it because humans are going to the surface of Mars soon…like it or lump it. The question isn’t if but who and when. If there is no life then we will never prove it with robots alone…if at all. So we must move forward.
The contamination argument is really something of a red herring. It’s based on old ideas about biology and Mars.
First it appears the surface of Mars is basically a sterlizing environment. So any life that exists would need to be underground, and it will be hard to find it without humans on site.
Second the technology has emerged in the last few years to tell by DNA analysis not only if any life found on Mars is from Earth, but how long ago it diverged from Earth. That is why biologists now know all life existing today on Earth was from a single orgination event.
True, but nevertheless that’s the argument…that any life found on Mars after contamination would too easily disputed, and might even be altered from it’s original state.
The Planetary Society also seems to have an anti-New Space bias that confuses me. Maybe it’s because NASA goes to space with specific scientific objectives in mind. New Space will make it available to us sweaty masses just…because.
The bias it has against New Space is not surprising given the founders were either NASA PI or involved heavily in NASA’s robotic science programs. Given their motive was to show popular support for these NASA missions it is not surprising they are against anything that might upset the Apple Cart for funding NASA robotic missions to Mars.
Think about it, it would be a bit hard to ask Congress for a billion dollars for a new Mars rover when Elon Musk is selling tickets to Mars Settlers for a million dollars…
And as you mention it would make Mars available to the sweaty masses. It would no longer be the elite planetary scientists at major institutions but anyone, even high school teachers, who know how to organize a GoFundMe would be able to send a rover along on one of the settlement flights to be placed on the surface just outside a Mars settlement. Imagine hundreds of rovers on Mars, some operated by high school students or UFO researchers…. The unwashed masses indeed.
That was what happened when the Transcontinental Railroad were built. After ward you didn’t need to be included with a military survey party to search for fossils or archeology sites, you could just buy a ticket and spend your Summer vacation looking where you wanted. Or at least that was the case until the government passed the Antiquities Act of 1906 and started requiring folks to prove they were a real scientist in order to get a permit to look 🙂
Well, sure, but extraterrestrial “life” is chock full of “unknown unknowns”, isn’t it?
At the very least, the predicate organizer of this creatures could be other than DNA.
A risk that cannot be characterized is too big a risk.
If Martian life didn’t use DNA or a different form of DNA than it would be even easier to tell it wasn’t from Earth 🙂
True. On the other hand, every single example ecosystem that we have on earth that includes the introduction of any sort of non-native biota has been changed. And without a baseline we can’t know what the changes might have been.
When Nye goes off like this he further diminishes the ability for Planetary Society to have an impact. He was all chummy with the Obama White House but I see zero chance that he’ll have the same access with the Trump White House. He should be working in the best interests of the Planetary Society – not spouting off.
I’m a little confused by your comment, Keith.
Isn’t ‘spouting off’ his actual job? Like you I disagree with the message; and in this case the message includes factual errors. But visibility is surely the reason he was hired?
[It’s possible that there is some buyer’s remorse, though}.
It’s a matter of marketing. If he’s got three things to “spout off” about, why pick the one which may antagonize his the President? Mr. Nye isn’t likely to change Mr. Trump’s mind that way, and it may get him ignored when he talks about his other points.
Note how Mr. Musk initially did the opposite. He got in a position to talk about the things he _might_ convince Mr. Trump of, by not speaking at length about the issues where they disagreed. That lasted until the Paris Agreement business, so it wasn’t a perfect solution either.
I’m sorry to those of you who like him, but Bill Nye is an idiot. Of course people want to settle Mars. Not a billion or even a million, but thousands of people would love to go live on Mars. The question is can we pursue humans to Mars in a way that makes such settlement affordable.
Well, yes and no. Personally, he irritates the hell out of me. But space advocacy is big and wide, with room for lots of voices, all trying to kick the ball forward.
Sorry, Michael. He didn’t say that HE didn’t want to settle on Mars. He said NO ONE wanted to settle on Mars. He wasn’t content to say he disagreed with their voices… he denied their existence. That’s wrong.
I agree – Nye is making broad declarative statements that are factually incorrect, misleading, and counter to what America’s space efforts have pursued for decades.
Was there ever a more succinct statement defining old-space thinking?
No one was more “Old Space” than Wernher von Braun, who was the granddaddy of massive Mars colonization space ships. Meanwhile you have bitter old “New Space” failures like Gary C. Hudson who want nothing to do with Mars, but want large Lagrangian space stations.
I thought about that a day or so after posting this comment. Dr, von Braun, like Mr. Musk, was a Big Dreamer; he also had about as much deadline allegiance. We cannot have too many dreamers. The schedules will come.
My sense is that New Space isn’t so much the use of tech not available back in the day; it’s more a way of thinking.
It’s not entirely accurate to lay the invention of New Space thinking at the feet of Mr. Musk, but he has certainly become the poster boy. And the more I learn about him, the more I realize that his approach is so often simply different.
He knows when to ask “why”, and he knows how to assess the responses. He also has, as they say, “a big pair”, which surely contributes. Dr. von Braun was a government employee his entire life. Do not misread the intent of that statement: it’s not derogatory, it is descriptive, and it has implications.
There are things that robots can do that humans can’t, but the question-answer wheel turns sooooo sloooow!
There is much more that humans can do that robots can’t, but they are more delicate, require an on going support infrastructure, and need to return home safely. So if there is a question that can be answered by a robot, then it should be. However, that assessment is still based on the now restrictive assumption that the only reason to send someone or something into space is to answer some specific question. It also ignores the pro-tech cultural impact on the upcoming generation of sending humans vs sending just a robot.
Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society?! How the mighty have fallen, lol.
Its really sad how the Planetary Society is so anti-space they feel they need to make fun of Elon Musk. Left to them they would probably outlaw any space settlement.
The Planetary Society is discouraging human landings on Mars, for sound planetary protection reasons. But they are also space exploration advocates who can’t help but get excited about this momentum right along with the rest of us.
Yes, robotic missions are cooler than many of us give them credit for…but there comes a point when are are sending a robot to do (hu)man’s job. We are well past that point on the moon very close to that point on Mars…so close that these development timelines will pass it up.
When the first human-rated rockets fly, there will be some Planetary Society folks on board. Call that a prediction.
Except I don’t see them advocating for the Moon, either for humans or robots…
Really? I should think they’d want to use it as a distraction…
–their website– blogs/jason-davis/2017/20170126-moon-vs-mars-hsf.html
The majority of Planetary Society members are advocates of Human Spaceflight, it is the board/management structure of P.S. that is so biased. While it may appear that NASA funding is a zero-sum game, I believe in the long-term, it is economic development of space which will employ a lot more scientists than the current crop of NASA funding allows. In other words, Bill Nye is protecting his buddies in spite of their best interests. As for Microbe protection on Mars, Mars is a big place. There’s plenty of room in that Biosphere for both Earth and any possible Mars life to prosper for a long time before we have to worry about extinctions.
When it comes to planetary protection, extinction isn’t the real concern. It’s more a matter of being able to study a pristine biosphere (assuming there is one.) Do you have to do DNA analysis to tell if the microbe is martian or terrestrial? How conclusive is that test? Is the ecosystem in its pre-contact state, or has it changed due to the addition of terrestrial biota? The people in favor of strict planetary protection feel it is better if we simply avoid those questions by avoiding biological contamination. Personally, I agree with you. Mars is a big place. The approach of having special, protected areas has worked well in Antarctica. Biological samples from those areas can safely be assumed to be native, and no one has to worry about accidentally carrying something from New Zealand to McMurdo. I don’t see why the same approach wouldn’t work for Mars.
Mr. Nye’s (he’s not a PhD, as far as I know) view that people don’t want to settle Mars shows us the company he keeps. Nothing more.
Nope, not a Ph.D. or even Masters, he is just an actor pretending to be a scientist, unless you count the time he worked as Doc Brown’s lab assistant 🙂