What good is the space shuttle?

To evolve within natures own guidlines, change when change is necessary as humans have been doing for many years now. By pressing our luck to try and see what freaks we can "develop" with DNA sequencing would only bring about weird and unnatural beings that will perhaps be destroyed or destroy us.

 

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Cosmic... you have some touchy-feely image of how evolution works. It isn't some random mutation that gets passed on freely. It happens because that random mutation makes recipient BETTER than his peers, he then breeds more, usually by killing off the weaker ones within his range and spreading his/her seed far and wide. Evolution involves a great deal of mess that I sense, from your posts, you do not advocate.

So, again, I ask you: how will we evolve? There are ONLY three ways to evolve:
1) doing what nature does, and setting our morals aside and let only the strong survive and kill off the week
2) selectively breeding (a la, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood in Dune), through licensing of the right to breed and or forced sterilization of those that have genetically undesirable traits
or
3) genetically engineering our species, either by experimentation on the genome or by extracting those traits we find desirable in various humans and animals

In nature there are only two choices: entropy or evolution. You can't have some rosie future where things perpetually stay the same.

Besides, you are acting like we'd be experimenting on humans to create freaks. Designing human beings will, one day, be like designing buildings. DNA works like any blueprint-- once you have the necessary ability to understand the "codes" there is not experimentation. You select a design, and the body complies. Freaks has nothing to do with it.

Our next stage of evolution could combine such traits as this:

-1% of the population is immune to AIDS, all apes have a protein that makes them immune to AIDS we could very well incorporate that protein into all humans
-humans could engineer our eyes to be those of eagles, noses with the scent range of house cats and hearing of a Labrador retriever
-there is a percentage of the population that has a significant immunity to all forms of genetic mutation and cancer-- we could give this ability to all humans
- by increasing the limbic center of the human brain by a factor of two, would only mean increasing the size of the human brain by about 5%, but would make all of us geniuses that outstrip any human being that has ever lived without sacrificing the "emotional" centers of the brain that govern aesthetics and morality
-we could re-engineer hemoglobin and red blood cells to carry ten or twenty times the oxygen it currently does, thus increasing our physical endurance by many times

There are so many possibilities that are out there and it would be ridiculous to sit back and say, "nope... enough's enough". Nature grants no reprieves or "do overs" this one existence is all humanity's got.

~String

 

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If we trash this planet, do you really think it's a good idea to spread the mis-management?

...DOD off the gravy train. Take the I.V. morphine drip of cash from: Blackhawk, Haliburton, et. al.

 

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Yes. I do. We will mismanage everything until we evolve into a perfect species, in about two thousand years. I'm okay with spreading the disease of humanity far and wide... as long as we actually survive.

Do you presume that we sit around and hope some horrible natural or celestial disaster never strikes the Earth while we wait around for humanity to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

Again, if we at least get off this world and spread throughout the solar system (where there are presumably no other intelligent species to harm), we'll have about a billion years before the sun goes BOOM, during which time I'm all for us learning to be a perfect & responsible species... we just need to get off this stinkin' rock.

~String

 

Huh?

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One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand ...

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Please understand, I am in favor of space exploration, but,
I disagree with your reasons. It's a beautiful "rock"

 

Space Shuttle vs Soyuz

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Space_Shuttle_vs_Soyuz_TM_-_to_scale_drawing.png

I say use Soyuz to transport people and use Shuttle to transport cargo

 

Why use man-rated rockets to transport cargo?

 

Soyuz is cheap and much safer...and is very easy to deal with (it is smaller)

Shuttle costs more but can carry more...and its safety record isn't shining

 

Exactly. It's called not putting all your eggs in one basket. The earth periodically kills off 90% of all life in mass extinctions. We do not want to have all of humanity sitting here waiting to be wiped out when the next asteroid or whatever comes along.

Oh, one point of disagreement. I seriously doubt we'll be a "perfect species" ever, let alone in two thousand years.

 

Well, I have to tell you, they're so worried about being politically correct that they won't use Freon in the foam, which would have prevented the destruction of the Columbia. Since it is legal for them to use Freon, it is insane for them to allow this kind of risk to the astronauts over and over again.

 

Now this is a fairly solid reason for the quest of/for space.
But, because we're a sloppy animal too stupid or careless to keep from soiling our nest? :shrug:

 

Space junk or minuscule meteors strike spacecraft regularly.
But in January 2005, two pieces that were not much bigger than microwave ovens - the engine from a 31-year-old Thor rocket and a fragment from a Chinese rocket - collided over the Pacific Ocean.

And in July 1996, a briefcase-sized fragment from an Ariane rocket slammed into a French satellite at a combined impact of 31,500 mph, snapping off its 191/2-foot stabilizing boom.

Space managers expect the items to circle Earth at 18,000 mph, 30 times the speed of a jet, for 10 to 11 months before they reenter the atmosphere and burn up.

Until the orbital junkyard is cleaned up, any spacecraft contending for future space missions should be carefully considered!

 

This "rock" is what we MUST maintain until we can find distant worlds to inhabit. I see that it just maybe possible one day to get anywhere in the universe without a spaceship but with other technology that could be developed far advanced from what we even imagine today. If there isn't a "rock" to live on to develop these technologies then we will be having a hard time in surviving as a species. Species come and species go so perhaps humans are destined to become extinct befor they spread their contamination elsewhere in this universe.

 

Actuallly, as I recall, very minor alterations in DNA can give birth to a new species. However, per Darwin and other more modern evolutionists, such variations often take tens of thousands of years to grow from species variation to a new and unique species. From my point of view, we differ from all other life in our ability to adapt by culture growth and through our intellectual capacities. Accordingly, I first suggest that mass extinction from a cataclysmic event is rare, happening not every several thousand years, but millions or more. 66 million of us died in WWII at our own hands. No natural disaster, (individually or combined) since then has come close to reaching that pinnacle.

Secondly, can we even trust ourselves with gene modification? Or should we leave it in the hands of time based on natural selection and survival of the fittest? Is a space boulder the size of Texas going to wipe us out, or is it more likely that such occurence (however slim) will alter our methods of survival and change our cultural destiny, and thus have us evolve into something more suitable for the existing world? A true Dawinist, I think, would implore the latter. But I guess it depends on how big that asteroid actually is vis a vis its probability of occurring.

Finally, I agree that the planet is a delicate one, constantly in flux, and capable of extreme drought, volcanic activity, and Ice Ages. But evolution sought fit to give us the greatest chance for survival on this planet, not somewhere else. So, in the end, I think it better for us to concentrate on cultural evolution, which is under our complete control, to better the state of all persons. You may call it entropy; I call it humanistic.

 

I didn't ment anyone in particular yust as a species from DNA left in blood samples or from bone fragmets (considering our nature verry tiny mildly torched bone frachments)

All considering DNA alterations say we inhabit Mars in the near future and people get children in a 3/5 gravity field would these natural +2metre tall people who could never return to earth in fear for their sevire cardial and bone deficiencies be more human then someone who's geneticly altered so that he can one day return to earth if that pleaces him?

 

Actually, I would argue that the problem was more a matter of the U.S. fixating on a reusable spacecraft and refusing to consider any alternatives, even when it became clear that it wasn't economically feasible or even technologically possible. NASA and the U.S. government in general became obsessed with the idea of an airplane-style spacecraft that could be used over and over again. It was supposed to make everything much cheaper, since they would only have to pay the cost of fuel and routine maintenance between launches. Sounds like a reasonable idea…except that it just wasn’t technologically possible to build a single-piece vehicle that was fully-reusable, and the “routine maintenance” ended up being so horrifically expensive that it’s actually cheaper to use disposable rockets.

Even though an aircraft-style space ship just wasn’t economically or technologically feasible, they insisted on it anyway…and we got the shuttle as a result. Another big problem with the shuttle is that NASA lacked any sort of clear goal when they built it. As a result it can doing anything, but can’t do anything very well. It can launch reasonably-sized large payloads, carry seven crew, and has a lot of room inside for doing experiments/carrying equipment. But it’s not efficient to use it for any one thing. If you want to launch big things into space (space station modules, ships to the moon/mars/wherever, parts of a big ship that’s you’re going to assemble in orbit before it departs, etc.) the shuttle can’t carry enough weight to make it worth-while because of its medium-sized cargo capacity. If you want to ferry personnel or supplies to and from orbit (because you want to maintain a space station, or change crew on a large, multi-part spaceship before it makes its next trip) the shuttle isn’t efficient because of its high cost.

A much better approach would have been to continue to use large, disposable rockets for heavy launches and smaller, cheaper vehicles for the “light lifting” like ferrying crew around, re-supplying space stations, etc. We might be able to build a small, fully-reusable vehicle that can do what the shuttle was supposed to do if we settled for a cargo capacity of just a few tons and used it only for light jobs.

 

Nasor, I was thinking something like that. All the parts would be smaller and cheaper for a spaceplane that could take ten people and luggage up to LEO at one time. The idea has been around for a while.

 

The US only had one remaining requirement for the Space shuttle and that was a mission squeezed in to service the Hubble Space Telescope to keep it operating until the new larger Webb Telescope can be deployed.

The rest of the missions are entirely to complete the construction of the international space station. In other words to continue to fly 25 year old spacecraft so as to keep the Russian manned space program alive and allow others nations with no space capability the opportunity to fly in space.

From 2010 and the retirement of the shuttle ( it will be retired at once if there is another accident) the US will have no manned space capability until 2013 when the new/old Crew Exploration Vehicle flies to prepare for a return to the moon.

The ISS program should be curtailed, fly the Hubble mission and use the money saved to expedite the CEV so as to not be utterly dependant on 1960's ex Soviet Soyuz spacecraft to get to the ISS. This three seater capsule is so yesteryear as to be laughable but for 3 years that will be the only ticket for manned travel into space except for an even more primitive Chinese system.