The Planetary Society will hold the second of its “town halls” on space exploration policy this Wednesday on the campus of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. This event will feature Bill Nye and Lon Levin (a co-founder of XM and a member of the Planetary Society’s board), among others. This is the second in a series of town hall meetings, after one in the Boston area in late March (which, according to the society, “attracted hundreds of participants”).
BTW, I plan on being there tonight. I’ll try and twitter the event if I can.
OK, I’m here. And I just made the statement that for me a Vision would be 10% of the US GDP being produced in space and 1% of the US population living permanently in space. Yea, that’s ambitious and 10% if a hell of a lot. But that’s a Vision.
I just asked the participants how many people expected to fly into space in their lifetime and only 5 people raised their hands. I then asked how many people expected to live permanently in space in their lifetime and _I_ was the only person to raise my hand. To me that is very sad.
Now we’re doing the robots vs humans debate.
There does seem to be consensus that its not juts robots, though. I am getting some support for the economic motivation being the only thing that can make this sustainable.
IMHO, Lon is doing a good job of listening but Mr. Nye seems to really want to drive this to his personal need to send more robots to Mars.
BTW, the meeting was being recorded and the intent seemed to be to post the audio of the meeting but I cant’ seem to find that on the Planetary Society website anywhere.