What life off earth for folks who never return to earth to live…will be in my view hard to predict. Everything is different. You just dont “pop outside” and on the Moon the scenary seems rather bland and similar…

When my Great Grandmother was 30is they simply didnt have the resources to tolerate crime…and a lot of innocent people probably got axed in the rush to shut it down there is a series which I bet is kind of close..Deadwood…

On the other hand while we might kind of have some issues with corpses being feed to pigs and the kind of “rough justice” of the frontier (and a lot of people who claim that they would love that life today really couldnt hack it) it was the life that they lived and I doubt a lot of them sat around saying “wow I can hardly wait until things get better”.

I have as time as marched on come to view three accepted realities of American culture as really myths of politics.

The first is the “core family”…mom/pop kids toughing it out on the prairie…the second is “rugged self reliance” and the third is the sort of “god fearing” legend of the west.

The more I read and study (and get older) the more I think that people are about the same from one generation to the next AND are more shapped by the currents which govern the functioning of society …so in short my theory is that the rigors of life “off earth” will shape the character of the society more then anything else…

Robert G. Oler

I did some thinking about this once, for a novel that didn’t get far alas, and found myself wondering just what the social structure of some far future planetary or extrasolar community ought to look like. And I came to the conclusion human beings were going to be a bit thin on the ground, because we no long need large numbers of humans to support civilization. (Think of Isaac Asimov’s novels using Solaria as an environment, but with imbedded microprocessors all over the place rather than human-like robots).

Think of medievel France or England — “countries” with three million people — 2,950,000 of them peasants occupied by producing food, most of which they consumed themselves. We aren’t going to duplicate this type of society in space. We won’t use peasant farmers. We won’t use “industrial armies” for routine factory work. We won’t be using herds of lowly paid immigrants to mow our yards and clean our houses. With any luck, we won’t employ legions of social workers and prison guards and drug addiction counselors and school crossing guards and hospital orderlies washing out bedpans and …. and much more. Partially because our manufacturing techniques will have changed, partially because robot devices can replace most peon labor, partially because various social pathologies we take for granted on earth aren’t likely to last for long in colonies.

My suspicion is that a world of say 10-30 million people, with most people gainfully employed in white collar or artistic/literary endeavors from say the age of 20 to 90, with “old age” beginning at say 100, would probably regard itself as fully populated. It would probably crank out as many novels or computer games or decent films or cathedrals or champion sprinters or pantyless film starlets as our own, rest easier on the environment, and generally offer what you and I would think of as a very comfortable life.

Oh sure, even in Eden, people will find things to complain of, and serpents can appear on the damndest apple trees. But I think people will arrange a better life for themselves EVENTUALLY then they do now on oil rigs or in small Ohio towns in my youth.

My guess however is that it looks more like life on a Flattop or oil rig then Waldon’s pond. I just hope that it doesnt end up looking like Alien (at least in how “life is” on a space platform).

On a oil rig individuality is cherished as long as 1) it doesnt interfere with the job and 2) anyone elses individuality…and then its nailed down pretty fast. Its been “years” but I spent two weeks on MARS (the Mars of Mars/URSA large shell oil platforms). These are mostly Louisiana (south la) folks they all were a little “eccentric” (of course they all did very difficult things on the rigs…but well it reminded me of what life was pictured as on the oil rig in Abyss. (before the crane fell on the rig and the other folks went nuts…and the Alien came…)

Robert G. Oler

I’ve always been a tad cynical about space colonization as an outgrowth of purely commercial interests, but I’m being to be more cheerful about the prospects for colonization as lebensraum. Granted life in a colony might be uncomfortable at first, but the freedom to grow and expand in a community of like-minded individuals might come to seem very precious, well worth a few inconveniences. Surely we can find a few brave libertarians willing to virtually enslave themselves on Mars if Republicans and Democrats can be kept 35 million miles away, stout hearted British yeomen who want to get away from Jamaican and Palistani yeomen, Frenchmen who have tried of Arabs and Germans and ECU bureaucracts, ECU bureaucrats who’d like to build a better community “for all” from scratch without unruly Frenchmen, Moslems who want tall walls of distance between them and the failed secular Western world, Chinese eager to build and fill ricebowls in forever open lands ….

Maybe that’s the dream of the future? A million gated communities? Kind of hard to sell as a “national” space program, I admit.

Not that old chestnut again. The reason we don’t automate those functions is because it doesn’t cost several hundred million dollars to send a geologist and his or her grad students to an interesting site. If it did, and it cost a fraction of that to send a robot, (even one with lesser capabilities), that’s what every university would be doing instead. As mentioned above, that’s basically what has been happening in Marine Science over the last decade.

“A geologist can casually hold a rock…quickly rotate it in any direction, break or cut it along any axes, and so on. In spite of many decades of expensive effort, no robot or teleoperated device is anywhere near this kind of efficiency or flexibility.”

Flatly wrong. Here’s proof: http://boingboing.net/2009/08/29/lightning-fast-robot.html

More proof. http://www.shadowrobot.com/hand/videos.shtml

And apparently NASA doesn’t thinks they have potential: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119706&page=1

That’s a pity. I have some real trouble with what appears to be an assertion that a teleoperated “hand” can’t turn over a rock. I guess that would mean that a geologist with limited use of his or her hands because of arthritis should not be funded to do field research, nor trusted to find seashells? No, that can’t be right.

This can’t an argument about dexterity. We can make astonishingly dextrous, precise and powerful remote manipulators, and we can put them on Mars for a fraction of the cost of a human being. That capability is actually quite good, and it’s only going to get better. Nor can the argument be about teleoperation in general. Such a robot is just a tool. Nothing more. When I sit in my car and drive it down the street, I’m operating a robot tool, and that operation relies on eye-wheel coordination done from a several yard-long physical linkage. No big deal that I’m not pushing the tires by hand.

What this is about is latency time — the fact that teleoperation from the Earth to Mars takes several tens of minutes and, mainly because of attention span, the human brain doesn’t work particularly well on a timescale that long. Technology advances are unlikely to be able to do anything about either that, or the speed of light. So for that reason, and until we can make robotic explorers that are largely autonomous, I wholeheartedly agree that having humans close by is important. Just that they don’t have to be on site. Concepts that have been floated about having humans on Phobos controlling surveyor robots on the Martian surface are thus very attractive. The feasibility and cost of such a mission for the purpose of finding life would likely be very much better than putting people directly on the Martian surface.

The marine science people have crossed this bridge already. Most ocean floor research is now done telerobotically, with controllers on the surface. That’s a perfect parallel to a control station on Phobos. Alvin, and similar human- transporting submersibles have done wonderful work, but they are now largely understood by the marine science community as not being particularly cost effective. Yes, scientists are getting very enthused about telerobotics for venues that are swimming in targets.

Can humans on site do better science than humans not on site but with low latency connections? Not completely clear. Robotic extensions of nearby scientists can, in principle, work 24/7, and can be operated in a wholly participatory manner with an array of sensors that are vastly more capable than the human eye. Can a human on Mars do more in a day than Spirit could do in a month? Sure, but that’s a strawman case with a primitive robot being operated with huge latency. A human on Mars would be hard pressed to do anything like what Spirit AND Opportunity could do, if just that we can easily afford to put such robotic craft on opposite sides of the planet.

It all depends what he goal is. If the goal is to colonize Mars, well, landing people on Mars is pretty much what you have to do! If the goal is looking for life (present or ancient) there, and to do it in the most economical way, telerobotics is hands-down the best way to go, though ideally with low latency. From a science perspective, at least, gear-phobia doesn’t get one anywhere.

“To pretend that the billions we are spending now are ever going to provide answers about Martian life is, quite simply, dishonest, not to mention largely a waste if that is your reason for spending it.”

Quite probably wrong. But of course you’re comparing the billions we’re spending now with the hundreds of billions we’d be spending to put people there. A more honest comparison would consider what one could do telerobotically with hundreds of billions of dollars at ones disposal.

To relate this back to the subject of the thread, the issue that has to be defined
is exactly what we’re trying to do with the human spaceflight program. Where is the trajectory supposed to be pointing? If what we’re trying to do is find life on Mars, that points one in a different direction than if we’re trying to colonize Mars.

Robert G. Oler

There is little or no mass movement to Antarctica for all intents and purposes it might as well be the URSA/MARS rig complex that Shell has off the coast of LA. Yet it is a 100 or so more times easier to live at then say The Moon …and I bet that there is a lot more there which can be used by the rest of humanity.

Now I think/know that there are resources on the Moon which some America can at some point in history “use” but right now I dont see a one that this America can use…which would be anywhere worth the cost.

If Space Exploration were somewhere “in cost” near what it cost to keep Americans (and others) at the South Pole we would have a pretty solid base on the Moon…we are some distance from that.

I dont see a “base” on the Moon until transportation cost really come down…and I dont see that happening until ISS transport is commercialized and that commercialization spreads to other venues of space flight (like Comm satellites)…once that happens I see a “modest” base (kind of another ISS) which might start the cycle over again.

The irony of ISS (mainly for right wingers) is that While Ronald Reagan (who I just admire the heck out of) might have started it, Bill Clinton gave it a reason for the Pork spending…and that might be the lever to get us a space industry.

As an aside I would note this. Everyone who tells me (and this is not aimed at you…we are having a delightful conversation) that they want to “live in space” I say “go join the Navy and see how you do eight months at sea”

Most people who want to “live in space” really dont

Robert G. Oler

What “thunder” are you talking about? I guess I missed the lightening on MSNBC.com as well.