From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Wed Dec 25 2002 - 02:04:09 MST
On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> My other memories from that period were the old space exploration
> schedules. We were supposed to have a permanent moon base in the 1970s
That would have been easy (albeit expensive; possibly more expensive
than US could have afforded).
> and a Mars base in the 1980s. By 1990, we were supposed to be
Now that is another kettle of fish altogether. It would take a portable
closed-loop ecology, a trick we've never learned how to do.
> exploring asteroids and maybe reaching Jupiter. It was not for no
Now this would have required a nuke drive.
> reason that the movie 2001 showed us going to Jupiter by now. NASA
> had predicted it, congress was planning to keep approving these
> budgets. I really thought that by now I would be off planet with
> multiple different worlds to choose from. I am not joking. I really
Yes, we should at least have Luna by now. Instead, that effort and money
has been absorbed by the Shuttle, and the ISS.
> thought I was living in the space age, only to be stuck on earth with
> no way off. I really feel marooned in a non-technical world compared
> to what was predicted. This is probably the biggest basis for my
Manned space exploration didn't happen, but the probes are doing nicely.
And people _have_ started talking about going to Moon again, this time to
do industry. It's no big deal delivering a few tons of hardware to Luna
surface once or twice. Once we have the capability for remote fabbing
packaged into that footprint things are going to lift off. You might not
go to the Moon in person (unless medicine can hold aging), but you could
at least telecommute there.
> belief that things don't always progress as fast as predicted.
But other things did. TBit/s transmissions, global (wireless) networks,
computers, genetics, nanotechnology within touching distance. I can't
think of a single predictor who got all these things right in the 1960s,
or 1970s.
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