From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@idiom.com)
Date: Sun Nov 21 1999 - 23:35:32 MST
Billy Brown writes:
> The U.S. Navy routinely operates nuclear submarines (with a crew
> of several hundred men) submerged for several months, and it has
> conducted a number of endurance trials in which submarines stayed
> down for much longer periods. During such a deployment the air
> supply is completely cut off from the outside world and recycled
> by mechanical systems. I think this provide adequate proof that
> atmospheric regulation can be handled by non-biological systems.
A few months is not a very long time. Perhaps you would feel
just fine committing yourself to being a member of the first
group that gets to test such systems in their twelfth month,
eighteenth month, etc.
> So, where exactly is the fatal problem supposed to be?
If we knew in advance where all the fatal problems are, technology
would not need to be tested. Our difference is that you are impressed
with the amount of testing that has been done so far, and I am not.
We know how to keep people alive in space for a few months at a
time. We know nothing about how to do it longer than that. We know
nothing about conventional human reproduction in space. Zip. Nada.
Now conventional human reproduction may become obsolete in fifty
years, or it may not. I don't think it's a good idea to pin the
future of our civilization on the belief that conventional human
reproduction will be completely replaced by different processes
sooner than we will require access to offplanet material resources.
> I don't follow 'closure' experiments for the very good reason that
> they have absolutely nothing to do with practical life support
> engineering.
Absolutely nothing, eh? Strong words. Using prejudices of this
kind to justify a failure to investigate alternative approaches
leads to tunnel-vision research, which is generally the least
productive approach to unsolved problems. Another unproductive
approach to unsolved problems is pretending that they are already
solved.
As for "closure experiments" being about Gaia worship, I'm not
talking specifically about rich-ecosystem closure experiments,
but *any* and *all* closure experiments, including Mir and your
submarines. You think technology can be designed and deployed
successfully without being tested. I don't. If we are serious
about taking advantage of offplanet resources, and we are not in
a state of Blind Faith that uploading and other technologies
will relieve us of having to study what are the *current*
obvious obstacles to this, then we need to study more long-term
closures. I don't care if they are full of wombats and
woad-painted Wiccans or do all their material transformations in
a laboratory full of glassware and filters, they need to be
closed, and they need to be closed for years, and we need to
study the ways they change over time, including changes
beyond the twenty-four month timescale which have *never* been
studied for any closed systems other than the planet as a whole
and small terraria incapable of supporting a human being.
-- arkuat
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