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advancedatheist comments on In memory of Leonard Nimoy, most famous for playing the (straw) rationalist Spock, what are your top 3 ST:TOS episodes with him? - Less Wrong
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Comments (40)
I hate to spoil the mood for nerd grieving and geek hermeneutics, but Star Trek made a certain kind of sense in the late 1960's (nearly 50 years ago!) when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had real space programs which tried to do new things, one after another. But because astronautics has regressed since then, despite all accelerationist propaganda you hear from transhumanists, this genre of mythological framework for thinking about "the future" makes less and less sense. Given the failure of the "space age," would people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality, bother to watch these ancient shows and obsess over the characters?
Actually, they mention every so often that the Cold War turned hot in the Star Trek 'verse and society collapsed. They're descended from the civilization that rebuilt.
So much for the immense successes we have had with unmanned missions. It make a lot of sense to send a few pounds of electronics into space rather than a person. What's wrong with cost effectiveness all if a sudden?
It's cost effective in the short term. It's not clear that it's good for humanity in the long term.
The original Star Trek is a Western, it's about people trying to do the right thing out on the lawless frontier. Why are people still watching Westerns?
I haven really watched more than a few episodes of ToS, but IIUC it never even bothered to be a realistic depiction of how space exploration would look like. It was more e metaphor of the Cold War, in Space!
They will probably idolize some dude who played a vampire. Or zombie. Or BDSM vampire zombie...
If they had BDSM vampire zombies in space I would totally watch that. Once.
The original series was rarely about the political or military tension between the Federation and an opposing major power (i.e. the Klingons or Romulans). It was much more often about dropping in on some planet and solving some local problem; or some psychic effect or setup by superhuman powers causing the crew to reenact a moral or metaphorical drama. Superhuman godlike entities appear more often than the Federation's rivals.
(Klingons only appear in seven TOS episodes, and Romulans in three — out of 79 episodes produced. Alternate Earths, such as those of "Miri" and "Bread and Circuses", and explicit reenactments of Earth social systems, such as the Nazis of "Patterns of Force" or the gangsters of "A Piece of the Action", are about as common.)
Won't they realize that humanity's dreams of obtaining vampirehood and zombiedom have utterly failed? They would never look up to such an obvious fantasy!
I agree with you that humans in their current form will forever be earth-bound. But it's not because of a lack of funding or initiative. It's because it would be absolute insanity to consider exporting humans off the planet. The example I like is, suppose elephants were sentient, and coexisted on the planet with humans. Equal intelligence. Would it make sense to develop rockets to lift elephants into space, when humans are so much lighter? Of course not, go with the humans. So then, why lift humans into space when robots are so much lighter?
Intelligent, conscious entities, children of humans, will almost certainly spread out into space. But the human form is so ridiculously wasteful compared to a human consciousness operating in a robotic machine that it will never make sense to expend the effort required to spread humans around.
Freeman Dyson brings up this very issue, his approach was the Astrochicken. But I don't think even he really got how it will all play out.
Arthur C Clarke did, I think. The human form is just a stepping stone. The story doesn't end there.
--Galaxy Express 999
Which Arthur C Clarke novel(s) are you referring to? Even in 3001, he depicts humans colonizing the solar system, so I'm guessing it's not the Space Odyssey series.
2001 - A Space Odyssey:
The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.
I think it's a bit of a leap to go from NASA being under-funded and unambitious in recent years to "people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality".
Some people, like Keith Henson, argue that we've blown the thermodynamic opportunity to get off planet because we've already squandered the best quality fossil fuels.
This seems very strange. First, most of our rockets use hydrogen and oxygen. One doesn't directly need to use fossil fuels. Second, there's still a massive amount of energy available in terms of fossil fuels, it just involves lower energy return on energy investment. Third of all, there are many other sources of energy, with nuclear power being one of the more obvious, but massive amounts of solar and wind also being available. Fourth of all, rockets are comparatively inefficient in general since one needs to move most of the fuel itself. Launch loops and space elevators are both obvious substitutes that are more energy efficient once they are off the ground. Do you know where Henson has made this argument and what his reasoning was in more detail?
I don't think Keith Henson refers to the energy expenditure of rockets but to the total cheap energy evailable to global society. Currently we are more concered with optimizing the last out of the reamining sources and keeping society running at all. Granted there are still significant technological improvements but these are mostly small scale. Rockets have not improved at all.
My second and third point directly responded to that interpretation of the claim.
I agree with all your points except the fourth. Once outside the atmosphere and up to speed, rockets are actually pretty efficient. The space shuttle main engines achieved 15% propulsive efficiency if I remember correctly; this is better than many land vehicles.
I've studied launch loops and they have massive power requirements, on the order of magnitude of heating up the atmosphere significantly (up to a degree or so). Space elevators can be efficient, if the power delivery system is efficient, and so far all workable proposals (laser power beaming, conductive cables) seem extremely inefficient.
Rockets are in many ways the ideal space launch system, the major disadvantage being enormous unit cost.
Yes, but getting out of the atmosphere is really inconvenient.
Do you have a citation or a back of the envelope for the statement about launch loops having such large power requirements? I don't think I've seen that before, and I'd be interested in seeing that.
I don't remember exactly where I read that, but here's a page with some power calculations: http://launchloop.com/LaunchLoopHeating
100 billion tons/year may sound like a lot but you really do need to launch that much cargo in order to recuperate construction and operation costs. The 0.1 degree heating cited on that page is a bit optimistic since it doesn't take into account secondary effects.
Ouch. Yeah, that's not reasonably viable.
What, exactly, is the claim?
Is the claim that launching a ton of payload by launch loop heats the earth more than launching a ton by rockets? That is very hard to believe. To a first approximation, the energy savings of the launch loop are heat savings.
Or is the claim that launching enough payload to make a launch loop worthwhile is too much heat, either way?
Good point. Hmm, now I'm confused.