Physicist Stephen Hawking has recently begun advocating we abandon Earth if we want to survive as a species. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million,” he says. “Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”
If spreading out into space is our “only chance of long term survival,” shouldn’t we do as he advises and just go? It is a simple question and astonishingly there is an equally simple answer “No!”
We can barely reach our neighbouring planets and everything else is just unimaginably distant. Even if a man does land on one of our neighbouring planets, it will either be unbearably cold or impossibly hot, it will have either the wrong atmosphere or little or none at all. As for going to a nearby solar system, the distances are so great that we will never get there.
For humans to survive, we need an atmosphere similar to earth’s. Primarily we need nitrogen and oxygen, a smidgen of carbon dioxide is a big help. We need a reasonable temperature, neither too hot nor too cold. It is a bit on the cold side at the earth’s poles but, compared to other planets, even this is clement.
The table above illustrates the enormity of the problem. Only earth has an atmosphere suitable for humans. Mercury and Mars have virtually none at all and Venus’s atmosphere is extremely dense, consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Even if these planets had a breathable atmosphere, the surface temperatures are either much too hot or far too cold. Admittedly, because of their poles and equators, Mercury and Mars will have small zones with a reasonable temperature range for humans.
Even travel within our own solar system takes an unconscionably long time. Orbits of the planets mean that sometimes they are close together and at others quite far apart. At its nearest Mars is some 56 million km away. In fact, in order to save fuel by using the sun’s gravity, space probes to Mars do not take the shortest route; currently it takes some 9 months to reach Mars.
It takes years to get out of our solar system, but this does not get us appreciably closer to any other solar system. Our galaxy is shaped like a disc, 100,000 light years across and 1000 light years thick. Our nearest star, Proxima Centuri , is 4.3 light years away. This is an unimaginable 40,681,440,000,000 km away. It would take 75,000 years to get there travelling at the speed of Voyager 2. And of course it would take 75,000 years to get back. This is worth mentioning because it is the only thing you could possibly do. Proxima Centuri is without planets. Even if we could travel 100 times faster, the round trip is still over 1000 years and utterly out of the question.
If conventional travel won’t cut it, what about relativity, warp speed, worm holes and the like? Mostly this is related to sub-atomic particles or funnelling matter in one galaxy and having it pop out in another. Even where this is not pure fantasy, none of it can possibly relate to human travel where we hope to arrive in much the same state as we left.
The truth is that we are bound to our solar system and, moreover, bound to the single planet Earth. The human race has no hope of escaping it.
Why then do we spend billions indulging our space scientists? The answer has to be that we didn’t realize that space travel beyond our solar system is absolutely out of the question and that travel within the solar system is utterly pointless.
Unsuitable for second homes?
An example of waste is unmanned exploration of Mars, where there have been both successful and unsuccessful landing craft. Generally these contain experiments designed to look for signs of life, including micro-organisms, water and the like. It is difficult to work out which is the greater waste of money: the immensely costly successful experiments or the somewhat less costly failed experiments. The British-designed and -built Beagle 2 cost a mere £50million. It failed without working at all. Beagle 2 was part of ESA’s Mars Express mission costing some £300million where the Orbiter continues to produce data. This contrasts with NASA’s successful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at a cost of £500million. The general public has little idea that the “experiments” are essentially meaningless. Normally signs of life should involve some living organism or a convincing fossil. In fact, the experiments may or may not point to the existence of methane on Mars which in turn may or may not have been produced by micro-organisms. All of this is slightly interesting but one cannot imagine the public being willing to spend billions of pounds to satisfy the curiosity of a few scientists.
We can say is that Mars is very cold but it might have be able to have supported micro-organisms in its past. We can this now but, equally, we could have said it before all this exploration started.
The space probes Voyager 1 and 2 have a message to aliens, a golden record showing sights and sounds of earth. Given that in 1000 years’ time these spaceships will be hardly any nearer to any star or possible alien – at which time almost certainly everything on board will have stopped working – the whole exercise is pointless in the extreme. We might have just as well put up a satellite beaming signals telling aliens that, if they exist at all, they are just too far away. It still would have been pointless, but a great deal cheaper.
This should be contrasted to Earth’s satellites which have brought us improved communications, a greater understanding of meteorology and useful applications, such as GPS. None of these engineering advances need subsidy. I asked one of my friends, a retired engineer from the European Space Agency, about the spin-off benefits of space research. He thought that miniaturization was the main spin-off but this was driven mostly by commercial satellite research and development.
Our scientists cheerfully spend our billions knowing full well that there can be no benefit to us. We just have to take this on the chin.
We should stop subsidizing the pointless and let the rest take care of itself.
– Nick O’Hear
Nick O’Hear is an electrical engineer with wide industrial experience. He co-holds two patents and is currently chairman of Tension Technology International, Ltd.
6 Comments
This is probably one of the silliest thesis I’ve ever read. It is so riddles with inaccuracies that I wonder if this publication has any type of fact checking process. Forget about the silly idea that space probes contribute nothing (you do realize that many of the systems developed for them are applied to other satellites, right?), but the last claim of “This should be contrasted to Earth’s satellites which have brought us improved communications, a greater understanding of meteorology and useful applications, such as GPS. None of these engineering advances need subsidy” is incorrect and wrong.
The author should actually do some research into GPS or Galileo and see that they were completely subsidized by governments and they continue to do so. Just because there are commercial applications, doesn’t mean governments did not develop or launch the satellites.
What does this man want us to do, ignore the Universe? The discovery of life off this Earth, would be the greatest find in human history.
This man should check his facts. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, not 100,000,000. Also where is his sense of wonder and curiosity about the universe. Some things are worth doing even if they don’t return a profit.
Mr Street is quite correct, of course. The figure has been corrected and I am grateful to Mr Street for drawing the error to my attention.
I assume the main reason for this publication is to provoke reactions as seen above.
He just argues consequently among the lines of reason.
I tend to agree with Mr. Street who wonders about curiosity and amazement.
Humankind needs goals to thrive – even if we never succeed, the road to these goals is full of new discoveries and surprises.
Mr. O’Hear is surely incontrovertibly correct in his 2 main points: (1)all the planets of our solar system are so formidably inhospitable to human life that human settlement on any significant scale will never be a practical option (Though there may eventually be small outposts on the moon and nearer planets, along the lines of those currently in the Antarctic, temporarily visited mainly by scientists and perhaps a few exceptionally affluent tourists); and (2) for all practical purposes humans are and will remain “bound to our solar system” and the human race has “no hope of escaping it”.
Mr. O’Hear does not mention that human activities in space have thus far been driven primarily by the military/security interests of states and this is likely to remain a prominent aspect of human outer space activities (the USA already conducts a significant portion of its military operations using space-based instrumentation and other large states will predictably move in the same direction). As observed, satellites have also acquired importance for navigation and communication purposes. Further, as environmental and ecological issues becoms matters of greater concern, the importance of satellites for a multitude of earth-monitoring functions will increase.
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