Houston… we’ve got a problem… February 28, 2015
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Scientists, though, have remained doubtful that the mission will get beyond the hypothetical stage, citing its lack of funding and the lack of a spacecraft or habitat suitable for supporting life on a longterm mission.
A lack of spacecraft. Yep, that’d be a problem alright.
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It’s maybe a interesting philosophical problem as to why we so value the idea of sending humans into space. What, actually, is sending wo/men to Mars supposed to give us that we couldn’t get from tech? ‘Authentic’ human experience? But such experience is already heavily mediated by, and dependent on, our technological prosthesis. Is it some atavistic urge to conquer, maybe? Maybe ST was right about the final frontier.
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Bruce Sterling argues that it’s romanticisation because it’s so far away. He argues he’ll take it seriously when people want to seriously colonise say the Gobi or similar inhospitable places on Earth (the Gobi is undergoing rapid desertification and as a place for humans is increasingly less good an environment), and how there’s no such thing as Gobi Opera. Still, perhaps there is an outward urge. Your point re mediation is something that’s struck me, even if ‘there’ they would be inside space suits and cut off by layers of materials etc from the actuality of the place they’re ‘in’. Curious.
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