On Saturday October 23, 2010 the International Space Station will have been continuously occupied for 3,645 days, breaking a record previously set aboard the Russian Mir space station. Humans will be able to claim a continuous presence off the surface of the planet for almost 10 years, and children born during that time may be the first generation not universally confined to the surface of our home planet.
Around the world nations are struggling to make difficult choices as their economies contract, and it would irresponsible to ignore the (pun intended) astronomically high cost of the space program when prioritizing budget line items. The space program does not deliver many obvious and immediate benefits beyond some stellar (there I go again) wall paper for your computer desktop. But I would argue that as we weigh the resources that we put into various efforts as a nation and as the steward species of the Earth, the space program should be grouped with investments in education, transportation and communications infrastructure as “weightless” on the balance.
While we humans have a penchant for quick fixes, instant gratification and impulsive decisions, we have proven for millennia that we also have the unique ability among animal species to plan ahead, work together on a massive scale and lay the groundwork for future generations to survive and prosper. While space exploration and experimentation are still very expensive, our progeny three or four generations from now will not regret the resources spent on the hundreds of small things we are learning about living off-planet as they look out into the solar system for the raw material and real estate to thrive. Here is a small and very incomplete list of things we can only learn by continuing to support the manned exploration of space:
long-term physical conditioning in micro gravity
The psychological effects of long-term isolation
nutrition in space
re-acclimatization to the Earth after a long time away from it
methods and protocols for communicating with the ground
Charlie Stross writes about the things he can and cannot do with his iPad while traveling.
I happened to be traveling also last week and my only internet device was the iPod Touch. And I discovered something that bugged me more than it should. I had read all the magazine articles that I had transfered to the iPod using FileViewer, and really enjoyed the experience (on the plane, on the deck of the lake house, over breakfast cereal in the kitchen…). I was out of reading material. So I found an open WiFi router, opened about 5 Safari pages, pointed them at various online articles, and then shut the thing off. Later I realized that when you open Safari while offline and browse a previously loaded page, it blanks it out and tells you that you have lost your connection. Why can’t it cache those pages that it has already downloaded?!?
My sister-in-law had another complaint; she has a first generation 8GB iPod Touch, and resisted upgrading to v3 iOS for a long time because Apple was charging for it. No problem; it was her choice to stay on the old software. The thing should still keep working, right? But then her work email server (she works at a University) was upgraded and no longer supported mobile email on pre-v3 devices. Her apps upgraded themselves automatically and many of them started breaking because they didn’t support the old iOS. So she decided to suck it up and pay for the upgrade. Now that v4 is out, many of the same problems are popping up again, but there is a new twist – iOS v4 doesn’t support the first generation iPod Touch hardware.
…and yet there is still no such thing as a drip coffee pot that is both transparent and insulated.
Add this to the list of things that should have been invented by now, including a washing machine that also dries your clothes, batteries that keep a charge for weeks instead of hours, and a cell phone that completely replaces everything else in your pockets including cash, credit cards, membership cards, discount cards, coupone, insurance information and a swiss army knife. Honestly, how hard could these things be to build?