The Traditional Isolationism Taken to a New Level

Alan Caruba at CNS is the latest conservative to take a swipe at the VSE: The Moon? Mars? Forget About It!

As entertainment, I have always particularly enjoyed any television show or movie about space travel. There’s something compelling about a group of people dependent on a space ship to carry them to or from danger. It is, as any “Star Trek” fan will tell you, “the final frontier.”

It is also largely absurd, particularly when it involves billions of dollars this nation can ill afford to throw at a space program that robots could perform better than people.

As entertainment, I have always particularly enjoyed a thoughtful argument about space exploration. Sadly, Caruba fails to deliver. At least we get the robots-not-humans bit out of the way up front, along with the tired whine about the billions of dollars being wasted. Being a conservative, he doesn’t go so far as to say it would be better spent “right here on Earth” on the bloated social programs which have already hoovered up several trillion dollars in the decades since Sputnik — he presumably expects the money saved by cutting the VSE would magically boomerang back to the taxpayers’ pockets, unmolested by other federal spending desires, but on this the liberal vision is probably closer to the truth.

Why didn’t we return to the Moon? Why aren’t there huge space stations? As Tucker points out, the experiments on the long-term effects of life in zero gravity demonstrate that humans do not belong in space.

“The news has not been good. Muscles atrophy quickly and — for reasons yet unknown — the human body does not manufacture bone tissue in space.” Moreover, the Moon “is barren oxygen-less desert.” Want to see a desert? We have them right here on Earth.

Two words: osteoporosis and borax.

There is some thought that studying the effects of weightlessness on bone and muscle health could lead to treatments for osteoporosis, among other things. Identifying an obstacle and working to overcome it is one way technology progresses. Besides, last I knew, there was gravity on the Moon — and we still don’t seem to know what the health effects of long-term exposure to partial gravity are, not well enough to say that it is an insurmountable obstacle to long-term human presence there.

Death Valley is one of the most barren, hostile deserts on Earth…and yet, there is something of value even there. We wouldn’t go to the Moon to “see a desert”, anyway, but to find out what is there. Like borax in Death Valley, there could be resources which we could profitably extract and use elsewhere, or which we could use in place to create an extension of terrestrial civilization.

One could just as easily have said, in the 1500s, that the health and safety risks of long sea voyages and the fact that the destination was a vast wilderness made the New World not worth the trouble or expense of exploring.

Much of what is required to launch and maintain those machines we send into Earth orbit can be and is done without using space shuttles. They have become the equivalent of trolley cars. Trolleys are useful on the sharp inclines of San Francisco streets and picturesque in New Orleans. I’ve been on both. They’re slow, and most people still drive their own cars around these cities.

Note that in both examples, the trolleys serve as much if not more as tourist draws for their respective cities as practical transportation within them. He probably intended by this to deride manned spaceflight as a public spectacle with little practical benefit, but one could also read his analogy as inadvertent support for space tourism — maybe manned spaceflight doesn’t serve a purely practical end, but like the trolleys, the enjoyment it provides (and the positive economic side-benefits this enjoyment generates) may be justification enough.

The unmanned probes have been the most successful ventures of NASA, and therein lay several simple truths. (1) Humans are neither designed nor intended to function in outer space,

Nor are we designed or intended to function at high altitudes or in arctic climates, yet millions of people fly every day, and millions more live in places like Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia.

and (2) technology permits us to do all the exploration we need to at this point in time.

Does it? How do you judge? And how does this view anticipate future needs? And while “technology” (I assume he means robotic technology here) may permit us to perform remote-controlled exploration, how much broader and deeper could the knowledge obtained be if humans were on the scene? (Note that this point reflects a science über alles bias, as well.)

(3) Space probes are far less costly than space shuttles that have to be rebuilt from scratch every time they fly.

While he is right as to the “reusability” of Shuttle, this begs the question that Shuttle is the only way to do manned spaceflight.

(4) They are far less expensive.

Wow…robots are far less costly and far less expensive? How’d they manage that?

(5) No one gets killed.

And no one cares, either — I’d bet that the reason the robots exploring Mars have received so much attention (compared to, say, Ulysses) is the perceived possibility of humans one day going there in person. Besides, people get killed every second of every day doing things less worthwhile than exploring the Moon or Mars. “If you seek safety, it is on the shore.”

At this point, I’m sure there are those who want to speak poetically of the need to explore outer space by sending manned expeditions “because it is there” or on the chance that there is intelligent life “out there” with which we might come in contact.

But surely no one would ever talk about such mundane reasons as finding and exploiting new resources, creating new economic opportunities, or the civilizational growth that might result. Nope. Just the usual giggle-inducing stereotypes.

If it is intelligent, it already knows that the Earth runs red with the blood of its habitants every day as humans kill one another for political or religious reasons and we animals eat one another. Moreover, despite some lovely beaches and spectacular mountain ranges, large areas of the Earth are not the most hospitable places for the humans and other creatures that inhabit it.

Or in other words, intelligent life wouldn’t be like us. I’m actually surprised to see such cynical, self-hating, anti-human comments from a conservative writer — like patchouli, this sort of thing usually emanates from the environmentalist left.

And as for large areas of the Earth not being particularly hospitable to humans…perhaps we should abandon those places, too. It might be a tight squeeze, though, fitting six billion humans into the Rift Valley where we properly belong.