By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
We have so much problems down here on Earth that Artemis seems like a smokescreen. I see no way it could benefit humanity.
There are an endless number of problems here on earth. However while we can make a difference, establish a trend, we can never fix them. It’s a losing battle. We fix at least as many problems by improving technology, civilization.
Let’s take refrigerators. There are way too many people without adequate food and there always will be. We can fix the excesses, we can set a trend but we will never end hunger. However technology advances, overall societies become wealthier, and now at least in developed countries almost everyone has access to refrigeration. Trying to help the hungry doesn’t get us there, shifting the whole society forward does.
We may not have concrete ideas how Artemis can shift society forward but in general big technology challenges do
Most of Earth problems have very little to do with technology and a lot to do with political and economical systems. And even it we had a Zeus program going straight to Jupiter would make noe difference.
But doesn’t that argue against your earlier point? If our myriad of earthly problems are generally political and economic system, then Artemis does not take away from addressing them.
One of the ways it could benefit humanity is to offload the destruction of our environment in pursuit of rare earth metals, natural gases, to a moon or planet where the environment does not support life.
Strip mining and fracking are actively and rapidly destroying our planet. Stopping those activities here would be a massive improvement to our chances of survival on Earth into the future.
Oh asteroid mining with slow electric engines would offload SOOOOOO much emissions and pollution. Granted we would have to build some sort of space elevator or platform which would be a global effort and cost hundreds of trillions in every stage. But once the main aspects were done, it would be very efficient.
Also it turns out asteroids are conveniently formed in layers like an onion. All the work of pulling veins of ore out of ground and rock is unnecessary, because the heavier elements are further towards the center of these much MUCH Smaller bodies than planets, and the lighter elements on on top. It would make it far far easier to find and harvest these minerals and resources than it is now. As most people are aware, rare earth minerals aren’t actually rare, they’re just so scarcely spread out over our crust.
All the minerals and resources we want that are actually from Earth’s formation are hundreds of miles below the surface, most likely in molten form in the mantle, because of how cosmic body formation works with density and gravity. The resources we are extracting were probably almost all deposited by asteroid, meoterite, and comet strikes, that also probably brought our oceans.
All this to say, these asteroid did the same thing Earth did, pulled their heavy materials to their cores, but these are much easier to crack and process than an entire planet. We don’t need to go all Ishimura from Dead Space with planet cracking, when we can just crack open tiny to small sized asteroids and harvest those valuable materials much more readily, in FAR FAR higher quantity than on Earth’s surface, and with very little environmental impact.
That would be givin a lifeline to an already unsustainable and destructive system.
So… we need resources. Like if we go back to preindustrial society, hundreds of millions die, from diseases and famine and disability and a whole onslaught of issues. We are currently fucking over our planet to scrape the remnant of asteroid impacts to make the tools and systems we use. Now, are a bunch of those unnecessary, of course, and can they probably be done better, yes. But until we have Star Trek style replicators or hard light technology, we will need a decent amount of resources to continue existing. And I don’t know about you, but asteroid mining seems a LOT more attainable and within the nearish future timespan than replicators or hard light.
No, we need different system. We already have enough resources to provide every human being on Earth with decent life. With late capitalism whole universe would not be enough, because its greed is insatiable. So, we’ll add exploitation of Moon to exploitation of Earth.
Oh I meant we use this technology in collectivist ways, not private corporations mining. Truly, to build that initial space elevator or space dock, I can’t imagine it outside of a star trek like Earth. We would have to all work together for this and for many other projects which would be cool to accomplish