July 2004
We live in a specific period of human history where mankind is producing huge amounts of things for “easier living” but together with this there was decreased efforts for discovering near or far space. Moreover, the people usually elect men who are assed by people (or capital), who are paying propaganda during election battle. These are the same people who produce these things which mankind consumes. Please, compare two graphs bellow. First one is Height of International Space Station [1] and second one is Popularity graph of George Bush [2] during the time.
We can see correlation between these two graphs. Why is this possible? Why people elects man who does not care about science, a man who is de-facto unpopular?
Is it possible that mankind has not interest in the nature? This is probably false deduction. However in the society forces exist which manipulate with people. For this forces/groups of people are their behavior realistic because they are bringing some advantages for their, for short time, for their lifetime. But this is generally not good for far perspective of humanity.
When I was watching transit of ISS recently, I realized that on board the space ship are only two men who are in space nowadays. There had been better days, when there had been seven people in space together. What are the reasons for such changes? To be an astronaut is an archaic job? Can robots control space ships and humans are not useful for space trips now? No, the truth is opposite. NASA sends garbage to the space now not advanced robots. Some recent missions were built from old parts from oldest projects. The Space shuttle is a very old vehicle, where only pure maintenance is difficult because of obsolete parts. Let's compare for instance capacity of memory in your personal computer and 256KB of Space Shuttle avionic computer (the value from last upgrade in 1991, let see [3]). The situation is even worse that we can’t repeat the trip to the Moon now.
So, where is the problem? Are people less inquisitive?
The problem is that to be an explorer is not enough. Especially in the case when inquisitiveness must be supply by sources of society. The inquisitiveness could be weaker instinct than ambitions enrich.
From historical experience we can evolve that good cure for progress is competition (unfortunately the war in its extreme form). We can only hope that Chinese cosmonautics in the near feature will grove up to be competitive force for such organizations as NASA, ESA or RKA. We can only hope that this progress will not be accompanied by a war.
Ad what about the mankind on the field
of space penetration? You can calculate the speed of ISS, from the graph above,
mass of the Earth and Newton’s laws. Then you can calculate escape velocity from
our galaxy. Then, please, look again how fare from the Earth a people is
[1] and you would see what is before us
:-)
[1] http://www.heavens-above.com/issheight.asp
[2] http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/BushMeter/
Epilogue:
There is another graph from 16-th November. There was a president election in the USA in October, wasn't it?
