I'm not going to pick a fight with anyone about this subject. I think that with all the inane/stupid shit that the government already spends our money on, some of that could go for exploring space. Are the astronauts going to worry about health issues, radiation and other fancy word stuff? I have no idea. It's what people do, explore. What's cooler than exploring space? Being the first person on Mars? Who wouldn't want to live on the moon for a while? People have to keep pushing further or we end up doing the same thing over and over. Are we going to be content to let Apple tell us what the next cool thing is? Or are we going to keep turning over rocks and looking for bugs, figuring things out for ourselves?
It is no so much space exploration but getting people into space that is the good thing here. By having people up there rather then machines it allows for actual evolving experiments and analysis to be carried out, rather than the static analysis that is carried out by having pretty rubbish robots doing everything. Also telescopes and spectral analysis give us no idea of how stuff has changed over time really. All of that has been inferred by finding similar things at different stages in its life. The title. I am not going to study astrophysics. I did consider it - indeed I could have done astrophysics, cosmology and space physics next year - but instead I am going to so something a little bit more grounded. In my opinion the best thing that is going to come out of NASA is technological advancement. NASA doesn't really do science like a university group would. I imagine a more autonomous organisation would be better for real breakthrough studies. Anyway ,the actual science of the universe is something that I don't see as being all too important. Doing more in depth study of it has been all well and good but I find studying how things fundamentally work more interesting that how the Sun works.
Like what? Give me some examples. I'm also not sure what humans would be able to do that "pretty rubbish robots" can't. Speaking of which, what's your educational background? Undergrad? You mentioned studying astrophysics on your own, but have you taken any astro classes, or done research under an astro professor? Your first sentence is directly contracted by your second one. Yes, spectral analysis of stars during different points of their lifetimes is precisely what astrophysicists mean when they say or write "change over time". What exactly is unsatisfactory about it, in your mind? I'm confused, then. You're not seriously interested in either cosmology, astrophysics, space exploration, or even hard theory. In that case, why do you have your heart set on NASA? If you just want to do robotics, or a similar applied/engineering discipline, you could work at a thousand other places, many of them with better pay, tools, and amenities. (Any good applied physics lab, CERN, LHC, LIGO, etc.)
Most literature that can be easily found refers to humans in space carrying out studies that are of a medical nature, and this is where results can be found. What I was referring to, however, is having humans in space allows on the spot judgments and decisions to be made. For example - if we could come up with a telescope station that was manned it would allow repairs/adjustments to be made on equipment as it was needed for a particular job, as deemed fit by the crew manning such a station. This seems better than having machines churn through there program and waste a lot of time. Obviously manned space flight is full of disadvantages as well - but some manned space flight, for the purpose of autonomous research groups in space, seems good. I am a physics undergrad. I have done some astro classes as well as personal research. There is nothing particularly unsatisfactory about it in the most, after all, building up a Hertzsprung-Russel diagram with as much accuracy as we have done is pretty much bang on when looking at the evolution of stars (we think). The problem comes when when we can't see short lived stages or hard to see stages. I could well be talking out of my arse here, but only being able to see snapshots rather than watch the evolution is always going to leave some small measure of doubt. I don't have my heart set on NASA. I said it as a throw away comment because being able to say to people you work as a rocket scientist at NASA would be awesome. And I know that NASA isn't the place to go if you want to just do science.
You don't actually have to work there to be able to say that. I do it all the time, and damn -- do I get the pussy.
Those medical tests have already been done decades ago, and its results well-known. It was of particular interest to the USSR, and Laika, the first dog in space, was immediately killed and dissected for that very reason. The stuff about health problems I linked to on the first page is all thanks to that research. With regards to telescopes, the idea of a giant super-telescope beyond the Earth's atmosphere is a thing of the past. Hubble is already inferior to a grid of much smaller telescopes all around the world pooling their combined images together. Not only is this approach many times cheaper, it's more accurate, and still developing at the present moment. That's absolutely true if you say that to a layperson. Not so much for an actual scientist.
What are your thoughts on the James Webb Space Telescope (<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope</a>) then? From what I've read, it should be able to get results that Hubble or ground based telescopes won't be able to. I feel like space based telescopes will have a role in science for quite awhile since you can only see so much before the atmosphere begins to obscure things too much.
On a different note , what about SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI So far it has turned up nothing of any significance.
Well, it's like Stephen Hawking said, "Why the hell would an alien want to visit us?" He went on to infer that the only reason would be an "Independence Day" sort of event.
The idea behind a grid is that you can eliminate aberrations caused by the atmosphere by combining images from hundreds of different telescopes in unique locations. As for the James Webb, I honestly don't know how effective it will be. Seems awfully risky, though; it costs upwards of $4.5 billion dollars, incorporates a bunch of very small and precise mechanical parts, and there is no way to service it if something breaks down.
Given exponential population growth, a spacefaring species traveling at sublight speeds would take, at the absolute maximum, 50,000 years to canvass our entire galaxy. Should have happened by now, obviously. Something's wrong...
The automation aspects of space exploration intrigue me. We've actually sat down with engineers associated with NASA to discuss the basics of what our equipment can take in regards to stresses, heat, etc, as well as our experiences with basic resuscitative programming which allows equipment to self start even after logic/programming failure. We have applications with robots inside furnaces, nuclear material handling, etc. Also we've run labs where a robot is given a basic set of instructions to build something and then is set inside a room (really a plexiglass cube) with various shapes and building materials. A basic vision system, six axes of servo motion with a +- .25mm repeatability, and enough reach to pick up every high density foam block within the cube and it'll eventually assemble a ramp or series of steps. I'm going to start selling moon robots on Monday.
Found the article I mentioned: http://io9.com/5553084/architects-design-gigantic-solar-cell-that-can-wrap-around-the-moon
I think all further space exploration should be done by robots/machines. We just need to add a bunch of cumshots on some slides to the soundtrack of Beethoven or The Beatles and watch all other intelligent forms of life (if out there, at this time) flee screaming. No doubt the Earth is a ticking clock and if we are to survive its death we need to get off. Only problem is that we are hardwired to toil under the thumb of gravity. So far, there is no known way to reproduce in zero gravity with sperm free-falling and unable to swim upstream. End result: either mutate through biologic tinkering and design a form more fitted for space travel, destroy gravity or send robots replete with genetic footprints as a kind of cosmic Hail Mary for more advanced forms to act upon. I vote robot. ...and bigger malls......
SETI would turn something up if it was dealing with a species that became advanced before we did. There's always the possibility that there's other life in the universe but that we're the most advance for thus far. Detecting a new species that's experiencing it's version of the Bronze Age would probably be a tad difficult.