I will have to disagree with you on the odds. There are LOTS of large rocks
out there, and most of them cross the Earth's orbit. It is only a matter of
time. The thing is, it seems that a lot of them are so nonreflective that
seeing them will be horribly difficult.
And the only way to go out there is to start going out there. There are
things that a human can do that no machine can do. At least yet. And
possibly for the next hundred years or so.
You like gambling with the survival of our species? You feel comfortable?
I don't. The sooner we have a completely permanent and self-sufficient
presence in space, the better, as far as I am concerned.
But I will agree that maybe our resources could be better spent in the short
run. Instead of a manned mission to Mars sooner, maybe we should spend more
resources in making several space habitats and making them ecologically
closed and healthy biospheres. We haven't figured out how to do that yet.
Peter Horton
DJ DDX KXUA 88.3
www.kxua883.com every Friday night from 10 to Midnight central
members.tripod.com/djddx/djddx
----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: The Space Station
> Peter Horton wrote:
>
> >The main benefit for going OUT THERE is obvious. The continued >survival
> >of our species. To put it simply, if you put all of your >eggs in one
> >basket (the Earth) all it takes is one rock (a medium >sized asteroid) to
> >destroy all your eggs (us).
>
> Lets calculate the odds on that. I'm not at home now, so forgive my lack
of
> research, but the evidence that I see indicates that a worldwide mass
> extinction even happens only once in multiple millions of years. The
> dinsaours exticntion is an example of this...and it appears that the
period
> of this is in the hundreds of millions of years.
>
> So, I'm not really worried about this happening in the next thousand
years.
> The odds are strongly against it.
>
> Not only that, but sending a few folks to Mars in the near future has
> virtually nothing to do with saving the population of the earth. A much
> more plausable use of space technology would be the mapping of all of the
> near earth objects of sufficient size to cause this type of difficulty,
and
> the development of the technology needed to nudge these objects in their
> orbits as need be. You'll be surprised at how small the nudge can be if
it
> is given early enough.
>
> Dan M....I'm away from home, so no full sig.
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>
> Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
> http://profiles.msn.com.
>
>
