Archive for 2006

Rosie: Apologies for the erratic blogging at the moment but Jose’s in Spain and I’m buried under a mountain of reading for my course, as well as working on a lot of really exciting statistics concerning non tariff barriers and tariff equivalents in China for an EU trade delegation in about two weeks time (I think this probably makes me a capitalist running dog). This week we asked:

What ethical dilemmas posed by future technology or social changes would you like to see explored more thoroughly in contemporary Science Fiction?

Jose: My biggest concern for the future is how we´re going to manage existential risks that are sophisticated subtle and may creep up on us quite quickly. We´ve still not responded properly as a civilization to Global Warming and we´ve had over two decades worth of warming. I doubt that Global Warming will be the last big crisis we face. I suspect that a series of existential crises are the unfortunate side effect of a massive civilization that develops progressively more advanced technology. I´m not sure which the next crises might be (we might go retro and start having to worry about nukes again) but it will be related to our technology and probably quite complicated. Our capitalist democracies don´t seem to respond to such crises, can they adapt or are we doomed to depend on 11th hour efforts.

Paolo Bacigalupi:

Frankly, I’m not very interested in the ethical dilemmas of future technology. I’m interested in the dilemmas inherent in our present-day technologies.

I’m interested in how we’re going to deliver technologies that the developed world takes for granted like electricity and heat and air-con to a growing India and China and still resolve global warming issues at the same time.

I’m interested in the conundrum of scale. A single person can do whatever they like, build whatever they like, consume whatever they like, and they don’t owe an apology to anyone for doing it. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 billion people all doing the same? Who gets the toys and who doesn’t?

I’m interested in the ethical dilemmas inherent in upgrading to a new bit of technological wizardry. I’m interested in our so-called information society — with its deep dependence on electricity generated by coal. I’m interested in our iPods and laptops and servers that are made out of plastics and heavy metals. I’m interested in the tributary communities of the supply chains that manufacture our digital lifestyle accoutrements and that bathe in levels of pollution that we would never accept within our own borders.

What is the ethical stance for owning a laptop or an iPod? Man, that’s an ethical question about technology I’d like to see explored. An Intel plant in New Mexico consumes vast amounts of water. What happens as New Mexico’s drought deepens? Is the chip-maker that serves a global demand for faster processors more important than the community that depends on that same water source for drinking? Who gets the water? Who wins and who loses in that scenario? That’s an interesting ethical dilemma.

We’re rooted in the resources of our localities in so many ways, and sf seems to love to forget that. I’m interested in any sf that spends some time grounding itself in today, rather than pretending that tomorrow’s dilemmas are the ones to worry about.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Martyn Amos:

What makes scientists fake their results, and what happens if it’s never detected? (Could make for an interesting historical “time fork” novel!)

Dr Martyn Amos is a Senior Lecturer in Computing and Mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Mara Hvistendahl:

The rise of technonationalism should make differing cultural attitudes toward certain areas of research increasingly important. Genetic engineering is the obvious one here. It would be interesting to see a cloning drama that plays out along national lines, taking into account, say, South Korea’s determination to become the world leader in the area. Demographic change is another fertile area. The growing gender imbalance in Asia, the explosion of megacities in the developing world, the aging population in the West and China (which will be the first country to age before it becomes rich) – these trends will surely have a significant influence on science and technology.

Mara Hvistendahl is a Shanghai-based freelance writer and China correspondent for Seed

Hannah M. G. Shapero

One thing which I have been speculating about comes from my own experience with Internet and its cooption by the consumer society. There is much talk in science fiction especially “cyberpunk” about connecting human brains directly to computer networks and a super-Internet type of world-mind. But from what I know, this world-mind, just like the current

internet, will be taken over by spammers and intrusive commercial interests, who will not hesitate to beam spams and even more coercive, or pornographic, messages directly into the brains of those who are connected to the SuperNet. Spammers always manage to evade filters and other anti-spam measures, so I don’t see it stopping when the Net becomes part of the human central nervous system.

Many authors delight in the thought of the “Singularity” or the “Unity” when humanity is brought together in peace and harmony by some technological marvel. To me that would be dangerous and perhaps a disaster. Connecting everyone would make the commonality vulnerable to cybernetic viruses, and to other as-yet-unforeseen sinister collective forces

which might arise in a cyber-unified civilization. William Gibson has written about this in some of his books.

I also am interested in the idea of cybernetic viruses joining up with actual biological viruses, perhaps through genetic re-programming inside a humanoid being that is infected with a cyber-biological virus. What if it were possible for a plague to arise not from biological sources but from human-interfaced “wetware?”

I tend to see things in a dystopic rather than an optimistic way, unfortunately; for every Singularity there is also a black hole.

Hannah M.G. Shapero (A.K.A. Pyracantha) is an artist and illustrator with many a sci-fi book cover to here name.

Carolyne Hill

The question implies a lack of thoroughness in contemporary science fiction, but I’m not going to bite. [aww, no fair -ed] I’ll speak of what interests me, without implying that dilemmas aren’t being explored sufficiently.

For me, ethical dilemmas involve balancing the needs and desires of various individuals or groups. And almost anything can cause a dilemma. But recent social trends that create dilemmas for me as a citizen of the United States are the povertizing of the U.S. middle class, the increasing belligerence of the United States on the global stage, and the widening class gap between the rich and the rest of us living on Earth. How can we respond—not just ethically, but effectively—to decrease poverty, violence, and class inequity?

I’m also interested in plague: how to (or whether to) prevent or manage an outbreak, how to distribute resources, how to handle the economic and social consequences, and how the survivors deal with the traumatic aftereffects. Questions about the overuse of antibiotics, the potential risks of nanotechnological plague weighed against the benefits of biological nanotech, the role of viruses and massive die-off in evolution, concerns about human overpopulation . . . how do we weigh all these factors to make ethical decisions when we don’t have all the data?

And speaking of data: the inundation of data or the lack of data in daily life also creates dilemmas that concern me. Having accurate facts and information helps a person make informed decisions, but the media stream—both the corporate media and the people’s media such as YouTube and wikis—have become increasingly data-clogged and overwhelming, making it difficult for an individual to distinguish between the accurate and the inaccurate (however we choose to define those terms). But being confined to a backwater apart from the full media stream seems equally deleterious: people who lack money or time to spend on pursuing the data, or who live in undeveloped areas without access to the Internet, or whose access is limited by censors or other filters—are equally at a disadvantage. How do we ethically balance the needs of people, governments, and the data’s own “need” to be free? And how do we deal with the media stream’s comcomitant quickening of experience, shortening of attention span, and preference for multitasking versus intent and lingering focus: all this may help people learn to make decisions quickly, but are those decisions ethical? Do teachers have a role to play in all this? As a teacher, I wonder. Where do my desires to pontificate against oppression or in favor of ethics begin to oppress my students?

Not surprisingly, many of these ethical dilemmas find their way into my own novels, and I enjoy seeing the same dilemmas explored in the works of others.

Carolyn Hill is a science fiction novelist who teaches writing and public speaking at the University of California, Berkeley where she received her doctorate.

This is a bit unusual but I’m actually doing a normal blog post today. Please bear with me, this feels a bit strange. I’m reacting in large part to a ball that’s being kicked around today, largely by Lou Anders who is Getting Medieval on Reality’s Ass (and just to show you how incestous the SF blogosphere is that post title is an excerpt of something Paul McCauley said in one of our Brain Parades. In the second parter he poses the question (again originaly raised by someone else in this case Paul Cornell)

“Where is our Casablanca? That is, an extremely populist work of extremely high quality.”

There’s a simple answer to that of course Star Trek and Star Wars. Both of which are now dead franchises but which served as excellent points into the genre for many people for decades. I imagine a lot of people might scoff at that, after all Star Wars it might be argued isnt’ really Science Fiction (which I disagree with but that’s beside the point). There’s been a lot of concern about the relative decline of Science Fiction book sales in the face of the genre’s rising popular appeal in other media. There’s headscratching over this seeming incongruity. If Science Fiction is dominating film, television and computer games shouldn’t it be rising in popularity in the dead tree format?

No, I suspect the opposite may very well be true.

I’ve got a funny corollary I want to bring up here and that is paper and pencil role playing games vs. computer role playing games. Back in the early to mid 90s I was a roleplaying game publisher. I remember getting into a debate back in a designer emailing list back then arguing the position that computer roleplaying games could never replace paper and pencil roleplaying games, the social element was missing for starters as much of the opportunity for improvisation, etc. The two really were apples and oranges in my view, the oranges would never replace the apples because they were in essence fundamentally different. In fact the popularity of the computer based roleplaying games might bring more people into the paper and pencil market.

I now realize I was dead wrong. World of Warcraft doesn’t let you do all the things that you can do in a paper and pencil roleplaying session but it fulfills a lot of the functions that most people want out of a roleplaying experience most of the time. And while there might be people who drift from World of Warcraft to playing Dungeons and Dragons there are certainly are many more people drifting in the opposite direction. There will always be paper and pencil roleplaying die hards, we even have people playing Dungeon and Dragons in Second Life now but we’ve clearly entered an era when roleplaying games are primarily about computers.

We all have a limited amount of time and money to spend on entertainment. If people are watching spending more and more time watching Science Fiction television and playing Science Fiction computer games they may be doing so at the expense of reading a Science Fiction novel.

We may just have to resign ourselves to the fact that Science Fiction is now primarily about visual media and that such popularity won’t necessarily translate and possibly work against its popularity in dead tree media. That doesn’t mean that Science Fiction books are on the way out or even in trouble but it’s a mistake to think that the hot market in oranges is a good thing for the sale of apples.

What ethical dilemmas posed by future technology or social changes would you like to see explored more thoroughly in contemporary Science Fiction?

I’ve got a lot of things I want to say on this one (so its a good thing it’s a two parter). And its especially apt since I just watched the first two episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s 3rd season. That’s one show that isn’t afraid to tackle contemporary political issues and put them on their head in a SFnal setting. Quite gutsy stuff for American Science Fiction television which in my opinion has been been extraordinarily timid for the past 30 years. However I’m digressing, that isn’t really what this Brain Parade is about.

One thing I’d like to see explored is the question of what happens to a democracy when its population splinters into various consensual realities and the role technology might play in that splintering. We’re already starting to see that now to a certain extent with self selecting media. There may have even been an Orwellian attempt to define Mark Foley (for the benefit of our non US readers he’s an American politician in mucho caca) as a Democrat.

How long before people can use technological tools to create their own sense of community with its own take on reality entirely? And what happens to a democracy when it has a population that may inhabit the same geography but which resides in seperate but parallel fantasy worlds? Methinks it’s a recipe for disaster but perhaps with a bit of ingenuity it might just work out in a weird sort of way. Wether its a good idea or not is besides the point because I think it’s a direction we’re already accelerating towards.

Joe Miller:

I think SF is doing a good job of extrapolating the trends most likely to result in ethical dilemmas and social changes. I’d like

to see more serious consideration of the tension between the demands of individual liberty and the necessity of combating terrorism. These are hard issues. I have suggested that one solution to Fermi’s famous paradox is that most civilizations simply do not survive a technology which puts weapons of mass destruction in the hands of individual lunatics. Vinge’s Rainbows End is a good meditation on this point. Another thing I would like to see in SF is better characterization of what scientists actually do and have to undergo in order to actually pursue a scientific career. We have a few people like Benford and Bear who appreciate this but a true “fiction of science” is still largely lacking.

Dr. Joseph Miller is Director of Pharmacology and Associate Professor of Research, Department of Cell and Neurobiology, at the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

James Bow:

The issue of cloning is coming closer to us every day, and this is going to raise questions over the nature of identity and whether or not humans have souls..

Already in children’s literature we have Lesley Choyce’s “Deconstructing Dylan” and Jenny Nimmo’s “Milo’s Wolves” which tell the story of a young clone struggling to find his identity. These are the first stabs that I’ve seen in response to Dolly the sheep and the general sense that human cloning is just around the corner.

James Bow is a writer, journalist and web designer.

Tony Ballantyne:

Ethical dilemmas? Maybe it’s my background, but I wonder about children. How are they different from adults and what rights and responsibilities do they really have? How far do they have a right to education and how far will we enforce this, particularly in troubled areas of the world? But supposing we do guarantee education for all; do people then have the right to be ignorant? Do we insist that they learn for example science, religion, arts, physical fitness, or do we allow them to pick and choose?

Tony Ballantyne is a British SF author

Mark Stachiew:

When it comes to ethical dilemmas posed by future technology, I think that science fiction writers have left few stones unturned. There aren’t many topics that haven’t already been explored ad nauseum. Genre writers have been exploring ethical debates for a long time. The only difference is that the future they imagined has arrived and we have to face the dilemmas they wrote about.

For example, I’m interested in stories about the conflict between human and machine intelligences. Karel Kopek wrote about the subject way back in the 20s in RUR. It was one of Isaac Asimov’s favourite subjects and it continues to fascinate readers and writers today, possibly more so now because the possibility of fiction becoming fact seems more possible than ever.

The ethics of cloning and gene therapy are also interesting. Can we breed subhumans to use for cheap labour or replacement body parts? Again, the idea is hardly knew. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in Brave New World, but it seems like the brave new world is almost here.

Mark Stachiew is a long-time science fiction fan who collects obscure science fiction tidbits for his blog, The Website at the End of the Universe.

Daryl Gregory:

The ethical dilemmas I’m interested in aren’t in the future, and come straight from my experience as a white, male, straight, American hypocrite. How do I reconcile spending so much money on my own kids (saxophone lessons, soccer shoes, Magic the Gathering cards) when children in the third-world (or down the street) go hungry? Why am I sitting here sipping this incredibly expensive beer (Arrogant Bastard Ale from San Diego, made more delicious by irony) while there are Habitat for Humanity houses to build? Shouldn’t I quit my job to spend full time opposing a government that defends using torture and won’t allow gay people to marry? If the system is corrupt, shouldn’t I run for office?

Science fiction doesn’t often show real people struggling with these issues, but some of the best fiction in the genre — like Geoff Ryman’s Air: Have Not Have — prove that it can be done, and beautifully.

Daryl Gregory writes Science Fiction

To round off Jose's debate with Charlie about whether or not we should be pursuing manned or unmanned expeditions in space I wanted to consider the incentives driving the push outward. During the first period of space exploration the incentive was that of national pride, of competition between the two sides during the cold war to get the first satellite in orbit, the first man in space, the first to walk on the moon. Science at this stage, the search for knowledge, was a marginal incentive at best. After the Apollo program became prohibitively expensive (and boring for the viewers at home) science began to provide the primary incentive; our desire for discovery and exploration, to find out what is up there, (and also to spy on what is down here) started to drive the space program, but it was always and will always be at the mercy of those who control the purse strings. The third set of incentives, which started with the first commercial telecommunications satellites and has continued with G.P.S.(Yes I know it was a military project at first, but it is one of the few that has repaid its initial investment) etc., was the commercial incentive; the desire to make money out of space, and it is this I would argue, which will drive the next phase in the space programme, the exploitation, rather than exploration, of space.

On the blog Joe Haldeman mentions that it is only when "cislunar space offers goods and services that can't be had more cheaply on Earth," that we will see the next phase in technological development, such as space elevators or their equivalents, thus allowing us to lift large masses cheaply and truly begin the manned exploration of the solar system. Well what type of goods and services can we expect space to offer us? On the services side the nascent space tourism industry provides an incentive for research into manned space flight. There are an awful lot of jaded billionaires and multi millionaires out there who will gladly pay for the chance to see the curvature of the earth and while this will undoubtedly be a minority pursuit for quite some time, the need to make money out of such ventures will help guard against the traditional bureaucratic excesses and wastages of which NASA is famously guilty. While scientists may shudder at the thought of the ISS being used as a glorified hotel for the hyper rich, if we are honest is it currently being used for anything more worthwhile?

The question of goods however is a tricky one. There has been much speculation over the years about whether or not zero G manufacturies might be able to produce goods that are simply impossible to make on earth, such as novel drugs or crystals whose molecular structure requires a freefall environment. While this is perfectly possible, the thought that these could be produced in large enough quantities to justify the time and expense of setting up such manufacturies and providing them with raw materials from earth is rather dubious at the moment. So what are we left with? The debate about where to go next has tended to focus on the nearest planets, the Moon and Mars, and while the moon's gravitational well doesn't pose too much of a problem to a returning expedition, Mars's does, not to mention the time it would take to get there and back.

Why not first explore and exploit Near Earth Asteroid's (NEA's)? These are resources that are easy to get to, easy to return from, and which potentially contain extremely valuable resources. In addition if a space elevator were ever to be built, the logical thing to do would be to grab an NEA, move it into earth orbit, and then spin out the elevator from it. While this process was ongoing the asteroid could be mined, used as a space station and base for instruments and telescopes, and could be studied, telling us a lot about the formation of the solar system. The key here is bootstrapping, finding ways to make each step along the path towards the ultimate goal of man's colonization of the solar system as profitable, or at least less unprofitable, as is possible. The desire for knowledge about our solar system or national pride will only take us so far, and as long as the desire for knowledge or national pride, is what drives the space program, it will always be a political football, kicked hither and yon by the powers that be. But as soon as someone finds a way to make money out of space, and especially out of manned space exploration, then we will see a massive acceleration in the rate of technological progress and the scientific discoveries that go along with it.

Perhaps therefore instead of asking whether we should invest in manned or unmanned space exploration at the moment perhaps a better question is, what is the best way of making money out of space? If we concentrate our investment in those areas, providing seed money and incentives such as the X-Prize, to those who think they can make a profit from the void, then perhaps we can accelerate the current glacial progress of technological progress when it comes to launchers and finally move beyond von Braun to something a little more efficient.

While the desire to make a fast buck may not be as noble a motive as the desire to expand the sphere of human knowledge, we should not forget that the history of exploration and colonization here on Earth is the history of mercantilism and exploitation, albeit often with savage consequences for those who have been exploited. At least in space we shouldn't have that problem. Manned and unmanned space exploration go together, hand in glove, and we shouldn't rule out one in favour of the other. The real question is what is the most efficient way of getting out there, and the answer to that is to take the project out of the hands of the bean counters, bureaucrats and politicians and into the hands of those driven by that most basic of human desires, greed. While businessmen and corporations may not be paragons of human virtue, at least they have a tendency to get things done, because if they fail they cannot hide behind walls of bureaucracy and political manoeuvring, instead they go bust, and the technology and patents they have developed are snapped up by their competitors to be used again, rather than disappearing into the governments' archives, never to be seen again. We will get out there someday, but as long as the space program is a slave to the whims of government, of national expediency, of the military, and indeed of science, it will be a long, long road with many switchbacks, reversals and pauses, and I for one could do with rather less white elephants sitting in the middle of the road.

The timing could not have been worse. While the United States suffered repeated pounding by hurricanes, on 19th September 2005 NASA Administrator Dr. Michael Griffin announced the details of President Bush’s plan to return human explorers to Earth’s moon and go on to Mars.

The plan begins by phasing out the Shuttle. Space Station support will be offloaded to commercial launchers, encouraging a new industry delivering bulk cargo to orbit. The savings allow a giant rocket to be cobbled together out of Shuttle parts, which will launch a lunar lander and transfer stage into orbit. Then, a single Shuttle solid rocket booster will orbit a scaled-up Apollo capsule called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which docks with the lander. The transfer stage will send both toward Earth’s moon.

Dr. Griffin chose not to use existing commercial rockets, which would have saved money up-front and allowed earlier lunar missions. Instead, NASA will spend some $10 billion on the new heavy rocket to make lunar flights easier, and to prepare for Mars expeditions, before sending a single astronaut to Earth’s moon.

Building new rockets may prove a political mistake. Significant budget increases for NASA were improbable even before war and hurricanes. Conversely, latent political support for human spaceflight remains strong in Congress and the Senate, even after the loss of two Shuttle orbiters and fourteen astronauts. Major cuts remain possible, but a wholesale withdrawal from human spaceflight is unlikely, especially as China and other nations enter the field.

Dr. Griffin’s conservative plan may live close to within NASA’s current budget and it breaks little new ground at first, yet it still costs an estimated $104 billion over thirteen years. Why not give up on human spaceflight and send robots?

In his seminal history of the Soviet lunar effort, “Challenge to Apollo”, Asif A. Siddiqi attempts to compare the cost and scientific value of the large, carefully-selected samples collected during the first two Apollo landings, with those returned by the Soviet Luna robots of the same era. It is difficult to directly compare the two programs, he argued, but the robot effort was far lessscientifically productive and it is not clear it was more cost effective. Likewise, the Mars Exploration Rovers are one of the great achievements of our time. However, no rover will rule out life on Mars, locate and map the widespread distribution of any micro-fossils, or accurately date the fine stratigraphy of volcanic flows and flooding over wide areas. Answering these kinds of detailed questions requires on site geologists.

In this light, Dr. Griffin’s “Apollo redux” makes sense. An initial one week lunar stay will quickly escalate to repeated six month Lewis and Clark style expeditions. Geologists will do detailed traverses, while astronauts practice“living off the land” mining oxygen from lunar soil. The giant rocket sets the stage for the future.

To truly understand the accessible worlds of our Solar System, scientists on site are essential. If there is a way forward, Dr. Griffin’s back-to-basics, relatively affordable, and results-oriented plan is it.

Donald F. Robertson is a freelance space industry journalist based in San Francisco.

This article originaly appeared in British magazine Astronomy Now and is used with permission of the author. Thanks Donald for contributing this to our manned vs unmanned debate.

It's raining red on this parade

These little red things rained down on Kerbala India in 2001. Are they extra terrestrial in origin? Are they alive? Are they reproducing? Some people seem to think so. You can read an abstract going into more detail here. The first paper (unpublished) can be found here and another with some bold claims here. Further tests are being performed over the next few weeks that will hopefully settle this question. But why wait for tommorrow when we can speculate today?

As one to the main proponents of panspermia I think the claims made by Louis are very interesting. Evidence for panspermia - the theory that life is a cosmic phenomenom and was introduced by comets - has grown consderably in the past few years. It is now thought highly plausible that life on Earth came from comets. If so the process of comets bringing microbial life must continue even to the present day. Whether the red rain is evidence for this is left to be seen. We are fortunate in Cardiff University to have been given an opportunity to study a sample of the rain. Our investigations are still in progress.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology He was a student and collaborator of Sir Fred Hoyle. Their joint work on the infrared spectra of interstellar grains led to developing the modern theory of panspermia.

We encourage investigation of unusual phenomena like this, but Earth all by itself is a stranger place than many people realize, and great care is needed to rule out more mundane explanations.

Henry Spencer, the Vice-President and one of the founding members of the Canadian Space Society. He had a character named after him in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel A Fire Upon the Deep.

Dear Jose,

Thanks for the red rain link! Sounds to me that something cooked the contents of the cell-like bodies. It would be fun to see if "disassembled" DNA building blocks and bits and pieces of other cellular denizens could be scraped off the insides of the "cells."

It could be that the Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower was the source of the red rain producing "visitor." That shower peaked on 27 July in 2001.

Apparently nobody knows which comet is associated with the Delta Aquarid meteor showers. Find that out and we might get a clue as to the ultimate origin of the red rain.

The "extraterrestrial life" ideas that I'm pushing (which are not

original to me) are at: Influenza 1918, A Venus Connection?

Best regards.

Bob Fritzius is a practioner of kitchen sink and shade tree physics.

The date of the peak, and the radiant coordinates (RA 22.3h Dec -5deg)
for the 2001 Southern Delta Aquarids meteor shower were provided by
the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand on their website.

The feature where we pester smart people. This week's question revolves around near future spaceflight, should it be manned or unmanned?

In case you've missed them Jose's original piece is here and Charlie's is here.

In terms of immediate priorities, there's no question that unmanned missions are far more cost-effective. At the moment Cassini is showing us yet again that every planet, moon and lump of rock in the Solar System is not only unique but has surprising features. The Mars robot explorers have shown us the same. But they've also raised questions that would be very easy to answer if only we had people there. In the longer term, we have to go ourselves.

Ken MacLeod is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera.

Ask an antarctic researcher if he/she could be cost effectively replaced by a robot without any loss of understanding of his findings. It is the cost of space transprtation which drives this sterile debate and it is that problemwe need to solve. Robots should always remain our assistants, not our substitutes.

Alan Bond is Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd [1] and associated with Project Daedalus, Blue Streak missile, HOTOL and Skylon.

Well, I agree with Carlos. Spaceflight isn't just about economics; indeed, I decry the worldview that says that all things should be reduced to the bottom line. Space travel is an ennobling adventure; it's part of our reason for being as a species. As the closing title card of Star Trek: The Motion Picture said, "The Human Adventure is Just Beginning."In fact, I sum up a lot of my thoughts on this in my own novel Hybrids, which contains this speech on this topic from a fictitious US president.

Robert J Sawyer is a rockin Canadian hard SF writer

Jose, being an astronomer by training, I'm prejudiced in favor of unmanned exploration -- the scientific return per dollar is orders of magnitude greater than you can expect from manned spaceflight.

Add to that the near certainty that George Bush's "return to the moon" pledge is just so much vapor. There's no money. There wouldn't be enough money even if he rescinded the tax cuts his wealthy pals enjoy.

Add to _that_ the fact that the shuttle has always been a dangerous juryrigged compromise vehicle, and now it's a geriatric one. Incredibly, there's no real successor on line; it will be at least eight years before one leaves a launch pad.

I'm greatly in favor of eventual manned flight, and I do believe that the ultimate destination of humanity is space. But the next step is a technology that will allow the transfer of large masses to Low Earth Orbit economically -- perhaps the space elevator; perhaps something else -- because nothing permanent is going to happen until cislunar space offers goods and services that can't be had more cheaply on Earth.

I'd like to be proven wrong.

Joe Haldeman has been shot on three different occasions. We don't know why, he seems nice enough to us.

Dear Jose: You and Charles are rehashing an argument I've watched develop over many decades.

In the 60s I couldn't figure out why they didn't land on the Moon with Apollo 1. Why wait until 11? Okay, that was naive. The machines have to be developed and tested, and the men don't get there without the machiness. What I notice is that your arguments (for the machines) are clear, precise, and rich in hindsight. Charles's arguments (for sending astronauts) are very much based on postulates and theory, and lead way around Robin Hood's barn.

And what I notice from my lifespan is that the machines, from magic telescopes to rovers and Voyagers, have shown us the universe in detail I could only imagine, and wrongly. Today's plans don't put men on Mars within my expected lifespan, and they could be cancelled at the stroke of an election.

But maybe I can hang on long enough to see Pluto. I've come to bet on the machines.

Larry Niven's Science Fiction classics delayed the loss of Jose's virginity

Robots will not have the capacity for a sense of wonder for many decades, I suspect. This aspect of human experience in space--the prospect of personal awe and discovery in the midst of infinite mystery--will propel funding far more over the long haul then robotic exploration, as marvelous as that is. People want to go and explore, not just sit and watch.

Greg Bear is a science fiction author. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict (Forge of God books), artificial universes (Eon series) and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, and Darwin's Children).

As we speak, unmanned space missions are exploring the moons of Saturn, heading to Pluto and the dark reaches of the Kuiper belt, and finding evidence that the Universe is mostly made of stuff we don't understand: dark matter and dark energy. Meanwhile, people aboard the International Space Station have a full-time job just keeping the thing repaired. Promised technological spinoffs like crystals grown in space aren't really amounting to much. The crew made news recently by throwing a space suit stuffed with rags and a radio transmitter into Earth orbit, just so ham radio fans could track it: a clear sign of diminishing returns.

Why are we even bothering with manned space flight? As a character says in Charles Stross' wonderful novel Accelerando, "NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!". This stunt, which will cost billions if we don't stop it, is the scientific equivalent of putting a goldfish bowl on top of Mount Everest.

It would be much smarter to spend the money creating cyborgs who don't breathe and can stand hard radiation; these guys will actually enjoy space travel. We can do this and we can do it quicker than you might guess. In the meantime, let's send machines into space, like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. This project, if funded, has a decent chance of seeing gravitational ripples left over from the Big Bang. It's the only known way to see through the wall of fire that cleared up when the Universe was 400,000 years old, back to the first microseconds of history. And it's cheaper than sending canned primates to Mars.

John Baez is a a mathematical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity and n-categories.

As a one-time Astronaut Applicant, and a working space scientist who

works with unmanned science missions, my opinion is that the best space policy is to embrace the power of "and" when it comes to the manned/unmanned mission question. Unfortunately, it has become customary to pit the one against the other. Right now good unmanned missions are being cancelled and delayed because the Powers that Be have decided once again that "science must bear the cost" of the manned space program. This is short sighted, and among many bad things it turns the space community upon itself. We're being divided in order to conquer us. I'm confident that President Bush's Moon/Mars initiative will go nowhere, but in the process of going nowhere it will cause a number of good science programs to be cancelled.

There *are* scientifically sound reasons to put people into space. As others have pointed out, there are also reasons which transcend science. All of these are legitimate reasons to expend our time and treasure on a progressive and reasonable manned space program. It would be nice if someone had such a thing. The current US manned space program suffers from a number of

accumulated problems which have origins back in the late 1940s, and which have become entrenched policy over the course of successive administrations.

Space scientists resent the long-standing practice of raiding the space science programs for money to support the manned space program. Space scientists rightly point out that the International Ultraviolet Explorer accomplished more, at lower cost, than the two ASTRO missions flown aboard Space Shuttle flights. This is but one example of misguided efforts to tie science missions which could be performed by unmanned spacecraft to the manned space program.

NASA is fundamentally an engineering establishment. Scientists have always been in a minority at NASA, and science has never been the main driver in NASA organizational decision making.

While I'm not entirely sure that transfering space science funding to the NSF would be the best solution, I think it would be better than the status quo. NOAA has a nice partnership with NASA whereby they get NOAA weather satellites launched and into orbit. The NSF and NASA could develop a similar partnership that would insure continuting integration, test, and launch

support from NASA while moving the mission operations and data analysis funding out of NASA's budget into the NSF where it more naturally belongs. NASA would be left with manned spaceflight and its too often neglected aeronautical research mission.

Bill Gawne works for a NASA contractor in Maryland and teaches physics and astronomy at Towson University and is a top bloke

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