Mary Roach has made a living poking fun at science for years.
She's written a number of fun and interesting books:
'Packing for Mars' is her second book I've read - 'Stiff' was also entertaining. I'd also like to recommend a TED Talk by Mary - 10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm - interesting and funny stuff.
The book opens this way: "To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconsistent. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep."
Mary spends the next 320 pages reviewing the history of US, Russian, and Japanese space programs, demonstrating in an accessible and humorous way why it's so damned difficult to put a human in space and bring that human home safely. Eating is a problem. Bathing is a huge chore. Using the bathroom can be dangerous. The body suffers too - muscle and bone mass simply dissolve away.
Logic tells me that robots are a perfectly fine way to explore the universe. Space is the most extreme of extreme environments, and it's a huge struggle of man hours and equipment to keep us alive and well. Until technology has progress for another hundred years or more, we should simply focus on robots.
My heart tells me that it would be an almost religious experience for me to look up into the sky, look at the tiny pink dot of Mars and think 'THERE ARE PEOPLE WALKING ON MARS. RIGHT FREAKING NOW!'. It would be a huge accomplishment, an amazing achievement, great this, wonderful that...
...But it would be too dangerous and a waste of resources to send a human to the surface of Mars in the next twenty or thirty years. Anything that a person can do, we can design a robot to do better. As wonderful and amazing as we are, robots are better at the grunt work, and exploring Mars will involve a lot of grunt work. We could design a 6' tall humanoid robot that can walk around, hold human tools, perform human tasks... but why would we? We're great and adaptable creatures, but we're too fragile for space travel technology as it exists now.
Just as getting to the moon in the 1960's was a series of slow and careful steps, I'm sure our journey to Mars will be much the same way. Getting astronauts to a science station which would remain in Mars orbit would remove the 20 minutes of transmission delay between Earth to Mars and allow them to use telepresence control of the robots. The orbital Mars station astronauts could even do their work in a simulator room, surrounding them with 360 degrees of monitors, allowing them to have a human's eye view of the surroundings - we would get the benefits of having 'boots on the ground' without risking an additional atmospheric decent/ascent.
One thing has been made very clear to me across all of the space travel documentaries I've watched, books I've read - artificial gravity of some sort will be a necessity for the health and well-being of the astronauts. The term 'artificial gravity' sounds like a joke, but that's thanks to Hollywood - there are a number of ways of accomplishing 'fake gravity', if just through spinning the spacecraft at the appropriate speed. It will cost more to provide gravity, but if it means our astronauts bones and muscles don't melt away to nothing during the trip, it will be worth it.
She's written a number of fun and interesting books:
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
- Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
- Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
- Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
'Packing for Mars' is her second book I've read - 'Stiff' was also entertaining. I'd also like to recommend a TED Talk by Mary - 10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm - interesting and funny stuff.
The book opens this way: "To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconsistent. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep."
Mary spends the next 320 pages reviewing the history of US, Russian, and Japanese space programs, demonstrating in an accessible and humorous way why it's so damned difficult to put a human in space and bring that human home safely. Eating is a problem. Bathing is a huge chore. Using the bathroom can be dangerous. The body suffers too - muscle and bone mass simply dissolve away.
Logic tells me that robots are a perfectly fine way to explore the universe. Space is the most extreme of extreme environments, and it's a huge struggle of man hours and equipment to keep us alive and well. Until technology has progress for another hundred years or more, we should simply focus on robots.
My heart tells me that it would be an almost religious experience for me to look up into the sky, look at the tiny pink dot of Mars and think 'THERE ARE PEOPLE WALKING ON MARS. RIGHT FREAKING NOW!'. It would be a huge accomplishment, an amazing achievement, great this, wonderful that...
...But it would be too dangerous and a waste of resources to send a human to the surface of Mars in the next twenty or thirty years. Anything that a person can do, we can design a robot to do better. As wonderful and amazing as we are, robots are better at the grunt work, and exploring Mars will involve a lot of grunt work. We could design a 6' tall humanoid robot that can walk around, hold human tools, perform human tasks... but why would we? We're great and adaptable creatures, but we're too fragile for space travel technology as it exists now.
Just as getting to the moon in the 1960's was a series of slow and careful steps, I'm sure our journey to Mars will be much the same way. Getting astronauts to a science station which would remain in Mars orbit would remove the 20 minutes of transmission delay between Earth to Mars and allow them to use telepresence control of the robots. The orbital Mars station astronauts could even do their work in a simulator room, surrounding them with 360 degrees of monitors, allowing them to have a human's eye view of the surroundings - we would get the benefits of having 'boots on the ground' without risking an additional atmospheric decent/ascent.
One thing has been made very clear to me across all of the space travel documentaries I've watched, books I've read - artificial gravity of some sort will be a necessity for the health and well-being of the astronauts. The term 'artificial gravity' sounds like a joke, but that's thanks to Hollywood - there are a number of ways of accomplishing 'fake gravity', if just through spinning the spacecraft at the appropriate speed. It will cost more to provide gravity, but if it means our astronauts bones and muscles don't melt away to nothing during the trip, it will be worth it.
Soon you will be posting your reviews on our book blog.
ReplyDeleteWhat's up with cutting the cover into two incomplete pieces?