Manned space flight is going nowhere; rockets are a technical dead end due to energy overheads.
There's a reason manned exploration stopped after 10 years: the only place suitable for human life beyond earth must be brought along with the travelers, and the only place close enough to reach this way is just rocks. Even if those rocks happened to be useful as raw materials for vehicles and human habituation in space, where the moon's order of magnitude lower gravity would almost seem liberating for further sojourns, but those rocks are not useful. Mars is no more hospitable nor advantageous than the moon, and an order of magnitude more unapproachable. So physics as we know it keeps us stuck on spaceship earth.
A breakthrough in physics enabling something like the Krell machines to arbitrarily rearrange matter could overcome the universe's indomitable nature. But if we had Krell machines, what would be the human purpose of exploring? Just make everything as you wish right here!
As to humanities (life's) destiny to colonize the far reaches to escape our plight on earth: if we can't it work for us here, where the preconditions and provisions were optimal for us to emerge from sea slime, what's with the hubris of exporting our pathos into the void except to indulge megalomania? In other words, humanity is already an output of a Krell machine known as Sol.
Kubrick and Clarke were truly sages to envision the next step between humanity and the star child as an orbiting Hilton hotel in the form of a Ferris wheel guarded by nuclear bombs which unexpected purpose is to gain access to a black box within which psychedelic schematics pour into humanity to enable us reach the next evolutionary level beyond Teihard de Chardin's noosphere.
But at that point matters are religious not physical.
Well it so happens the situation of humanity is already very suitable for religion.
Three Idle Words essays on space exploration:
Lunacy of Artemis
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Why Not Mars?
https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
Shape of a Mars Mission
https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...
Manned space flight is going nowhere; rockets are a technical dead end due to energy overheads.
There's a reason manned exploration stopped after 10 years: the only place suitable for human life beyond earth must be brought along with the travelers, and the only place close enough to reach this way is just rocks. Even if those rocks happened to be useful as raw materials for vehicles and human habituation in space, where the moon's order of magnitude lower gravity would almost seem liberating for further sojourns, but those rocks are not useful. Mars is no more hospitable nor advantageous than the moon, and an order of magnitude more unapproachable. So physics as we know it keeps us stuck on spaceship earth.
A breakthrough in physics enabling something like the Krell machines to arbitrarily rearrange matter could overcome the universe's indomitable nature. But if we had Krell machines, what would be the human purpose of exploring? Just make everything as you wish right here!
As to humanities (life's) destiny to colonize the far reaches to escape our plight on earth: if we can't it work for us here, where the preconditions and provisions were optimal for us to emerge from sea slime, what's with the hubris of exporting our pathos into the void except to indulge megalomania? In other words, humanity is already an output of a Krell machine known as Sol.
Kubrick and Clarke were truly sages to envision the next step between humanity and the star child as an orbiting Hilton hotel in the form of a Ferris wheel guarded by nuclear bombs which unexpected purpose is to gain access to a black box within which psychedelic schematics pour into humanity to enable us reach the next evolutionary level beyond Teihard de Chardin's noosphere.
But at that point matters are religious not physical.
Well it so happens the situation of humanity is already very suitable for religion.
Well written and I 100% agree.