Chapter 8 Chapter 3 Stepping Out of the Territory of the Earth

Although the space program is expensive, it will inevitably cost trillions of dollars to go to other planets and star systems in the future.However, human prejudice and ignorance are the biggest obstacles for human beings to step out of the earth. This phrase developed countries seems rather arrogant, it seems to imply that the most advanced countries in the world have reached the end of their possible development, and they have nothing more to learn.This is not true, people of all ages tend to imagine that they have reached the pinnacle of human achievement, that their descendants will prove these ancestors wrong by their own achievements but they themselves often fall into the same nest.We have made mistakes ourselves, and our children and grandchildren will laugh at this belief just as much as we laughed at the Victorians since the Industrial Revolution a century and a half ago and we believe we have now reached the apogee of technological capability.

In fact, is it possible for technology to reach its limits?We can't definitively answer that question—no one can, but perhaps people of the past, looking to their technological future, saw it with a more conservative perspective than our own.From earlier times, as if any technological advance had been met with the contrary opinion that it was impossible, author Clarke, arguably the most visionary philosopher of science of our time, stated in his first law Zhong Zeng said: When a young scientist tells you something is impossible, he is wrong, and experts will also mess up the difficult situation. Clark went on to explain: But the lack of imagination and Insight, the layman's view, is sometimes closer to the truth.

Before Napoleon was about to invade England from his stronghold at Boulogne, a disheveled American engineer named Fulton came up to him and explained how to defeat the blockading British fleet. What, man, the emperor was stunned. Say minutes later, you're going to build a ship to sail against the wind, and propel it with fire below her decks?Please forgive me, I don't have time for this nonsense.If he had listened, he might have conquered England, the primitive steamship, as Fulton had foreseen it, which appeared shortly after Napoleon's death.But experts are so diminutive about their future that humans might expect to walk on the moon after crossing the Atlantic in such a steamship.A distinguished professor Dionysius.Radnor said so.

Soldiers often say something is impossible.One reason why the Roman Empire fell was that her leaders refused to take an interest in science.Their attitude is typified by Frontenius, a military engineer in Vespa's time, who wrote: I will be ignorant of all new tricks and new engines for war, whose inventions have reached their limit, I don't see much hope for the future.Soldiers of all ages have often seen a situation with no hope of improvement, that was their mantra, and in World War I, millions were killed by gunfire because no one had studied Japan in 1904-05 The Russo-Russian War made the same events happen again in our time.President Eisenhower, being a general himself, did not understand the significance of the launch of the Soviet Russian spacecraft Sputnik 1 in 1957. The Russians just put a small ball in the air, he told the news crew. : This does not cause tension at all.

Commoners are similarly ignored.The introduction of railroads to people was as hotly debated as the case of supersonic airplanes. A noteworthy letter was in 1829, New York Governor Martin.Fan.Bren wrote to President Jackson: As Your Excellency knows, Mr. President, railroad freight travels at an astonishing speed of fifteen miles an hour, is propelled by engines, is dangerous to the life and limb of passengers, and their roads through the country cause barn fires, Burn domestic animals, startle women and children, this omnipotent thing must not be allowed to do what it wants, or people will travel with neck-breaking speed.

This kind of alarm has also appeared frequently in history. The astronomer Ptolemy said in the second century AD that no one could pass the equator because the direct rays of the sun would boil the oceans and set wooden ships on fire.It took Europeans twelve centuries until the lovely voyage organized by the Portuguese navigator Prince Henry proved that Ptolemy was a braggadocio.Airplanes have also long been considered impossible, involving the absolute impossibility of heavier-than-air mechanical flight, as the astronomer Simon G.Newcomb wrote in 1903: Flying in the air is a problem that man has never overcome.

A few months later, Orwell.Wright made his first flight in a powered airplane at Kitty Heck, North Carolina.This time it was not published, and newspaper editors refused to print what they called the ridiculous story.A few weeks later, when Orwell made another successful flight, it was authoritatively declared that no plane could carry the weight of a single passenger.So Orwell asked his brother Webb to be a passenger on the next flight. Well, humans can fly short distances; but that's not much use for anyone.The engineer Nuo Chang wrote a famous paper on the two-man flight of the Wright brothers, which appeared in Popular Science Monthly, saying: "The machinery can even carry mail in a special way, he writes, but the useful payload is very small." Small, this machine will fly faster, they can be used for sports, but it is impossible to do commercial transportation.Eleven years later, in January 1914, the first air passenger service between the two Florida cities began.Well, this thing can take passengers, but let's see that just before the Great War, the astronomer Peek would fight some stupid ideas. The psychology of ordinary people, he wrote, often depicted huge flying machines. , flying countless passengers across the Atlantic, it seems safe to say that the concept is bound to take hold, even if a machine can carry one or two passengers across the Atlantic, the capitalists who own private boats will need to be banned.Today, millions of passengers fly across the Atlantic every year at 600 miles per hour, a speed nearly double that of a supersonic jet.Afterwards it was commented that the limit of all airplanes was 660 miles per hour, which is the highest speed of sound. The learned professors wrote some equations to prove that it was impossible to exceed this speed. However, in 1947, Captain Yeh of the US Air Force G was flying his rocket plane, Charming Grini, at six hundred and seventy miles an hour.

Plans for space travel have also been ridiculed.In 1920, residents of Worcester, Massachusetts, raised the alarm about Gorda's noisy experiment in which he was trying to launch a small rocket that fell into range of a neighbor's property.However, America's most successful achievement in space is Gedda, the inventor of liquid-fuel rockets.He believed that a rocket could fly through the vacuum of space and reach the moon in a day, but was attacked by the New York Times: He does not seem to have a high school education.This is from a contemptuous editor, and the article completely ignores Newton's third law, arguing that Gorda's moon rocket would need something to react in a vacuum.Forty-nine years later, in the early morning hours of 1969, when Armstrong and his colleagues left Cape Kennedy for the moon, the New York Times respectfully published a formal apology to the late Gorda Apologies sir.In the UK, in the 1930s, members of the newly established British Interstellar Association did a lot of theoretical foundational work needed to fly to the moon, and they did nothing except scold scientific achievements.One of them said: I'm amazed at the half-baked logic used to attack the concept of spaceflight, even scientists think we're talking nonsense.An interesting miracle happened. The British scientist Picton declared in 1926:

This stupid concept of shooting to the moon is a ridiculous example. To escape the gravity of the earth, a rocket with a velocity of seven miles per second is required. The heat energy of this velocity is 15,180 calories. Therefore, the situation says It is impossible to come. In the past hundred years, there have been countless examples of scientific predictions, and there are far more stupid ones than this one.In 1899, the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office asked President McKinley to abolish the patent office because everything that can be invented has been invented.Sir Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom in 1932, but declared his discovery to be of little practical use.Critics ridiculed Marconi for saying that radio messages could cross the Atlantic, and the public thought that to do so he would have to have a radio reflector the size of the North American continent.When Bell completed the application of the telephone in 1876, Sir Price, the chief engineer of the British Post Office, after being asked about his impressions, he gave a good answer: No, sir, Americans need a telephone but we do not, We have enough messengers.The great physicist Kervin did not accept evolution: everything we find shows that Darwin's philosophy is useless.

I didn't list all the anecdotes, but simply wrote about the ridicule received by some of those who made a great contribution to our knowledge and civilization, but they denied the big error of prediction, proved Clark's law, and hinted at the future of mankind direction.Edwards, in his 1958 lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society, argued that human progress could be measured by a velocity index, according to which the improvement in human technology could be measured by the distance a person could travel in a twelve-hour day to measure.For thousands of years, this meant that a person could walk twenty miles a day (this is the average).Thousands of years before BC, a tame horse traveled an average of forty miles in twelve hours.The industrial revolution improved the roads and the stagecoach system, allowing a healthy horse to travel seventy-six miles an hour.Thereafter the railroad can be extended to 550 miles.Airplanes have made an astonishing improvement. In 1940, they could travel no more than 1,250 miles in one day, which is shorter than London to Athens, or New York to Houston.Twenty years later, jet engines more than quadrupled to 5,500 miles.So in 1960 it was possible to travel between London and Johannesburg, or New York and Beirut, in a single day.The supersonic planes of the mid-1970s allowed us to travel 10,000 miles in a day, from London to Canberra, or from New York to Sydney.This speed is far faster than a stagecoach or a railroad, but it is still too small compared to an orbiting space station.In a low orbit of 300 miles, these people can fly 240,000 miles in twelve hours, and they can see nine sunset miles.On the spacecraft heading for Mars, its speed is at least 50,000 miles per hour, which can enable the astronauts to fly 600,000 miles within 12 hours.It's not fun, human exploration of Mars seems to be within reach of this century, probably before 1990.The United States decided in 1971 to build a useful inter-Earth-orbit launch system (thus reducing launch costs by 87 percent) and to rendezvous with Soviet Russia in orbit so that the two countries could finally unite Possibility of heading to inner planets increased.I'm predicting that all of these huge expenses, compared to the next thousand years of space development, are about the same ratio as the stagecoach's funding to the 25 billion Helios project.

How can we afford to do something like this?The United States, the wealthiest country in the world, with a gross national product of $1 trillion in the 1970-71 fiscal year, we suspect will be happily engaged in the space program in a few hundred years.Only a lunatic country would spend all of its annual gross national product, or most of it, on an enterprise of unknown value.But the gross national product is not a constant. The annual growth rate of the U.S. economy is about 5%. Assuming that the long-term average is 3%, we can make a table showing that the annual growth rate is 3%. In 23 years will be doubled, as shown in the table below: U.S. Gross National Product (per billion dollars) 1971 thousand 1980 1300 1990 1750 Two thousand three hundred and sixty two thousand five hundred one thousand three hundred and thirty two thousand one hundred fourty five thousand two hundred forty-five two hundred and fifty ninety-eight thousand one hundred and seventy-three two hundred and sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight This is different from the way environmentalists extrapolate and warn that by the year 2500, the world's population will reach 126 trillion.A certain principle of exponential growth is useful when applied to the resources of the country and the planet, but it is different when applied to the growth rate of the population, for reasons explained above.Regardless of these assets, it can be argued that in the coming century many countries will grow richer as their technology grows.We need only go back a few centuries and see the great advances made at that time, and imagine that in the time of King George III, we knew how to make airplanes that could fly, and some fanatic would want to build giant jets and squadrons; Sending troops and artillery to the American battlefields, but the British government objected to the plan for only one reason: the brigade would cost nine or ten times the country's GNP.Today, such brigades have been established, which only account for a small part of a country's gross national product, and such large enterprises are still flourishing with huge funds. In 1968, Dieson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton pointed out this point vividly in a speech on the possibility of building a spacecraft to fly on planets outside the solar system. He believed that building a manned interstellar spacecraft, would cost $100 billion in 1968 currency: When our gross national product was only low, no one would have thought of building such a spaceship.But we think of a certain century, if the economic growth of human beings keeps at 4% per year, then in about 200 years, the gross national product will reach 1,000 times.When the gross national product reaches that stage, building a 100 billion spaceship is the same as building a 100 million spaceship today.Therefore, I predict that 200 years from now, barring major changes, the first interstellar flight will begin. The last sentence can be rewritten as: If there is a big change, then interstellar flight will be delayed until four hundred years later.Therefore, we can see that there will be infinite times of great changes in the time scale of Hertz-Plann and Russell's charts.I call this book 10,000 years in the future, and I think certain events will happen in 2100 and 2500, but the dates are not important, although big changes will prevent the prediction of things in the next 10,000 years, If we accept the three assumptions, then there is a greater than 99% probability that it will happen at any time.In six billion years, almost everything that could have happened has happened.I made three assumptions, and three different hypothetical disasters may lead to the end of human beings: 1. There is no substantial change in the radiation of the sun. 2. The solar system will be invaded by hostile or nosy alien technologies. 3. There is no fundamental change in human nature, that is, people's responses to stimuli remain the same. Hypothesis one is what worries me the most, although the 1913 diagram is well conceived, it's still a bit sketchy, any single planet, like the sun, will have some sort of error, maybe one in millions , but there will be, a more serious danger, that of malicious intervention, blowing up the sun and destroying all life on earth is only one act, it will be a spectacle, but no one will live to see it. Astronomers Shagang and Shelovsky believe that in the distant future there must be a powerful civilization capable of blowing up planets with a super laser exceeding ten megawatts.If every square centimeter of the sun's surface can be bombarded with 10 billion ergs of gamma rays per second, a chain reaction can be produced, causing the entire sun to vibrate and explode, obliterating the earth.However, we hope that the interstellar rulers at that time would avoid this kind of revenge. The structure of the laser gun that destroys the sun is difficult to keep secret in any era. disturbed. As for Hypothesis 2, we have no data to estimate. Some writers will try to prove that the earth was visited by aliens in the distant past, but we lack actual evidence. By now, I am often prepared to believe in the existence of flying saucers, but it is difficult to understand Why does a race fly more than ten trillion miles into the earth, just to warn the pilots, without any other purpose?The chances of the second hypothesis are very low. The third assumption seems to be stronger than the first two. We seem to be unable to predict this, but human nature does not change in basic ways. The Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs are far less positive than we have data. As we know less than posterity but the general laws of psychology have been the same since the beginning of man. Such a statement would seem to call for some questions to be asked.What are the general laws of psychology that we talk about so easily?How does the person respond to certain situations in the given environment?We have only the most vague claims, and despite countless books and research papers on the psychology of crowds and individuals, we still have no picture of the average human being, genetic factors influence our behavior and intelligence far more strongly than environment, Humans differ in behavior and thought more complex than any known species, but any intelligent Pharaonic Egyptian can tell us these things simply, and the more we progress on complex events The more ignorant you are, the nature of people remains unchanged, but any person's character can be made up of vague adjectives. What would happen if all three of my assumptions were true?Contrary to the opinion of the Club of Rome, there is no limit to growth.There is no reason why the wealth of the earth, or of the industrialized nations, should not continue to increase from the present average of three to five per cent a year.Even if the earth's resources will have a limit one day, the resources of those solar systems and big galaxies are endless.The report of the Club of Rome mentions a number of industrial crises which create new problems of economic growth.Some politicians also accept the idea that there are limits to growth, but they believe that such limits will only occur in the distant future.And when that distant future arrives, we may say that the statesmen of that time will come to the same conclusion, and they will likewise share the views of our time. Apart from economic depression, man will move his economic activities into space.When predicting that the next century will see an astonishing increase in human space activity, I'm going to avoid Dyson's hissing about space.Using the technological achievements of the past ten years to deduce the situation of the American flag flying on alien planets in the next century, let us go back to the growth of the cosmic civilization of Kardashiv.In the first chapter, Kardashiv saw that our current way of life is the first type of civilization, and we have only developed the resources of one planet.When we have mastered the resources of the entire solar system, we will enter the second type of civilization. At that time, we will use our industrial technology to decompose the entire planet and arrange them in a more suitable orbit.If such a civilization can be produced, it will be ten billion times richer than it is today.This enormous increase in wealth may seem amusing, but I will prove that it is not.Some economists believe that we will one day reach 5 percent annual growth, which seems quite optimistic. Let's assume a more reasonable 3 percent.A growth rate of 3% means that it doubles every 23 years. If it is 3% every year, then our civilization will be 10 billion times richer every 730 years, although from time to time Recessions and periodic depressions will undoubtedly bring about this level of wealth within a millennium, and mankind will surely become tens of millions of times richer in the next century than it is now, and the day of ten billion will come. arrived. From the first type of civilization to the second type of civilization, since the first artificial satellite was launched in 1957, it has begun to change.After Sputnik 1, there were hundreds of satellites of increasing size and complexity.Human beings have orbited the earth countless times, large rockets have visited neighboring planets, an unmanned spaceship has flown out of the solar system to outer planets, twelve men have walked on the moon, In 1973, weightless tests of the Aerolab orbit were underway, and perhaps most significantly, the space rendezvous between the United States and the Soviet Union. Disregarding any reductions in the space budget, it is safe to assume that the trend toward increased space exploration and space development will increase exponentially over the next millennium.The myriad of celestial bodies have been unfolded before our eyes, and the moon is the easiest to reach and develop.The Helios mission to the moon has been aborted, but after twenty years, humans will still return to the moon.This view was well expressed by Sir Shackleton, president of the Royal Geographical Society, a distinguished explorer and scholar, when he returned to Earth in 1972, the last Helios mission, when he said: If the history of exploration has any meaning, it means that man has discovered new territories, to which he keeps returning, and eventually establishes a permanent base there.I'm sure the same thing will happen to the Moon in a few decades.Humans will go back to the moon because it's a place, because the challenges of detection are enormous, and because it's of immense scientific interest.Ever since it was first climbed in 1953, people have returned to Mount Everest time and time again, but the scientific results obtained from it are far less than those from the moon. Shackleton's vision came close to prophesying that not only would this nearest world provide a perfect laboratory for the study of the universe, but it would also be a ready-made space station with a surface as large as Africa, allowing us to study Consider its possible future use.