Todays interesting take: ...History suggests that if anything of value is involved, contacts between distant societies are fraught. Think of Spain and the Aztecs. Cortés could have traded peacefully for Aztec gold and silver, but that would have involved the expense of ferrying over goods from Spain for barter. Conquest was more attractive (economically, if not morally), and greatly abetted by an epidemic of smallpox introduced to the Aztecs by the Spaniards. Stuck at the end of a trillion-mile supply chain, voyagers from Earth might be less likely to replicate the triumph of Cortés than the fates of Thomas Drummond and William Paterson. The two men were leaders of Scotland’s biggest mission to the Americas: the attempt to implant some 2,500 highlanders in Panama starting in 1698. A grandiose effort for a poor country, the expedition sucked up as much as half of the nation’s available investment capital. It was that rarest of events, an unmitigated disaster. The locals in Panama weren’t interested in trade. Unable to grow food in the unfamiliar ecosystem and beset by diseases they had no experience with, the Scots died by the hundreds. Drummond vanished; Paterson lost his wife. As the few survivors limped back to Edinburgh in 1700, Scotland’s economy collapsed, forcing it to merge with England. Is interstellar travel too risky and economically irrational ever to happen? Turn again to Zheng He. His voyages were sponsored by the brutally ambitious emperor, who ignored his flunkies’ complaints about the cost. Key to most great leaps is at least one overconfident investor; in 15th-century Asia, the emperor played that role. Our society, vastly richer than early-modern China, has no lack of would-be successors. Look at the billionaires jumping into commercial spaceflight: Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, Naveen Jain with Moon Express, Elon Musk with SpaceX. Eventually humankind will push into space no matter what the expected cost-benefit ratio. Those first adventurers will have one advantage over their early-modern predecessors. Future starfarers will know about Zheng, Cortés, Drummond, and Paterson. They will understand that the outbound voyage, no matter how complicated and expensive, is only the beginning. wired/2014/11/future-of-space-exploration/
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 12:32:06 +0000
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