I am trying to get a team together in participate in NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program (THE Vomit Comet Contest). I announced this program on Columbia’s Class of 2013 home page and I got a sizeable reaction. This was about a month before school started. We had a team and we only did a little informal brain storming. Then school started, we all had to go through culture shock and adapt to college life, another 2 weeks lost. Only then did we start having team meetings. The next 2 weeks where fairly easy in terms of the workload. The first meeting brought 3 people. The third saw 2 and now almost everyone is dealing with a never ending hose of exams. Now we have 20 days to do everything for the project. We have to do this during midterms and presentations and deadlines and club meetings of all sorts.
Needless to say, we are doomed. There is a low chance of us making the deadline.
Doomed is to put it lightly actually, we were doomed before, but now our experiment idea was shown to be flawed. We are back at square one.
How does this apply to space habitation?
We are in a time period similar the the time period my team was in before college. Humanity has a large amount of resources (material, financial and chrono-resources) available. But, if we have a huge change in our environment, whether environmental or social, humanity will be unproductive while it adapts. It would be best to get space habitation done before this, but we still have a short time where everything might be easy.
But, if we wait until the last moments we will see nations peel off any multi-national space habitation effort are they pour resources into solving problems at home. Nations are most willing to do something when there isn’t much going on; to put resourcing into a huge project when they do not have deadlines to meet. We missed a huge opportunity by waiting until this recession to settle space and we are still waiting.
The number of problems humanity faces is growing and the pre-existing problems are getting worse be the way. Do you really think we can make any deadline for space habitation?
Reactions
-Is there any hope for space habitation at the last minute?
In Case You Skimmed
-The longer we wait on space habitation, the more busy the people who are working on space habitation become; the more life gets in the way of space habitation.
