In the recent years the more I look into the history of space exploration the more I think that if the "Space Race" continued we would at least see developments in food production.
There was a time where I was obsessed with "Organic Food" but if given the choice between instant noodles and lab grown meat and GMO and RNA crops from "Indoor Farms" I would choose the latter every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnLRl08L1XE
What if this stayed at a high level?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/NASA-Budget-Federal.svg
Would human missions to a Moon base throughout the 70s and Human missions to a Mars base in the 80s-2010s have accelerated the development of "Indoor Farming"?
Would those missions have accelerated the development of RNA and GMO crops?
Would those missions have sped up the development of "Lab Grown Meat"?
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2022/06/02/kimbal-christiana-musk-life-itself-wellness.cnn
Not just those technologies but nuclear power on the Moon?
And would we see something like this earlier if missions to the Moon and Mars had improved nuclear power?
Space based solar power?
Solid state batteries?
Electric semis?
https://electrek.co/2022/12/02/watch-tesla-semi-500-mile-trip-bill-gates-said-wasnt-possible/
Laser communications?
Supersonic flight without sonic booms?
Massive nuclear powered or even fusion powered spaceships flying hundreds of people to settlements on the Moon, Mars, and asteroid belt?
Asteroid defense and mining?
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-asteroids-orbit-shape-changed-after-dart-impact/
Electric aviation?
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/x-57-maxwell/
We still seem far away from deploying those technologies en-masse which makes me believe it is not yet to late to embark on a "Second Space Race".
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/20/why-there-is-a-new-global-race-to-the-moon-.html
I dream of a future where American public school students and college students have access to a much wider variety of cuisines including foreign cuisines thanks to food production technology developed in the next 10-50 years.
I dream of a future where college students only eat instant noodles if they want to!
I wish society would dream again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc
If this report is right then it doesn't have to be as expensive as it is.
https://www.space.com/30008-moon-colony-cost-commercial-space-report.html
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-moon-program-93-billion-2025
https://reason.org/commentary/nasa-should-consider-switching-to-spacex-starship-for-future-missions/
If we lived in an aspirational and science literate society we would have cancelled the "Space Launch System" aka "Senate Launch System" a long time ago.
How much different would our world be if the "Space Race" never ended?
by inspace
6 Comments
American public schools will give their students access to the finest ultra processed foods as long as they are cheap
If the space race never ended NASA would probably have a small research outpost on Mars by now but I doubt the world would be significantly different. For food production minimizing cost and maximizing profit will always be the goal, I don’t see why we would suddenly be eating synthetic meat.
NASA is a science agency so their mission it not to colonize any part of the solar system or to mine asteroids, why would there be “spaceships flying hundreds of people”? That would only be done by commercial companies if they can make profit that way but I don’t see how they could. A constellation like Starlink is profitable, a settlement on Mars will not be and asteroid mining probably won’t be either.
Watch For All Mankind on Apple TV. I reckon it was a pretty good projection on where we would be.
I have never seen a shower thought this long or with this many links.
World War 3? The space race was tied to the cold war and I don’t think an extra 30 years of nuclear tensions bring about anything positive. We’ve made everything bad enough picking the Middle East as the new bad guys and they don’t have nuclear weapons.
For 10 years the US put 10% of GDP into space. That’s not 10% of tax revenue, that’s 10% of every dollar earned by everyone in the country. That’s not sustainable.
We did it to prove to the Russkis that we could drop a nuke on thousands of targets at the same time, on short notice.
Photos of the big blue marble, and low-G golf, and bringing back moon rocks was all great for PR and fun cheerleading, but it was not the point. You can tell, because we stopped.