Thought Experiments in Outer Space

Here's a free book, produced right here in Phoenix, at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. It's a selection of stories and essays and interviews titled Visions, Ventures, and Escape Velocities, about the future of space exploration.

Especially check out this chapter: "The Luxury Problem: Space Exploration in the “Emergency Century”, an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, sci-fi author. Robinson says, and repeats, some very interesting facts and ideas about space travel and habitation.

"I think it would help to think of Mars as being like Antarctica, rather than like the “New World.” It would help focus our goals and the steps needed to achieve them. We need to send robotic landers with most of a base camp for humans landed in one area and ready to be activated and inhabited. We need to think of the people going there as scientists making a visit to a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as the British would call it. That they will study Mars and then return home, like astronauts to the Moon, but gone for five years rather than a month.   This would take the magical thinking out of the process and reduce it to a set of achievable steps, with goals that are interesting and even spectacular, but not game-changing for civilization. There’s too much fantasy projection onto Mars and it obscures the project as it really exists. My work may have contributed to that, but I think a careful reading of my books will show they were always trying to make the case that Mars is no cure for Earth’s ills, just a kind of mirror, or an interesting experiment, even if a thought experiment only."

You can get the book in several different formats...