New Mars Forums

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,431

How do we get youth interested in space plus

Good question as to do we get have those with chance crossing to be "interested in considering how talent can be attracted to support development of your idea."

One point I would like to make is that the talent needed for a project like this is available in massive numbers of trained and experienced practitioners who earned enough while working to live long lives away from the daily grind.

In addition, there are (I am confident) thousands of young people with plenty of energy to learn, and not yet bogged down by the demands of a full time job.

It would be stupendous waste of all that talent and experience to fail to enlist at least ** some ** of it on behalf of an innovative idea such as you have offered.

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,431

Re: How do we get youth interested in space plus

tahanson43206,

I likewise think that a lot of brainpower is being wasted on trivial pursuits that are unlikely to lead humanity to a better future.  I'm primarily fighting against short-sighted and inward-focused thinking that hasn't generated better outcomes thus far.  We seem to have a growing number of people who exhibit an unhealthy fascination with the otherwise meaningless superficial physical characteristics of other people and far too many plain old bad ideas that simply don't work whenever humans are involved.  Right now we're stuck in a funk that isn't helping anyone and we need to break free of that so everyone can get back to living life and advancing our collective human cause.

We need to get off this planet so we can go forth and explore the unimaginably large universe we actually live in.  There seems to be this objectively wrong idea that says you need to be or do "X" in order to contribute.  It's funny how Elon Musk doesn't believe that and has accomplished so much without caring that he didn't "know how" when he started.  Ultimately, we all learn by doing.  Theory is good to know, but then there's actual practice.  Medicine is actually called "a practice", because at least the doctors who came up with the term weren't so foolish as to believe that they actually understood everything that they were doing.  The first people to engineer rocket engines didn't know a damn thing about rocket engines and sure, they made lots of mistakes along the way, but now we have reliable rocket engines as a result of them not believing that they had to know all the answers ahead of time.  I'm not sure where the idea came from, but from talking to young people these days, that "I have to know everything about some task before I even try" idea seems to be very pervasive and it's disabling them.  Maybe they have so much information now, yet not a clue as to what good it is to them, that they don't understand how to use their imaginations and basic logic.  That was something I never thought would be a problem.  Getting people to think about how to solve complex problems is like pulling teeth, but they still wonder why nobody wants to pay them what they think they're worth.  We've never built interplanetary spaceships before, either, yet that seems like a poor excuse to not even try.  Until we can get "the professionals" involved (that was only a joke, there aren't any), some amateur attempts will simply have to suffice.

I agree that landing is not a high priority, but it might be necessary from time to time (hopefully infrequently), which is why it should still be a fully functional ground-to-orbit machine.  We presently lack ship yards in space or highly efficient orbital class launch propulsion systems, which is why I was thinking that the gutted hull would be launched first and then fitted out in orbit using assemblies that bolt-up to mounting brackets.

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,431

Re: How do we get youth interested in space plus

This seems like a large outreach program to the educational institutions to get bulliten board and more information out there about Mars Society, plausible jobs there in and for the general discussion groups which are needed to not only pool talent but ideas as well.