Why are people not interested in space, or dont even care?

One last one before i go to bed.

space.com has 368 thousand likes.

That is 368 thousand people who actually like that website, which means they would have to be interested in space research and development.

And that is only people who have actually bothered to click like on that page.

I haven't yet and i have been visiting that site for years now.

I think there has to be way more interest in this endeouvour of ours. And if there is we might have ourselves a crowd to put to work.

All we need to figure out is how.

I pretty much crash landed on this website.

still so impatient

Ok I read the about section, again. I think last time I was too excited to really digest what is said in there.

So this place is already trying to get a "crowd" involved in the space industry.

Questions:
Do you have any indicators of growth? And where could I have a look at your long term[flash=][/flash] statistics of these indicators in one spot all digested and ready to ponder about?
Do you have some sort of plan on the long term, and where could I check that out?

I will search around but sometimes its easier to ask than look.

Impatience and lazyness dont mix well.

How much of the development of this site is open source?

And if billions of dollars came this way, how much of it would end up at the research facilities?
If we got crowd funding up and running once we have a crowd here.


I tried to do a topic about this kind of stuff, but I was told its already around, could somebody direct me the right way?

Ok i found the small widget at the bottom of the forum, which is quite informative with people online, people registered etc...

Do you have a long term database of that sort of information?

I want to dive into the data, i am curious why this place hasn't gone to orbit yet.

I want to see if it is growing or stagnant, i want to try and figure out the "science" behind growing a massive scale online collaborative project that would involve millions or hundreds of millions of people on a constant basis, while doing useful and important work for the space industry.

And i want it all now. /impatience at work right here...

I don't think that it is a case that people don't really care or are not interested. For the majority of people what is above there heads is of no importance and to busy with their head down getting on with their lives. Apart from satellites that send data to us and about us from almost everything we do there is nothing more to concern us into action - and most don't even think about that. Until the space economy is producing work that most people can choose to undertake it will still be a pet project of humanity.

There are many people interested in space and astronomy and whenever something that is actually interesting happens it is all over the news and suddenly it is a big deal. Still after the event has passed the people that aren't that interested go back to their jobs and the dreamers carry on dreaming. At least the dreamers carry on supporting the ideas that are hard to accomplish and therefore worthwhile.

I have read much online in comments about space projects and up and coming ideas - such as asteroid mining for example. There are really two kinds of people, those that think that anything to do with space is a waste of time and money with resources that can be better spent fixing the world. The others are all for it and would love to be behind the project and see it done regardless of the cost. So who's right?

It's a false dichotomy. Why should we have to choose between exploring space or fixing up our planet, limiting our population, and work on prosperity for everyone? We can easily do both. The only issue is that neither are currently profitable for those with wealth and power, and only a few of them are visionary enough to go do it anyway.

This is an issue I've struggled to understand all my life. As a young child I developed what I thought was a very natural and common interest in space exploration. But as I grew older I realized most people either never had the same interest or quickly lost it.

As an adult I began to see a self-reinforcing cycle at work in the space exploration malaise. As public interest wanes there is less funding available - as the funding decreases there is less exploration - as exploration declines so does public interest. And so on.

I don't claim to have any special insight into the solution other than to say that we all have roles to play in keeping space exploration and development alive. I was very encouraged when I found this website and discovered a thriving community of people with similar interests to my own. You are all helping to keep the dream alive.

Here's one small way that I've tried to contribute...
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPYYk5wQq2c

...this was a part of my Graphic Communications Senior Project at MSUM, a promotional video for a fictional, near-future space tourism company. Yes, it's all made up, but I put a lot of time into it and strove to make it believable. In the end I was able to reach a couple of hundred classmates, friends and professors with what I hope is an enthusiastic and positive vision for the future.

Thanks again to all of you for building a community here that encourages people to literally reach for the stars. I look forward to getting to know you better and working together to encourage and revitalize space exploration... and just have some fun conversation too.

FutureNow - I respect the amount of hard work you have put into this visualisation. I think the space industry could do with more creatives able to render visually ideas that others can relate to. Keep the inspiration going!

But it's kind of telling that your "blooper reel" (which is funny BTW) has more views than the real one.

I'll take that as a compliment. Sometimes humor can be more powerful in reaching people than a serious lecture or presentation.

I appreciated the recent comment by a NASA representative to the effect that our current best line of defense against an asteroid or comet was "prayer." Seriously, for decades nobody seemed terribly concerned despite numerous warnings, and then suddenly there's a moderately destructive meteor event coinciding with a widely publicized near miss and the whole world wants to know how we plan to protect ourselves. Maybe it's good to poke a little fun at the people on this issue.

I'm working on a video response to that as well, but so far I just have a couple of 15 to 20 second short clips. These were done with footage I shot with my smart phone and doctored in Adobe AfterEffects.
Fargo Metoor.
Fargo Meteor with impact.

I realize that a lot of people just see these ideas as entertainment or fantasy, but there is a genuine threat out there, and with two significant events involving serious human injuries and extensive damage in about 100 years... let's just say I imagine that the people of Russia are taking this discussion seriously.

Maybe we should surround the Earth with a huge ring of gas, so that it will slow down and burn up most asteroids as they come in. Or, we could just nuke the things.

My dear Tovarich Lourens, there is no "we". There are those who create more wealth and resources, etc., and there are those that create less. And there is no one more powerful than the government, which has the right to pass laws and throw you in jail if you break those laws, and which has the right to wage war on other nations.

The problem with space is that there is no resources there that make it profitable to go there. So going to space has to be done on personal initiative, as opposed to trying to produce resources. There is no problem with this - there are more than enough wealth producers who are interested in space, and would and are spending their time and wealth to go to space. But if taxes weren't as high as they are, there would be far more wealth available to be spent on both space and charity to those who need.

Hmm, interesting idea. I wonder if anybody has ever done a cost analysis on something like th... HEY! WAIT A MINUTE!

there are several key issues here.

first off i think people are interested in space and i think space is interesting.

the challenge is to step into the zone of interest instead of the valley of fnord.

I think there is a huge potential for a group like this one to take off and capture the interest of the public, but not how you play the game right now.

i'd love to discuss it as a problem to solve rather than be resigned to it - ie the question should be;
"how can we interest people in space in the same way that we are interested in space?"

the answer to that is open source collaboration.

its a signal to noise ratio problem, and that problem solves by upping the signal and stepping past the noise. All the chit chat isn't going to bring people in. Pics and images and 100 sketchup models will.

I dunno you guys i stopped in hoping to reach out and touch some folks and i'm realizing now this forum is half dead, none of my posts have been posted yet, i think most people waiting for 3 days for a response man their attention span and interest just died-

So you stopped tending the forum, you gave up on it in a sense.. and thats sad.

maybe we should really connect strongly and i can lead you out of the wilderness.

if i don't ever show back up here or it takes you know a month for the admin to actually post my posts...

i will have given up by then...

but if you want to really work and solve this problem together and make something happen here, my email is prometheuspan@hotmail.com

just in case you know.. the lag on a response goes into weeks or months like it looks like it may...

Don't think of it as lack of interest or apathy. Think of it as practice for trying to converse with people who are on a ship that is half way to Alpha Centari.

Has anyone here played Kerbal Space Program?

As far as I am concerned, that video game has done wonders for the space community. I admit, probably why I have signed up to this website.

I never understood orbital mechanics until I had played that game. I never understood the sheer difficulty in something simple such as rendezvous with another space ship already in orbit. I never understood periapsis and apoapsis. I now understand staging in launches. I now understand terms like DeltaV and Specific Impulse. I could ramble on.

Even better, the game let me mod it to improve on physics. Eg FAR. I now understand the sheer magnitude of travelling to the moon. Even designing a "space plane" such as the shuttle. You develop an appreciation for centre of thrust, centre of mass, centre of drag. You start learning about how altitude effects the flight of a plane. You start to see patterns in real life craft such as why the concord flies so well at high speed and high altitude.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? I think companies like Armadillo Aerospace came too soon. I think Elon Musk has worked out how to make space technology cool again. I even hear that NASA use KSP to train new employees. Anyway, that's my 2c.