Colonization Exploration Generic - ENDI 2011
Negative
*** The DA *** 2
1NC – Space Exploration DA 2
Uniqueness – No Exploration Now 5
Uniqueness – No Contact Now 6
Generic Links – Exploration 8
Exploration – SPS Links 10
Exploration – Asteroid Mining Links 11
Colonization – SPS Links 12
Colonization – Asteroid Mining Links 15
*** Exploration Bad *** 15
Exploration Bad – Generic 16
Exploration Bad – Debris 17
Exploration Bad – Debris Uniqueness 18
Exploration Bad – Debris Links 19
Exploration Bad – Debris Impacts 20
Exploration Bad – Debris Turns Case 22
Exploration Bad – Space Disease 23
Exploration Bad – Earth Diseases Spread 25
Exploration Bad – Disease Impacts 27
Exploration Bad – Disease Impact Magnifier 29
Exploration Bad – Disease – Empirically Proven 30
Exploration Bad – Disease – AT: Virii Incompatible 31
Exploration Bad – Disease – AT: Antibiotics Solve 32
Exploration Bad – Tissue Degeneration 33
Exploration Bad – Cancer 34
Exploration Bad – Ozone 35
Exploration Bad – Ozone Extensions 37
*** Aliens Exist and Are Bad *** 38
Aliens Exist 39
Contact Bad – They’ll Kill Us 42
Contact Bad – Genocide 43
Contact Bad – Earth Wars 44
Contact Bad – Threaten the Aliens 45
Contact Bad – Tech 46
Contact Bad – Computer Viruses 47
Contact Bad – Disease 48
Contact Bad – Resource Theft 49
Contact Bad – Err Neg on Contact 50
AT: They’ll Be Nice 52
AT: Timeframe Too Long 53
AT: Invasion Inevitable 54
*** Colonization Impossible *** 54
Col Impossible – Frontline 55
Col Impossible – No Sex in Space 58
Col Impossible – Launch Costs 63
Col Impossible – Water 64
Col Impossible – Helium 3 65
Col Impossible – Diseases 66
Col Impossible – Timeframe 67
Col Impossible – Cosmic Rays 68
Col Impossible – Radiation 69
Col Impossible – Moon Specific 70
Col Impossible – Mars Specific 71
Col Impossible – Mars – No Sex 73
Col Impossible – AT: Asteroids 74
Col Impossible – AT: Try or Die 75
*** AT: Get Off the Rock *** 75
Stay On – Only Earth 76
Stay On – AT: Asteroids 77
Stay On – SPS Solves Asteroids 79
Stay On – AT: Supervolcanoes 80
Stay On – AT: Impact Outweighs 81
Stay On – Innovation Solves 82
Stay On – AT: Resources 84
Stay On – AT: Population 85
Stay On – AT: Climate Change 86
Stay On – Timeframe Too Long 88
*** Colonization Bad *** 88
Col Bad – AT: Consciousness Transformation 89
Col Bad – Spending Link 90
Col Bad – AT: Solves Environment 91
Col Bad – Terraforming Unethical 92
Private Sector Solves Col 93
Affirmative
*** General DA Answers *** 93
Non-Unique – Aliens – Already Attempting Contact 94
Non-Unique – NASA Exploration 95
*** Get Off the Rock *** 95
Off Rock – Uniqueness 96
Off Rock – Generic Extinction 98
Off Rock – Asteroids 99
Off Rock – Asteroids Impact Extensions 105
Off Rock – AT: Divert the Asteroid 106
Off Rock – AT: Asteroids Rare 107
Off Rock – Sun 108
Off Rock – Overpopulation 109
Off Rock – Climate Change 110
Off Rock – Environment 112
Off Rock – Resources 113
Off Rock – Supervolcano 114
Off Rock – Supervolcano Probability 116
Off Rock – Supervolcano Timeframe 117
Off Rock – Nuclear War 118
*** Colonization Possible *** 118
Col Possible – Generic Tech 119
Col Possible – Mars 120
Col Possible – Mars – Tech Ready 124
Col Possible – Mars – AT: Too Expensive 126
Col Possible – Mars – Timeframe 127
Col Possible – Mars – AT: Dust Storms 128
Col Possible – Mars – AT: Disease 129
Col Possible – Mars – AT: No Sex 130
Col Possible – Moon 131
Col Possible – Generic Planets 132
Col Possible – Orbital Colonies 133
Col Possible – Asteroids 134
Col Possible – Molecular Nanotech 135
Col Possible – AT: Meteor Collision 136
Col Possible – AT: Too Expensive 137
Col Possible – AT: No Life Support 138
Col Possible – AT: Radiation 139
Col Possible – AT: People Won’t Go 140
Col Possible – AT: No Sex in Space 141
Col Possible – AT: Distance 143
Col Possible – AT: Resources 144
Col Possible – AT: Timeframe 145
*** Colonization Good *** 146
Col Good – Generic Extinction 147
Col Good – Earth Resources 151
Col Good – Consciousness Transformation 152
Col Good – Resource Wars 153
Col Good – Environment 154
Col Good – Energy 157
Col Good – HIV/AIDS 158
Col Good – Economy 160
Col Good – War 161
Col Good – Bioweapons 162
Col Good – Asteroids 163
Col Good – Environmental Ethics 164
Col Good – Competitiveness 166
Col Good – Asteroid Settlements 167
Col Good – Mars 168
Col Good – Try or Die 169
Col Good – AT: Send a Smaller Group 170
Col Good – AT: Private Sector 171
Col Good – Now Key 173
*** AT: Aliens *** 173
No Aliens 174
Aliens – Won’t Find Them 180
Aliens – Timeframe Too Long 181
Contact Good – Friendly 182
*** Exploration Good *** 184
Exploration Good – AT: Disease 185
Exploration Good – AT: Debris 188
Exploration Good – AT: Robots Can Explore 189
*** The DA ***
1NC – Space Exploration DA
A. Absent the plan, NASA spaceflight will end
The Space Review 6/6 “New strategies for exploration and settlement” June 6th, 2011 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1860/1
Greason, though, is more pessimistic about the future of at least NASA’s human spaceflight program without a firm strategy in place for space settlement. Without that strategy, he said, “we’re going to build a big rocket, and then we’re going to hope a space program shows up to fly it. Any in my opinion, that strategy—the strategy of default—is going to result in the end of the NASA human spaceflight program” when members of Congress question the wisdom of spending several billion dollars a year on that effort and its lack of progress in an era of constricting budgets. “If we haven’t done better in the next ten years than we have in the last ten years, we’re going to lose that fight, and NASA’s human spaceflight activity will end.”
B. Space exploration will lead to alien encounter
Daily Galaxy 5/29/2011 [‘Weekend Feature: 'Endeavour' Astronauts on Extraterrestrial Life -- "We'll find something out there."’, May 29th, 2011, http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/05/-weekend-feature-endeavour-astronauts-on-extraterrestrial-life-well-find-something-out-there.html]
The human race will find life elsewhere in the Universe as it pushes ahead with space exploration, reported astronauts of the space shuttle Endeavour. The US space shuttle Endeavour prepares today to undock from the International Space Station and jet back to Earth, wrapping up its final journey before entering retirement, NASA said. "If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there," said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour, "Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great Universe," he added. “I personally believe that we are going to find something that we can't explain," said another astronaut, Gregory Johnson. "There is probably something out there but I've never seen it," he said. Dominic Gorie, the crew commander and veteran of four space flights, points out that explorers in past eras did not know what they would find before setting off across the ocean. "As we travel in the space, we don't know what we'll find. That's the beauty of what we do. I hope that someday we'll find what we don't understand." Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut on past Endeavour missions, agreed "life like us must exist" elsewhere in the Universe. The comments come after a surprisingly high-level debate in Japan about UFOs. Japan's Foreign Minister, Nobutaka Machimura said in 2007 that he personally believed aliens existed, in an unusual rebuttal to a government statement that Japan had no knowledge of UFOs. Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba went as far as to say that he was studying the legal ramifications of responding to an alien attack in light of Japan's post-World War II pacifist constitution. At the celebration marking the 50th anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking, Newton's heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, answered the question, “Are we alone?” His answer is short and simple; probably not!
C. Aliens will pillage earth for resources and kill the humans that remain
Jonathan Leake, journalist, 4/25/2010 [ “Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking”, April 25th, 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece]
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.
The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.
Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
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Bottom of Form
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.
One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.
Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.
D. Independently, Microbes became extremely dangerous in space
Barry E. DiGregorio,Author and Journalist, 2/1/08 [ “Deadly Microbes From Outer Space”, February 1st, 2008, http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/deadly-microbes-from-outer-space]
For astronauts toiling in the close quarters of the International Space Station or on a shuttle to Mars, an ordinary germ would be risky enough. But a recent experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that a microbe can turn even more dangerous in space than on Earth. In that study, a bacterium particularly nasty for humans—salmonella—was shown to become more virulent after just 83 hours of growing in space.
The experiment on the space shuttle Atlantis was designed to explore how a lack of gravity affects disease-causing microbes in space. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle grew the salmonella, and back on Earth researchers used it to infect a group of mice. For comparison, bacteria grown in a laboratory on Earth in normal gravity infected another group of mice. The mice infected with the space-grown germs had a mortality rate almost three times higher than that of mice given germs grown in normal gravity.
Researchers noticed that while on board the space shuttle, the salmonella encased themselves in a biofilm, a protective coating that is notoriously resistant to antibiotics. Several follow-up experiments on space shuttle flights over the next few years will look to see whether other bacteria undergo similar changes in virulence in microgravity.
E. New diseases result in extinction.
Souden 2k, David: former Research Fellow in History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, consultant to the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure [“Killer Diseases,” Factsheet, http://darrendixon.supanet.com/killerdiseases.htm]
Nature's ability to adapt is amazing - but the consequences of that adaptation are that mutations of old diseases, we thought were long gone, may come back to haunt us. But of all these new and old diseases, AIDS poses the greatest threat. It has the capacity to mutate and evolve into new forms, and the treatments that are being developed have to take account of that. Yet the recent history of life-threatening and lethal diseases suggests that even if we conquer this disease, and all the others described here, there may be yet another dangerous micro-organism waiting in the wings. The golden age of conquering disease may be drawing to an end. Modern life, particularly increased mobility, is facilitating the spread of viruses. In fact, some experts believe it will be a virus that leads to the eventual extinction of the human race.
Uniqueness – No Exploration Now
NASA’s space budget will be trending away from human space exploration
SpaceRef 6/8/11 Citing studies from Euroconsult, the leading international consulting and analyst firm specializing in the space sector
SpaceRef “NASA Spending Shift to Benefit Centers Focused on Science & Technology” 6/8/2011; http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=33782 [Schaaf]
According to the report "NASA Spending Outlook: Trends to 2016," NASA's budget, which will remain flat at around $18.7 billion for the next five years, will also be characterized by significant shifts from space operations to technology development and science. With the shift in budget authority, NASA Centers focused on Earth observation, space technology, and aeronautics will see increases in funding, while those involved in human spaceflight will see major funding reductions. Indeed, the termination of the Space Shuttle program will lead to a budget cut over $1 billion for Space Operations, resulting in a 21% budget cut for the Johnson Space Center. Overall, the agency's budget for R&D will account for about 50% of all NASA spending