flipper said:
Pardon me but the correct description is "ugly bags of mostly water."
I think it's better to emphasize the squishiness and meatiness than the
aqueous base.
Even so, those bags dry out mightily fast in a hard vacuum, you have to
admit. They'll be preserved very nicely though (minus the cellular damage).
To answer your question, for the same reason that sending a 'probe'
would have been interesting but ultimately a hell of a lot less useful
than the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, and the rest that followed.
Now you're just being absurd. What else were they going to do, float a
dinghy on a tow rope, wait for it to go out, then haul it back and hope for
spices to appear? Don't forget how many died on those voyages. Not that
that mattered; death was common back then, and states were more eager to
grow their empires.
Neither the expense of launching "spam in a can", nor the loss of human
life, is tolerable today. We have much cheaper, and much better, ways of
doing things, ways that couldn't be dreamed of.
Remember further, few of the earliest explorers, settlers or pilgrims were
even moderately prepared for survival, during the journey and in the
wilderness. And that's landing on a continent covered in green stuff.
There's food and shelter anywhere you look, you just have to know where to
go and what to pick. And they couldn't even do that.
Later on, once we've gotten enough infrastructure out there (in orbit, on
the Moon, asteroids, Mars, etc.) that we can have life support available,
then, and only then, can humans move in, and again do some truely amazing
things. But that's only possible once they can be self sufficient. This
might be another 50-100 years -- which by a more suitable analogy with
history, seems reasonable.
Tim
