Can blind people build a spaceship and land on the Moon?

Question

This question is inspired by Could a species develop the tech necessary to land on their own moon without comprehending light?

Consider following scenario: a civilization of alien tricksters abducts 10,000 people from Earth and put them on an Earth-like planet that has a moon, very similar to ours. Those people are tasked with making a successful expedition to that moon. For extra stimulus, let's say there is a portal there that leads back to Earth, and people are told where exactly this portal is located. The catch is that all of those 10,000 people are blind. Not suddenly blinded, but been blind at least for while and adapted to it.

Also, alien tricksters use some advanced technology (indistinguishable form magic) that ensures that people's descendants also stay blind (at least until they are teleported back to the Earth).

10,000 abductees have a good head start. They have:

• houses, infrastructure, supply of food and basic necessities sufficient for 10 years;
• well-stocked equivalents of Wal-Mart (hypermarket), Home Depot (home building/repair supply) and Best Buy (large computers and electronics store);
• a library that contains all modern scientific and engineering textbooks (Braille and text-to-speech versions) and periodicals, plus a full copy of Wikipedia;
• the continent they reside on contains all minerals that modern human civilization consumes;
• in addition, they are provided with seeds and live domesticated animals (cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, cats) that can breed;

Also:

• every abductee has a college degree or possesses a skilled trade (all random);
• all people know a common language to speak;
• all people start as healthy in childbearing age;

But:

• the colony does not have any industrial or scientific equipment - only the items available in general stores.

Would this colony of blind people be able to build a spacefaring civilization, or moon will forever be out of their reach?

P.S. There is no timeline for the colony for achieving this goal, but there's assumption that descendants who would finally do this must still be genetically humans.

Answer 1

Given the parameters of the question, I would say NO, a colony of blind people could not build a space ship and land it on the moon.

I would hazard the guess that a colony of 10000 college educated and skilled blind people will most likely starve inside a year without a lot of external help. And they'll probably die of disease or injury a lot quicker than even that!

Once the Walmart grocery department runs out of food, you're basically asking 10000 people who can't see and almost certainly don't know how to farm to begin a large scale agriculture project, just to support themselves. Raising cattle, whether for beef or for dairy, is an intensive labor. First of all, you have to be able to see where your herd is in the pasture. You have to be able to see to plough the fields and work the machinery. Farm machines are dangerous enough for people who can see! I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a couple dozen amputation injuries. Which means you'll need surgeons and nurses to put injured people back together again. Oh, right, no one in the colony can see...

No industrial or scientific equipment means you're asking 10000 blind people to create an entire industrial pyramid just to support the basic colony, to say nothing of the colony's basic goal. No industrial equipment means no production of anything not present when the colony is founded. It means no ability to build or repair infrastructure. Going back to the farm, it means no harvesters, no milking parlours, no tractors, no refrigerators, no grain elevators. In the community, it means no snowplows and no back hoes, no trash trucks and no recycling centers. It means no machines to fix downed power lines and no machines to build or fix computer components. Your 10000 blind people are going to have not only design but build all of those things just using the stocks on hand in the local hardware store.

No industrial equipment means no way to design, model, test, build prototypes and ultimately make a functional rocket. You don't just go down to the hardware store and buy a rocket pilot's chair. The windows department will not have the components required to make a viewport. Saturn V rocket motors can't be bought in the lawn and garden department!

And so forth!!

Answer 2

I doubt very much that you can get 10.000 people with no visual problems to build a rocket in 10 years.

The cost of the Apollo program is estimated to be US$ 107 billion by 2016 standards.

Divide 107 billion between 100.000 (10.000 people for 10 years) and you get $1.070.000 / person*year.

Since I very much that the average people involved in the Apollo program¹ made that much, this gives you a rough estimate of the difference of effort.

You do not need only the engineers. You need also the people who will mine the raw minerals, who will produce the fuel, who will build the factories to refine the minerals and create the components and the tools.

And on top of that, you do not have economies of scale. For the Apollo program, if you needed some aeronautic expert, you could hire one from the existing aeronautic industries. If you needed a mineral, probably it was extracted cheaply because it was used elsewhere and there was that expertise. Here, you have to form your engineer, start your mining operation from the ground on. This is a "sunken cost" that is not even considered in the US$ 107 billion figure, and can easily be the most important in your setup.

Once your supplies end (or presumably way before that) you need to divert a lot of people to farming, producing clothing, medicines, etc. You simply will have no spare manpower for building rockets.

And then, of course, it is the issue that the Apollo program produced just a few tens of rockets. At 5 people for rocket, you would need 2.000 rockets to send all your people home, not one rocket.

TL;DR: No way this can work in a reasonable time scale.

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¹And here I am not talking only about the NASA guys, but also the people involved in producing the tools and parts and everything, from the extraction of the mineral from the ground upwards.

Answer 3

Well, as I see it, the mission CAN succeed, but it would take more than one generation. I'll elaborate:

All people have degrees, so they have the KNOWLEDGE needed. They also have knowledge storage, however, you didn't specify if knowledge is stored in a way they can CONSUME it. Is it audio? Brail? It would be easier if they can access it. if they can't, its useless. Regardless, since they all have degrees at least some are physics, engineers and mathematicians. Some are also teachers. However, as I understand it they were not BORN blind, so while adapted, they are not as adept as people who are blind from birth. This means they would find it difficult to perform menial work, to mine, to sew, to grow plants and tend cattle and so on. I do not think they would be adept enough to be able to build and test the shuttle needed in one generation. they would first need to build the tools with which they will be able to code the "brain" of the shuttle, the sensors needed to guide it in lack of eyesight and so on.

So, What they would do is this: The first generation would invest all their time in learning how to perform the work needed to preserve what they have, would start the infrastructure and develop the routines needed for the guidance of the shuttle, and preserve life enough to grow the next generation. When they have children, which will be blind from birth, they will invest their time in passing all that knowledge to them, as well as educating them in the knowledge needed for building the shuttle. These children, by being born blind would learn to thrive in the environment they were given much faster and would be much more suited to building the shuttle. They would be able to make the trip and return to earth, and if not them, then the next generation.

The only problem I see with that is that they would not WANT to leave for earth. While their parents had attachments on earth, family, memories, a need to go back and a craving to regain their sight, the children would not know sight, would not have any pressing need to go back to earth, where their sight might be more of an impediment than blessing because they would be so unused to it, and would have to integrate themselves back into a foreign society.

Answer 4

Just No.

The sheer industrial might that even thinking about seriously pursuing any sort of space travel, let alone something as audacious as a manned mission to Luna, is simply impossible with a base of only 10,000 people (blindness or no) unless the rocket is already on the launchpad and all they have to do is fuel it or something.

For context, during the peak of the space race, NASA employed roughly 400,000 people and an estimated additional >20,000 industrial firms and universities. Also, that's people who are directly working for NASA or towards a NASA task. It doesn't include the fact that each and every one of those 400,000 people also had a whole support network of people indirectly working for them (the farmer who grows the food so the engineer can eat or the factory worker that makes cigarettes so NASA can have proper smoke-filled rooms).

With just 10k individuals who are suffering under the severe disability of being blind, there's simply no chance unless you consider the far, far flung future, centuries or more likely millennia in the future once they've managed to actually bootstrap civilization back into the billions.

Also, like, there wouldn't really be a point? Even if, by some divine miracle, they can squeeze out an Apollo effort, all they get is like two people to the portal, leaving everyone else behind. That's a hard sell, especially considering that everyone would be working towards this goal with all their energy basically all the time.

Finally--and I don't want this to get misconstrued as ableist--but full lights-out-blindness is a severe disability and the only reason that those suffering blindness today can lead somewhat normal lives today (in modern countries) is because of the immense effort that society has gone to in order to be more accessible and because of the countless hours of work that people put into supporting their sightless comrades. There is a reason that basically all macroscopic animals have some sort of "sight" organ and it's not random chance that evolution has caused human brains to be "supercharged" for vision tasks.

Basically, I would be surprised if they managed to not all die before their pre-supplied food runs out.

Answer 5

Quick edit based on comments. I think that blind people could eventually figure out a way to get to the Moon, even if it took them ten thousand years. I absolutely do not believe that the reason for going to the Moon would survive that long.

The cost to get people onto the moon in 1970 was $24 billion.

At the time, the productivity per capita was around $5k. This means that it took roughly five million human-years worth of effort to get someone onto the Moon.

If you dropped ten thousand people on a completely depopulated Earth, with all of its infrastructure and resources, it would take them at least five hundred years to reproduce the Apollo mission. This is only if that were their only priority.

If you're thinking "but we already know all of that, all they have to do is look it up," then you probably don't know that we STILL haven't recreated the technology to get to the Moon. The data was filed, and the expertise to understand that data aged out and retired. The original space program had a casualty rate that was only acceptable from the perspective of pursuing national security.

Space-X is having to re-invent that technology. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are struggling just to get into orbit. The US satellite launch systems are based on the Saturn V booster, which hasn't been significantly upgraded since before the space shuttle.

When you add in the need to rebuild civilization, you create a driving factor that makes the moonshot a vague eventual-goal for later generations. The later generations wouldn't know why the previous generations thought it was such a good idea, and they'd have their own priorities.

This pushes our moonshot into the several thousand year zone. If you think I'm exaggerating, then I'll remind you that the Earth's human population in 10,000 BC was roughly 1 million.

If you add in the "blind" part, then you can guarantee that your libraries and electronics would have decayed into uselessness long before the industrial revolution re-started.

So, maybe, eventually, these people might get into orbit, but it won't be because some ancient prophesy suggested that a gateway to Heaven existed on the moon.

Answer 6

President Kennedy in 1962 announced we shall go to the moon in this decade, and in 1969 astronauts landed on the moon.

HOWEVER

Its cost 4.4 billion, and effectively unlimited resources.

Our team, first they have to solve the vision issues, as in I need to machine this part to tolerances of 0.001 inches or there's a fuel leak or etc and the ship blows up. It's not just that put complex shapes, developing that is going to take awhile and set the project back.

They had a ton of pre-existing infra structure far beyond what home depot offers.

The quantities and qualities of materials needed won't be available and will need to be manufactured and refined.

Between the proto-typing and general waste they will need 100's of tons of metal.

For perspective our moon project took 7 years, and they only have 10 years of food. That only gives them 3 years to overcome the visual issues and get to a 1962 level of technology. I don't like the odds.