However, it's far more likely that $400B in cancer research will do more for curing cancer than hoping for side effects from $400B in other research.
Cancer is a systemic problem, it isn't measles or polio or TB. You have to understand the system in order to fix it and pushing humans into new environments will give us better insights into the system we call human life.
[1] https://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/the-never-ending-war-...
That's a pretty absolutist statement. We've spent more preventing murder, but murder still happens. We have developed many treatments for cancer that have added many quality life years for millions of people.
1a) What causes a cell to decide live forever (metastasize)?
1b) What causes a person to decide that killing another person is the solution to some problem?
2a) How can we detect a cell that is about to metastasize? How can we stop it?
2b) How can we detect a person that is about to murder? How can we stop them?
3a) What would have to be true for cancer to never be the cause of death ever again?
3b) What would have to be true for murder to never be the cause of death ever again?
See? Both are systems where individual elements within the system have decided to work against the system rather than within its constructs.
There is no drug, no treatment, that will 'cure' cancer until we understand exactly what is going on in a cell that knocks it out of line. And there will be no end to murder until we understand exactly what is going on inside a person's head when they decide that is the correct course of action. Everything we do on these two fronts (cancer, and murder) are delaying actions to minimize their impact on the greater whole.
The other part that some people have assumed (but the GP did not) is that spending this money on Mars exploration would reduce the amount of money that is currently allocated to cancer research. It wouldn't, it was specified as 'new funds'.
So what? Even if everything you say is true, the outcome of the research is possibly hundreds of millions of additional quality life years.
And there are many treatments that 'cure' cancer. Many people have cancer, are treated, and never have it again. Many have it, are treated, and live much longer than they otherwise would have. I'm not sure what you are saying, or why research that saves and prolongs lives has to meet some other standard (and what is that standard?).
The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.
This wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar) suggests a huge military involvement from the 1930s onwards
I will, however, not count pulsing as more than an improvement to the basic invention of distant object detection with radio waves.
As you can read on the page you linked Hülsmeyer made a working system, clunky as it was, for detecting ships in mist. Taking a system from prototype to mass produced, worthy as this investment might be, is not inventing it.
It's rude to make such assumptions about me. I do not take the positive side effects from research for granted.
You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.
All research will have side effects that can't be anticipated. It's stupid to perform research with "random, unknowable" side positive side effects as a primary justification.
You made the original claim that spending that money on cancer research would be more beneficial. The burden of proof is on you, not me.
Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.
More cancer research is not going to stop an asteroid.
And yet perhaps one of the blocks with modern science is people hitting the grave before they can finish innovative research. It takes at least 26 years to train a human from scratch to advance to basic research level in a field. You can add another 10, 20 years before proficiency. At least half the human life until total proficiency (as it stands) is reached and perhaps a quarter of the human life for which researchers can make meaningful contributions.
Arguably, focusing on problems on Earth - like eliminating mortality, solving longevity, curing cancer and dealing with death - will do more for our species long-term than exploring space right now. When your scientists live longer, more discoveries, contributions, and innovations can be made.
Spending $400B on dealing with the greatest tragedies and sources of sorrow known to mankind today - death, disease, illness - would be far preferable to most people than investing in space.
Going to Mars will have myriad discoveries & side effects, if we knew what they were what would be the point of going?
Also, what if curing cancer is harder than going to mars? One is by now a fairly quantifiable objective, the other is debugging a mind bogglingly complex system with no version control.
There was little, if any, explanation of why this should be done; and the posters arguing the opposite are, in my view, suggesting some of the "why not" arguments. The burden of proof is still on the fellow who made that "we should" claim. My 2c.
For example, almost all cases of cervical cancer are traced to HPV infections...so the research into the HPV vaccine arguably did more to reduce future cancer cases than research into cancer has. Further research showed that HPV can also cause a number of cancers in men (though at lower rates), which is part of the justification for offering the HPV vaccine to boys.
Sunburn, smoking, chewing tobacco, HPV, acid reflux, can all cause cancer. Saying those are all different cancers that require different cures is a good way to waste a lot of effort and money. It is more accurate to say that inflammation is a cause for cancer, and focus on that.
While you're chastising your mom for her lifestyle, the rest of us will be looking/hoping for a cure.
You should know that even you will experience increased and chronic inflammation as you age, no matter how much better than your mom, your lifestyle is. Increased chronic inflammation and aging are linked and we're still trying to understand why.
Posting like this is a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you for this because it's clearly a personal topic, but if you post like this again, we will. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
At the individual level finding a cure would be great, and during late-stage we would definitely want to understand how to have more successful treatments, but to remove the long-term load of the cancer problem on the medical system would mean better environmental and lifestyle interventions which act at a level of root cause instead of proximal treatment. If anything maybe we would find common ground have having cheaper diagnostics so that we could find more motivation to engage in preventative measures concretely rather than as a catch all.
My mom died of ovarian cancer after living a lifestyle that even you would approve of. Victim shaming pisses me off.
Shaming the victim with this lifestyle bullshit is not productive, and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
Yet you’re going right ahead and assuming that someone else’s experience is not _real_ cancer because they survived it and your mom didn’t? You really don’t have the right to be calling anyone else an asshole.
> and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
It seems like your feelings about your mom are preventing you from thinking objectively about this. Lifestyle can be a cure as well as a preventative, an extremely effective one, but that’s often overlooked because it’s easier and more profitable to get someone to take pills than it is for them to change all their dietary and exercise habits. Attitudes like yours, that say it’s wrong to call it anyone’s fault, really don’t help.
This is what irks me about "send people to Mars!" - we aren't anywhere near high enough on the technology tree to even contemplate the endeavor. Or to quote Bruce Sterling:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
I get the mindset of staying at home around the known campfire and the known wildlife and the known hazards. But I observe that it has never been a winning strategy for humans.
Hell, you can simulate life on Mars by signing up for a career in deep sea diving. Actually, deep sea diving is probably a million times easier since you can pretty easily get parts from the surface.
I should have posted the full Bruce Sterling quote:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.
If there were a society with enough technical power to terraform Mars, they would certainly do it. On the other hand. by the time they got around to messing with Mars, they would have been using all that power to transform _themselves_. So by the time they got there and started rebuilding the Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.
There are a lot of indications that 'living under conditions that were true for the last 1500 years but may not be available again for a while' is also a good plan. A city on Mars is likely a 100% energy sufficient and materials sufficient city. Such a city could survive any global warming catastrophe as well.
Most of this discussion comes down to various belief systems. I believe that any civilization that can live on Mars will also be able to treat cancer effectively, as well as survive other threats like asteroid bombardment, climate change, or major volcanic events. I don't believe that a civilization that can "only" treat cancer can survive those other problems. Clearly others have a different set of beliefs and that guides their research investment priorities.
But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no _there_ there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay.
This is not "settling" the Gobi desert any more than manning an oil rig is settling the north atlantic.
Much more well-reasoned detail here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
If Earth were hit by a dinosaur killing asteroid it would be more habitable than mars before, during, and after.
Any ridiculous boondoggle might have beneficial side effects. There’s no evidence, however, that spending money on a boondoggle is a more effective way of generating positive side effects than spending the same money on something sensible.
I contend that if we were to spend $400B on a crash program to cure cancer we might accidentally end up figuring out how to live safely on mars.
There's this funny assumption that the Earth might get hit by an asteroid but such an event can't happen to Mars. I'd like to know why Mars is asteroid-safe. Also what's the rationale in going to what in fact is an extinct planet to deal with the possibility of extinction in this of ours, which despite the bad press has been sustaining life continuously for billions of years.
Then not only do we get to be multiplanetary so that when the crap really starts hitting the fan there is a lifeboat, but we also cure cancer.