> There are many, many people in the world who don't know that we went to the moon, there are people who don't have access to electricity and plumbing. I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets, but I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet.
Your second statement contradicts your first. Either you want to ensure that everyone has access to electricity and plumbing before science spends any effort on exploration, or you don't.
The natural conclusion of this argument is that no money should be spent on exploration, and all money should be redistributed evenly to everyone so that everyone maintains an identical standard of living. I don't want to assume that's what you meant, but if it isn't, I can't figure out what your ideal world looks like.
The thread began begging the wealthiest countries on the planet to contribute a significant amount of that wealth toward space exploration.
No one here is making the argument that we should spend no money on space exploration. People are simply arguing against spending significantly more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.
> People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.
But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, "why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, "but cancer..."
This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether.
I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs.
Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I
I made no argument against funding space exploration. I even said "I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets". Nor did I discuss prioritizing spending in other ways. Please don't assume an argument against exploration is being made whenever a concern about exploration is raised. We can conduct science and also be seriously critical of it's impacts simultaneously.
I was attempting to critique to the narrative presented by pc86 used to frame our approach to exploration, namely exploration for exploration's sake and to interrogate what progress means to us, particularly because the example used included a comment about colonizing the new world. Sure, it's dangerous to litigate the past but also one of the best teachers about how to go about constructing out future.
So? You say that like repetition means it's necessarily a nonsensical droning of idiots. Maybe the reason people always respond with that is that they have a point. Dr. Zubrin doesn't make any compelling points there sadly. There is a ton of "real science" to do here at a wildly better cost-benefit ratio.
Other than the link at the end of your post, I don't think anything you said actually challenges the opposing argument.
But okay, here are a few reasons:
1. Because it's difficult. As Kennedy famously said, we choose to go not because it is easy, but because it is hard [1]. We will need to develop and improve a lot of technology, engineering, and science to get to Mars and build a self-sustaining colony there.
2. The technological developments required to get there and stay there will help further improve life on Earth. A number of technologies have been spun off from past NASA efforts [2] [3]. Mars is a harsh and challenging environment; past efforts like Skylab have been stepping stone experiments towards longer-duration stays in space, and Mars is the next step in that progression. We will learn a great deal about the biological effects of interplanetary travel (necessary if we wish to eventually extract resources from other bodies in the solar system) and agriculture in extremely harsh environments (necessary if we wish to stabilize regions on Earth impacted by global warming). You can see this in action right now: SpaceX is driven to get to Mars, and to get there, they're developing technology that's making it safer and less expensive to get payloads into orbit. If they pull off their planned global communications network as another step towards Mars, that will be a huge benefit for humanity on Earth.
3. It's the only way to begin answering the question, "how rare is life in our solar system?" We already know that Mars had the necessary conditions for life. We don't know if life ever developed there. We don't know life might still be present there. We don't know what forms it may take, how it may be different -- or not at all different -- from life on Earth. One of the oldest questions humanity has is, "are we alone in the universe?", and if we hope to ever answer that, we'll need to venture into space.
4. It will inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers. I think a lot of people assume that scientists and engineers are just sort of a thing that happens. No, they come from dedicated college students, and dedicated college students come from kids with dreams. Science fairs and after-school programs aren't enough; you have to give young kids something really big and really cool to dream about, and then they'll want to be part of that dream. The Apollo program gave us a three-fold increase in PhD students in US universities. You like Amazon? Apollo helped helped provide the fertile ground from which Jeff Bezos found the inspiration to build Amazon [4]. I don't know if the effects of all these new scientists and engineers can be overstated; people say, "we should cure cancer instead of going to space", and I say, "if you want to cure cancer, go to space." I grew up on Neil Armstrong and the moonrise photo and Scotty from Star Trek; I'll probably never get to fulfill my dream, but I got in to software development at the age of 8 because it was the closest I could get to being in a futuristic space ship.
5. Because it is historic. You want to make America great? Do something great. Dr. Zubrin described this really well; in 500 years, nobody will even remember who the President of the US was. But they'll remember -- and celebrate -- the year we went to Mars. Somebody will do it, eventually. China has the resources. India has the potential. Russia has the capability. If America doesn't get there first, I think it'll be time to admit that our great democratic-capitalist experiment has failed. It'll mean we, as a population, have become uninspired and lazy and complacent and lost the spirit of exploration that got us in here in the first place.
6. Because it is possible. We have the technology and science right now to get us there. We just have to try. We aren't still crossing vast bodies of water in wood-hulled ships. Mars is within reach now, so why aren't we reaching for it? What is holding us back? Cynicism? As Dr. Zubrin says, if we can do a great thing, then we should.
7. It will be a "remote backup" for humanity. There are still any number of things beyond our control that could wipe out most life on Earth, set human progress back a thousand years or more. If we expand into space, if we build a self-sustaining colony on Mars before that happens, not only will we develop more technology that will further reduce the chances of that happening, but if it does happen, we'll have much better chances of rebooting civilization on Earth. But it's going to take time for us to develop that far, so we should start as soon as possible.
8. A Mars colony will become a new experiment in human society. Look, there's just no way that a Mars colony will be governed entirely, long-term, by any government on Earth. It's going to need to develop its own governance. What will that look like? Technology is a fundamental part of life on Earth now; how might the next colonial government, full of scientists and engineers, incorporate it into government? What new solutions might they find to the political problems of Earth? We don't know yet. There's only one way to find out.
All of these points have been stated before, more eloquently, by other people before me.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
[2]: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/dec/16/apollo-legac...
This statement might be true as a generalisation, but is probably not true for this specific instance of conversation in this thread. I certainly haven't been responded to over and over again, yet I considered making similar arguments.
I appreciate the effort you've put into your points, though - thank you.
Cancer, hunger and the like are unlikely to kill the entire human race in one go. A climate event or asteroid could, which would render all other efforts redundant. Mars exploration means hedging the survival of our species.
A diverse portfolio is where the smart money is.
Also, who should determine how the resources of humanity are deployed?
People who arbitrarily have gained control of the resources?
For a tiny fraction of what is spent on space, we could solve world hunger and water.
It also seems a well fed and hydrated global population would be much happier, healthier, creative and productive.
Another question for folks who make the hedging argument — at what point do we say “ok, we have X% of the population living off world, so now we are going to divert funds to make sure people have access to basic human needs on earth.”
You bring up fair questions, but questions that are likely to always be there and never answered. At the end of the day, if we become extinct, all these questions are superfluous anyway.
Space exploration is, quite literally, a moon shot. But it's one that could give us the space (pun intended) to keep trying to solving the rest of the issues.
No we realistically can't. How exactly do you propose doing that? Keep in mind that there is a ton of precedents where local governments withheld foreign aid (which was supposed to "solve hunger" at least at that part of the world) to enrich themselves and/or to control their citizens. How do you solve that with any amount of money? Bomb the "bad governments" into submission? Just keep the money in some account waiting for those governments to become more civilized? Might as well colonize Mars in the meantime
Surely, if a NYC nightclub promoter can stop doing blow and start drilling wells, we can scale what he is doing.
- water access is a source for income in quite a few places (e.g. [1]). Drilling a few wells in remote villages might fly under the radar, but "solving clean water" means cutting people very much capable of violence from their income. That can't be solved by NYC nightclub promoter, unless they are willing to wage urban warfare.
- it's not enough to drill the wells as they will dry out eventually if there are no regulations and water distribution infrastructure. It's just not sustainable. And to solve the water problem sustainably requires a lot of infrastructure, water treatment, pipes, pumps, maybe some desalination plants. Even US itself is too gridlocked to solve its own problem of water supply, allocation, and aging infrastructure (e.g. Flint or CA's almond orchards), despite having all the money in the world. Why do you assume it's somehow enough to throw a few trillions at a few dozen countries with wildly different political and cultural climates?
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-25/thirsty-v...
Is a humanity that doesn’t bother taking care of its own people worth saving?
Do you feed your kids or do you goto a night club?
These mandates are powerful. The mandate to defend the nation led to radar and telecommunications, transistors, and many other technologies in use by almost everyone. The mandate to make it to the moon led to a revolution in material science that is now part of every car and phone, it allowed us to map the world and put it in half the world's pocket, and even created a whole new field, systems engineering, that is dedicated to the science of managing gigantic projects spanning thousands of engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and so on. The Human Genome Project, another massive multibillion dollar venture unlocked the human genome to the world for the first time and is directly responsible for much of the biotech boom in the last few decades.
As for "many people don't know that we went to the moon", I'm not so sure that's actually true. Carl Sagan wrote in the Pale Blue Dot in the 90s:
A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.
You're underestimating the biological human desire for exploration - it is a basic evolutionary survival mechanism.
Surely fixing politics, for example, would have a multiplying effect on the efficiency of everything else we do and would just accidentally bring up the living standards of millions of people.
Humans have a biological desire for exploration because it is critical to remaining alive and finding food. Humans are such a physically weak species with such a long child raising process that we could not have survived any other way.
Exploration is how you survive when apex predators grow out of control, forcing you to move to a safer region. Exploration is how you survive when the climate changes, forcing you to find new sources of water and food. Exploration is how you survive when overpopulation puts pressure on resources, like when tribes get too close and too big to each other and go to war.
Exploration is how we survive.
I would argue both is interconnected. With exploring new areas, whether on earth or on mars, new potential spots for human life gets found/get made inhabitable. And even though human sustainable colonisation on mars is far away, we need to start sometimes. Maybe just to make it a serious vision, to give people perspective whi say humankind is doomed anyway as we cannot grow indefinitely ... we can.
But for sure there is lots of potential on earth, like the deserts or the sea (ground), before mars becomes a serious alternative ... nut it is all interconnected. Progress in one area of sustaining life in extreme conditions, benefit other areas.
Besides, there never was a time, when there was no hunger on earth. Now while it would be nice to achieve this, I don't think it is smart to stop everything else until we get there ... if we even can get there.
We produce enough food, now, to feed every human being on this planet. In fact we make 17% more food per person today then we did 30 years ago, even with the population increasing over that time period. [1]
Ending hunger is an achievable goal.
>I don't think it is smart to stop everything else until we get there
Again, no one is saying we "stop everything else until we get there."
Production is just a minor part of the problem. Yes, there's an excess of food/water in one places and shortage in others, but how will you get these (often short shelf life) products from former to the latter efficiently? Who will pay for this? It's like saying that we have unlimited energy, because Sun produces vastly more than we need -- yes, technically that's correct, but it takes a hell lot of effort and resources while it reaches you wall socket.
It sounds a bit like it. Because also the main problem with this thought is, it requires a different distribution mechanism. Socialism for example. And or managed economy. Because today food gets produced the capitalistic way. To make money. Not a charity. Poor people don't have money.
So if there is a charity to buy enough food and able to distribute it to everone ... ok. But many tried, and you could argue it disrupted local food economy (charities bringing in free food, nobody bought from the local farmers anymore, they went out of buisness, simplified but happened)... and therefore increased the need for food delivery etc.
Also, as cruel as it is, the less hungry people, the more people who need food.
In other words, the problem is complex and not simpel. So those who feel the need to solve it (I do a bit actually) should do it. But others who want to explore the mars .. should do that.
Both is important. But maybe mars is actually simpler, than sustainable solving world hunger. Btw. people also like electricity, houses, cars, education ...
Each day, we're given the choice to change the way we relate to the resources at our disposal. I haven't seen any evidence that the incentives which drive us to cause great harm have gone away. On the contrary, the evidence I have seen points to those destructive incentives as being the driving force behind space colonization.
The problem you're identifying is completely independent of exploration. If we spent more on cancer and nothing on space then we would have more medicine-related technologies and fewer of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
But that doesn't have anything to do with what you're objecting to. Look at the HIV drugs the west has access to and Africa doesn't.
And even if the benefit goes 90% to western countries and only 10% to poorer countries, how is that not still better for everyone than using the money to build military drones or ad tracking systems or something equally useless if not actively harmful?
Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration?
I'm not anti-space... and I think it's important for us, as a society, to reach for the heavens. I also think, however, that it would not hold humanity back much in the grand scheme of things if we stopped exploring planets for, say, the next 50-100 years.
Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development, i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost.
What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints.
Normally if you can't fit your payload on the truck, you send a second truck. That costs another $100, so it's not worth it to you to spend ten million dollars to figure out how to make it work with one truck, even if you figuring out will save a hundred million other people a hundred dollars each.
With space, you can't just send another ten billion dollar rocket, so you do the ten million in research and actually solve the problem, and we get the piece of new technology that everybody can also use for other things.
"Necessity is the mother of invention." It's hot, it's cold, it's far away, adding a kilo costs nine kilos of rocket fuel, oxygen is scarce, gravity is different, etc. You need the constraints to force an invention instead of just suffering the status quo and covering for the inefficiency with brute force.
You actually have to go to Mars or there is no impetus to invent the technology required to go to Mars.
Without that you have two problems.
The first is that there is no goal, so nobody knows what to work towards, so you get undirected research that never goes anywhere. This is the problem the NIH and NSF have -- they fund a lot of research and 5% of it is brilliant but 95% of it is not.
The second is that there are other goals, but they're pedestrian. So there is money and somebody figures out how to divert it to their own business, and it ends up funding research that would have otherwise been done by the private sector if those companies' lobbyists hadn't figured out how to get the government to foot the bill instead. Which doesn't grow the pie at all, it just transfers tax money to well-heeled companies with good lobbyists.
Plus, I mean, we get to go to Mars. How is that not awesome enough to justify <1% of the federal budget? Spend a different <1% of the federal budget on the thing you wanted.
Effort isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, and necessity as the mother of invention has some truth to it.
We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... because deep down we are what we are.
Edit: We're even "worse" than I gave us credit for.
If we continue to glibly shrug our shoulders at the premise that mass destruction is just what we do, and if we keep pretending we have no choice in the matter, then the chance of us lasting 10,000 more years is somewhere near zero.
I have the same reaction when I hear talk of Socialism. It is simply Not dealing with reality to expect people to; start a business, spend every waking hour thinking and working on that business for some years, and then give Most of the profits away to benefit unknown strangers. Who will do that? (And yes I know Gates and Buffet and others are giving most of their money away, but that's after they have already lived a life of their choosing.)
Glib, sure after a fashion, but much more than that it is a factual reply based on reality.
The majority people of the developed western world already do this. Their taxes are higher than 50%. And they're happy with it.
The US is an exception.
The reason why they're happy with it is because they get benefits too. Transit systems and park systems that they benefit from. Healthcare coverage so broad they do not have to worry about their health.
OK, your house is smaller.
OK, your back yard (if any) is smaller.
OK, you buy less random disposable garbage on Prime Day to fill your smaller house.
But the people in these countries are happier. Because happiness is reality - expectations. And expectations are subjective and controllable.
The people crossing the land bridge to North America from Asia pioneered the west. Or perhaps they considered it East since that's the direction they took to get here. Anyway, I think the point is that humans have an insatiable desire to explore. We have adapted to so many adverse climates here on Earth. And we got around quick with just a lot of bravery, teamwork, and cleverness. I've read that early peoples coming out of Africa swam from the eastern portion towards modern-day Yemen, and then there are the incredibly skilled Polynesian sailors of the Pacific.
> ... without prioritizing equalizing the gains of science and exploration and those gains actively stratify society further.
Technology is all about tools. Science is a process by which we build knowledge. They are not good or evil on their own, that is ultimately a reflection of whomever leverages these tools. I agree that equitability is not a default; privileged few can use their advantages to gain influence, and then repeat until monopoly or oligarchy come to pass.
> I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed.
Sure, that's a reasonable thing to argue for and I broadly agree. Not all technology benefits humanity; making better bombs with science and technology does harm. Better surveillance measures undermines privacy, and these abuses of science and technology can stalk and kill just as readily as they can benefit us all. It all depends on how it is used.
But space exploration is something that really benefits humanity! There was a boon of technology that benefitted everyone in the wake of the hubbub of the space race. I don't know how it rates with all the other things we could possibly spend money on improving society, maybe below feeding the desperately hungry and below ecological restoration of course. But space has been a great, diverse source of technology, an infinite fount of curiosities, and I believe that if many more people gaze at the Earth from orbit, that a more global perspective will emerge, and this in turn could help direct funds to better causes.
Refrigeration, washing machines, cellular technology, farming tech, medicine & vaccines, all of these have had extreme impact on those at the bottom.
I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.
Yes, both in both good and bad ways, of course. Lots of people in the world have cheap mobile phones, which enables all sorts of possibilities. But we also all suffer the negative effects of industrialisation (the poor more than the rich, of course) on our environment.
> I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.
I'm very dubious of Pinker's Whig-like claims about 'everything getting better'. I'm not convinced that we've become less violent, only better at killing, and from greater distances (so it seems less brutal).
Forget ethics/morals for a second - this is just patently _false_. It depends on your definition of "doomed", but humanity as a whole needs only a few people to survive in order to not be doomed (defined as extinct).
It'd be easier to argue your case without hyperbole.
No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake alone leaves a lot to be desired, namely, ethics.
Also, It's clear that much like economics, technology doesn't inherently trickle down. It certainly has the potential to have positive downstream effects, but without having a priority of pushing those positive impacts downstream I would argue that we're left with a larger gulf between the marvels of modern science and technology and those and the bottom. That is to say, without prioritizing equalizing the gains of science and exploration and those gains actively stratify society further.
There are many, many people in the world who don't know that we went to the moon, there are people who don't have access to electricity and plumbing. I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets, but I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed.