Re:It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth
by Rebelgecko on Thursday October 29, 2020 @04:29PM
(#24935371)
Not that this negates any of your other points, but GPS comes from the US defense budget, the Space Force is spending a few billion per year on it
Re:It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth
by frank2 on Thursday October 29, 2020 @03:28PM
(#24934585)
Maybe the US should spend less on defense and should refrain from sending humans to Mars.
Re:It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth
by ogre_codes on Thursday October 29, 2020 @04:34PM
(#24935431)
As far as I'm concerned, this is akin to suggesting you shouldn't back up the data on your computer because it distracts from protecting your working installation. You can do both—invest in a back-up strategy, while investing more money and vigilance in protecting the primary source.
Space exploration is more though, because not only is space exploration an investment in a back-up plan, it brings very real benefits home to earth. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what you are going to find or what the repercussions of what you find will be.
In order to make this argument, you have to first figure out what percentage of NASA's budget is spent on space exploration versus things like GPS systems, weather satellites, climate monitoring, solar monitoring, physics experiments, etc etc, which have direct or indirect benefits to things happening here on earth.
NASA's budget for entire actual space exploration would be more-or-less a rounding error on our defense budget which routinely has $5b projects which benefits very few people and arguably makes the quality of life worse on our planet.