I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.

How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?

Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.)

We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.

Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money.

Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit?

I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.)

Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?

I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)

zero-sum fallacy. You assume that all we get from the effort is some photos, ignoring the knowledge gains in fields as diverse as robotics, data compression/processing and astronomy (eg space weather) which must all be improved in pursuit of such a goal. The knowledge gained from such endeavors can have a direct impact back here on earth but helping us to build safer and more capable autonomous machines, make more of our bandwidth and thus lessen our energy use, and craft better satellites that be of greater utility in studying weather, deforestation, disease outbreaks and so on.

I strongly object to this 'what's it all for except vanity' whinge. We do it in order to obtain a greater understanding of our environment, and history shows that science and technology pretty much always pays for itself in the long run through benefits to all humanity. Just like delivering and utilizing aid more efficiently in places like Africa or Bangladesh could someday yield intellectual benefits that would aid the process of colonising a planet with scarce resources.

If we just wanted pretty pictures, we could buy coffee table books or a nice camera and go on a photo tour. The images from Mars are generally not that spectacular, visually. What makes them important is the tremendous step forward in human knowledge that they represent. That's why that photograph of Neil Armstrong (edit sorry, of Aldrin BY Armstrong) standing on the moon is, to me at least, still the single greatest achievement of humanity.

That's 3 or 4 letters for you, easy. And all we had to do was start with an useful goal. Who knew?

Technology doesn't work that way. Real life is not Sid Meier's Civilization where you pick what to research.

If X and Y don't warrant express investment in first place, how come they justify investments on space programs after the fact?

To defeat this reasoning, I suggest you try and find a reason why serendipity should work better in projects with less immediate usefulness. I could be convinced that's the case, but I haven't heard arguments in favour of this hypothesis so far.

Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable.

It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+.

In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed.

> I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo.

HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system.

As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.

But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers).

I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).

Absolutely We spend a lot of money on aid, and then spend orders of magnitude more to chancel that aid by killing the market for third world products. But fixing that problem will require us to make thousands of farmers unemployed, and that's political suicide. Especially in Europe, where agriculture subsidies are strongly supported by the political mainstream.

The farmers of New Zealand adapted, too.

The other argument I've heard against abolishing food subsidies is a strategic one. We'd become dependent on food from countries that are often not politically stable. An oil crisis on the food level could be devastating.

I say, if that's the argument, then be honest about it and nationalize agriculture instead of pretending it's private businesses.

For some more optimistic aspects of the developing world (and especially Africa), see the newest special report of the Economist (http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?sto... (be sure to click "next article" at the bottom, if you want to read all of it).

The problem still however is price. In China it costs 0.15 Yuan to send a text message – in SA it can be the equivalent the equivalent of 1 Yuan. Voice calls are even more expensive (R3+ a minute – about 0.4 US$). I believe that the price elsewhere in Africa is even more expensive (since some of the base stations run on Diesel generators).

I also don’t think that telecoms growth should be seen as economic growth (it is not always coupled). Telecoms is however still a giant problem. In SA we have huge problems with extremely expensive Internet. This is extremely unfavourable. We have a lot of people that can speak English without an accent at the same time zone as Europe – yet it is too expensive to put up call centres.

I firmly believe that we can and SHOULD do both. NASA isn't the right model - something like the X PRIZE is much more exciting. The same is true of saving the world - pouring billions into humanitarian aid might work for specific short-term goals, but we need different models for long-term change - the obvious being more stable political and economic conditions to allow a self-sustaining standard of living.

It's a false dichotomy because, depending on who you ask, you can ALWAYS find a thing Y that is worth doing more than X. Given enough patience and small enough steps, I'm sure it's possible to build a chain of things that are increasingly higher priority to achieve, that nonetheless ends up being perfectly circular, like Escher's staircase.

when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity

should you really continue aid?

see also: dead aid http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...

The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population.

Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance.

And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.

if india and china's government's collapsed I would want to immediately cease aid to them as well.

an aside: this line of reasoning is my problem with libertarianism too. if historically under precondition X A caused B, it is quite silly to talk about A and B in a vacuum. see: nick szabo ranting about tort law :)

First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children).

I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index

BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative.

About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished).

About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?)

Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.)

Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no.

Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil).

But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh...

The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation.

Edit: Syntax and more syntax, sigh.