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A comment on Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET. Parent comment

Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by jessriedel on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:30AM (#9916260)
Do you mean impacting their life materially? Why would it have to impact their life materially to be valuable? Sharing a joke with a friend at a bar doesn't have material benefit, but it's one of the valuable things in life.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by nicboobees on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:16PM (#9917046)
If you're going to force people to pay money, through taxes, grants etc, to explore space, then it should have some material benefit.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by jessriedel on Monday July 20, 2015 @03:01PM (#9918237)
That's a pretty unusual axiom that most people don't subscribe to, and it's orthogonal to disagreements over justifications for involuntary taxes.
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