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Comment by radicaldreamer | Hacker News Reader

We could try with a much more doable planet like Mars. We could find out if long term survival is impossible, very difficult, possible but difficult, or doable with the right technologies. It's shocking how little appetite there is for redirecting 50% of the budget which is currently allocated to the military to space exploration.

I understand that the military is partly a large welfare program which doesn't compete with private enterprise due to different technologies and classified material, but I wish there was a movement to invest more of that time, money, and energy on basic research, climate change, energy technologies and space exploration. It's a hard sell though because I suspect that these technologies would compete heavily with established businesses.

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The military application of rockets is only reason we got the tech to reach space and military application of satellites is why we figured out how to stay there and the militaristic penis measuring between nations is only reason we reached moon.

Also, - large part of budget is salaries and pensions. - looks like %budget for military is lowest it's been in 20 years, (in 2015) 16% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

> looks like %budget for military is lowest it's been in 20 years

The point is the size of it, not the trendline.

NASA got 2-4% to go to the moon. Right now it's at 0.5%. Imagine how much space they could do with 8%.

>It's shocking how little appetite there is for redirecting 50% of the budget which is currently allocated to the military to space exploration.

50% for the military? All the figures I can find say it's 16% of federal spending.

Edit: As others have pointed out. OP may have been suggesting we redirect 50% of the military budget to space not that the military budget is 50% of the national.

They're saying cut the military's budget in half and put the rest toward space exploration.

I believe he's just saying 50% of what is currently allocated for the military, so by your math, 8% of the federal budget.

And the answer is if you accomplished a miracle and cut military spending in half and freed up 8% of the federal budget, there would be a rioting mob charging towards the money... no... that doesn't really capture how much we're talking here... there would be a rioting mob charging the suddenly-available huge pile of MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY and there's very little reason to believe space exploration would be any of the winners.

Having near certain evidence of life existing on another planet, due to seeing oxygen present in the emission spectra of an atmosphere of another planet, would be a true game changer for space probe and exploration funding.

Astronomy funding stagnates when its about rocks and geology. Bring real evidence of aliens into the mix and you've defined humanities focus for the next century.

If we discovered actual humans on a near-exact clone of earth, we'd still be about 50,000 years from something relevant here on Earth. Outer space is staggeringly expansive. Staggeringly. Like "your space probe is sad joke" expansive.

We could develop our own alien life right on Earth within that timeframe.

You're thinking about this wrong. As long as we can send probes and/or communicate within compressed timeframes than physical transportation of humans doesn't matter.

E.g. Breakthrough Starshot can get us to many exoplanets within 20-30 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

"Many" exoplanets? How many planets does Alpha Centauri have?

It is ~4 ly away. If you're willing to go ~10 ly, you get 6 more stars to look at. And it gets far worse from there.

It's now estimated there are more Earth-sized planets than gas giants on most stars, and that every star has at least 1 planet, likely more.

So that's 7 or more planets. That's many.

I'm not the one who downvoted your message because you can't downvote replies to your own post, but I suspect you got downvoted because you crossed threads. If you follow the "parent" up from my post, you'll see that it didn't involve the discussion about finding oxygen.

I agree with the text of your message; it just isn't an appropriate reply to what I said. In fact if such a thing was discovered I'd say all bets are off in terms of the response.

In addition to the clarification of intentions, military spending is in fact 54% of federal discretionary spending.

Entitlement programs like SS and Medicare/Medicaid are raised on a separate tax (you can see it on your paystub), and have zero discretion in how they're spent. It's determined by statute and is automatic, not part of the budget process, and the money never really mixes with the rest of the federal budget.

If you take those out, and take out interest payments which we also don't have much choice in, military spending is 54% of the money that's actually at issue when Congress makes budget decisions.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0177/6150/t/2/assets/Death...

On the other hand, government funded resource for DARPA created the place we're speaking on now. You could say that created and entire multidimensional marketplace for business. I'm not sure it would have existed if it were purely down to commercials (take Gopher as an example)

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