Comment by EREFUNDO | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EREFUNDO | Hacker News Reader

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This is a re-post of an earlier comment but I think it's very applicable to this article:

The Chinese explored the Middle East and Africa almost 100 years before the Europeans. Every expedition consisted of 300 ships, some as long as 400 feet with 9 mast and an armada crew totaling 28,000 men. After 30 years of doing it they realized that they were spending too much money on these grand expeditions. The succeeding emperor ended the program. The Europeans on the other hand would send out just a few ships and try to find ways for the expeditions to be profitable (Slaves, gold, land, colonies) in ways the Chinese never thought. These smaller European expeditions could not be stopped by one emperor because Europe was not a unified empire like China. The smaller European kingdoms also competed against each other. This not only made the expeditions sustainable but thrive for the next 500 years. Right now I think we are in China's situation 600 years ago. We stopped the moon landings for the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa. Unless we find a way for these space programs to be profitable I don't see humans colonizing space anytime soon.

I think the argument about dreams feeding the pipeline of scientists and technologists of the future is a sound one and speaks to the hearts of scientists and technologists everywhere.

I know a robot is cheaper and safer than a manned spacecraft, but are we really willing to make our robots live our adventures while we sit on our couches watching TV?

Space travel has to be profitable, of course. It also has to be cheap. Now think of the price tag of a single F-22. Or the colossal clusterfuck that the F-35 project became. Couldn't we persuade just a couple nations to dedicate the budget of a single aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine to help fund the dreams of the next generation instead?

I don't think it's such a sound argument if you could substitute virtually any flashy project that will entrance children for that. You could easily argue that developing sentient (and sapient) Giant Mecha or bioengineering talking unicorns would raise the interest of young people for getting into 'science'.

I'm sorry to say that, but people are just geeking out when they say that manned space travel is worth the expense and risk for the inspiration it will bring. Having space marines or replicating the Enterprise just for the cool factor when there's so much more to do that could benefit humanity in more tangible ways (like, say, ever more powerful AI, garbage processing, vaccine production and energy production) is folly.

Robots make for great expedition R&D. They can gather a lot of information very cheaply compared to manned spaceflight.

I'm not sure space travel has to be profitable. Certainly Christopher Columbus's voyage was not considered (by most people at the time) to be profitable. Yet economies of scale could definitely be taken into account. It is often said that the computing power of the Apollo missions to the moon were less than that of a TI calculator. It seems we should be able to have unmanned missions to the moon by private sector or even partially public funded. After all were sending DIY cameras into near space.

Of course they don't necessarily have to be profitable. The Chinese continued their expeditions for 30 years without being "profitable". My point is that if you want a sustained program that will grow, being self sustaining would be necessary. Eventually it has to pay for itself. I don't think the Europeans would have continued their expeditions if all the returns they got were 100 years of financial losses.

I agree completely! I am a huge fan of Neil Degrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krause. There are far more wasteful spending that we are doing, and there are long term benefits that the R&D of space exploration will deliver to us.

Are you suggesting that slavery and colonialism (whose consequences still hold on today) were better?

Maybe we aren't fucked up enough for space exploration yet.

No, what I am saying that if you want a program to grow it needs to be able to sustain itself.

The NASA program cannot be compared to what the Chinese did with 300 ship expeditions. Maybe that would be better compared to our expeditions in the Middle East and the military industrial complex in general, but not NASA. I agree with the comment completely about how Europe won. Maybe the commercialization of many aspects of space is the key. I for one am excited to some day travel between New York and Hong Kong in a couple hours on a Virgin Galactic flight, if such endeavors are profitable and competitive then space may lead to 500 years of thriving growth. Still though there needs to be government backing for the cutting edge, which does not need to be armadas but shouldn't be shut down completely.

I completely agree. Initial government backing will be necessary. Europe eventually won because their programs of exploration and expansion continued for the next 600 years, the Chinese expeditions lasted only 30. The major reason for this is because the European model was more profitable and sustainable.

Arguably, NASA has always been part of the military industrial complex, but it's a relatively less important component now that Cold War and the space race are over. Meanwhile, overall military strength continues to be important to US hegemony.

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