Imagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...
And that's just a device for watching cat videos. The carry-over between rockets and modern technology like hypersonic missiles is even greater - which is why we invented the space race to begin with.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
I sure never anticipated cosmetic surgeons twerking on Instagram in their scrubs to advertise themselves between the videos of a chick jumping into a confused Labrador's mouth and that one of the kid on a bike being shocked by the existence of brown chalk when they see a Pokémon drawn on a sidewalk.
But that doesn't mean that indirect spending and praying for spillover works better.
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me? ('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I was already payin' 'im fifty a week. (with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell. (but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year (for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here? (Hm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills, Airmail special (to Whitey on the moon)
Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
Curiosity has driven exploration, discovery, and subsequently science. It's fine that you're not as curious as some, but suggesting that we must only focus on things on Earth when we have literally billions of people on earth that all have individual interests and things they're curious about is just about limiting progress, not about preserving Earth.
If not, then we've established a mutually acceptable baseline for limits on human progress, and a subset of mutually acceptable reasons for imposing such limits. I suggest only that we need not stop there.
> How on Earth do you support the claim that one deliberately self-imposed limit on human progress can't be compared with another?
You're being obtuse. There's a much more clearly defined intersection of human ethics when it comes to performing science on human beings than there is with some sort of vague proposition that space exploration is a waste of resources that is harming humanity indirectly by not allocating those resources towards taking care of other human beings.
I don't think it has less meaning than the idea that the most sere and hostile environment for our species that we've yet been able to access - the deadliest imaginable desert, accessible only at vast effort and expense - has for our taking the boundless cornucopia of riches that space maximalists constantly promise, and with no more support than you complain I offer.
Meanwhile you blithely argue that some significant fraction of a trillion dollars, available in this happy counterfactual from what had been the war department's budget, should be devoted to this and nothing else, with no thought to the opportunity cost - and demand I justify myself in arguing we should better do otherwise!
That opportunity cost would be measured in human lives, consigned to neglectful death in the service of your cause - but whether by neglect or murder, dead is dead. You'd be far from the first so to act; history is replete with examples, even ignoring the one we live among now. Such people are sometimes called to account. What would you say if you were?
We've already benefited greatly from just the process of trying to get there. Even if there is no "riches" to be had in terms of extracting resources from alien planets, we still gain from our endeavors. This can be indirectly through technological advancements made in service to that mission (which we've seen plenty of already), or it can simply be in the pursuit of knowledge in the understanding of our universe.
> Meanwhile you blithely argue that some significant fraction of a trillion dollars, available in this happy counterfactual from what had been the war department's budget, should be devoted to this and nothing else, with no thought to the opportunity cost - and demand I justify myself in arguing we should better do otherwise!
Why do you assume that there is not thought to the opportunity cost? It's quite clear that we have different priorities on how humanity should allocate its resources but to say that it's not a consideration is just crass. The amount of human productivity we dedicate towards space exploration is a remarkably small percent of what's available, and a lot of that is driven by individual's interest in it.
The space program's budget is minuscale compared to what we spend elsewhere, maybe around 5% of a trillion dollars. That's a significant amount of money, but you seem to think that could be better spent on... what, exactly? Let's say we reallocate that budget to social security. That'd be adding less than 4% to its budget, which is already over a trillion dollars. Or the combined spend of medicaid and medicare, in which case it would be less than 3%.
> That opportunity cost would be measured in human lives, consigned to neglectful death in the service of your cause
A lot of things have indirect consequences, positive and negative. Many things that have dramatically improved the livelihoods of humanity have come at a great cost.
> but whether by neglect or murder, dead is dead. You'd be far from the first so to act; history is replete with examples, even ignoring the one we live among now. Such people are sometimes called to account. What would you say if you were?
The advancements made by curious people has made the world less impoverished and less "dead." Even if 100% of human productivity was allocated towards protecting human life, people will still die. That is life. At what point in your hypothetical world where you got to make these policies would it be acceptable for humanity to start exploring space again? When humans stop dying?
Humanity's driven by curious people willing to explore well beyond what seems rational to most people, not myopic luddites who would eschew entire avenues of exploration simply because they can't understand the utility in it.
> At what point in your hypothetical world where you got to make these policies would it be acceptable for humanity to start exploring space again?
When there is no human on Earth who suffers in a way that money can prevent, I'll no longer consider a dollar spent on putting a human into space a dollar culpably wasted.
> Humanity's driven by curious people willing to explore well beyond what seems rational to most people, not myopic luddites who would eschew entire avenues of exploration simply because they can't understand the utility in it.
I grew up suffused in the US space program. Huntsville was my favorite vacation. I read everything I could get my hands on - which, thanks to my grandfather, was a lot - I dreamed of astronaut school, at least until I learned it had visual acuity requirements. But even that little dampened the dream; I still spent most of my childhood studying with the intent of becoming an engineer and ultimately joining NASA. There are a lot of reasons that didn't happen, but none of them had to do with the dream itself failing - and in some ways, it still hasn't; do you think, if I still could believe there was anything for us either to find or to offer out there, I wouldn't want my people to go to the stars?
If, even in the face of all that, I still can be unconvinced by the case for putting humans as we are now into space, then that case needs to be better made. But dreamer though I was, the thing I came eventually to understand about a dream is that, however beautiful it may be, eventually you wake up and find reality still there.
As far as "human curiosity beyond rationality" goes, I would have been much more sympathetic to that argument before it became inescapably obvious that in its pursuit we have quite literally set the world on fire.
In the face of an error on that scale, I believe only a fool would fail to adjust his perspective, at least to encompass the possibility that, in the argot of my youth, we have gotten quite a bit too big for our breeches.
That we should reach beyond our grasp is something even I consider creditable in the species. That we should reach into the gearbox of the world and have it tear off a couple fingers, and then want to go right on reaching without a thought at least to stanch the bleeding, at some point becomes self-destructive madness. An individual human displaying such behavior would be restrained for his own good. As a species, we would have to do that for ourselves, or reality will do it for us. It is doing exactly that now. We would be wise to take that into account in deciding our next actions. We won't. But we could, and we should.
Humans aren't going anywhere any time soon, and I see nothing meaningful to choose between Mars today and Mars a hundred years from now, or two hundred, or a thousand. In that meantime, our efforts could make a meaningful difference as to how many billion humans are alive to celebrate that happy day.
You really want to convince me that space boosterism might still, in spite of everything, have merit? Show me you can take the long view.
The case is fine; the problem is your ignorance to seemingly many factors.
> As far as "human curiosity beyond rationality" I would have been much more sympathetic to that argument before it became inescapably obvious that in its pursuit we have quite literally set the world on fire.
Well, one of humanity's first great advancements was, in fact, to create fire.
We are making tremendous efforts in many different fields, but it's becoming abundantly clear that the only thing you actually care about is global warming, which, unsurprisingly, is something that we have people working on and hundreds of billions of dollars being spent annually on to solve. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, the space program's existence continues to contribute to climate science with earth-observing satellites [1] that provide all sorts of data that would only be possible from space. Thanks, space program!
> Humans aren't going anywhere any time soon, and I see nothing meaningful to choose between Mars today and Mars a hundred years from now, or two hundred, or a thousand. In that meantime, our efforts could make a meaningful difference as to how many billion humans are alive to celebrate that happy day.
Once again, you've not provided any rationale or reason as to why we can't work on more than one thing at once, or why the space program in particular has earned your ire. You can look up the dozens of advancements we've made directly thanks to our endeavors in heading to space. In fact i've already given you one very important example as to how it's relevant to your interests. You choosing to remain ignorant about the rest is your own choice, but it's quite clear that you're too ignorant to be making any value judgments on the space program at large.
Why not just admit that your argument is purely ideological? Or at least make an argument for what that money (that you don't seem to know even how much is being spent) should be spent on and how much further it could go in that area? The space program is not in ideological opposition with solving climate change; in fact it's playing a critical role in it.
> You really want to convince me that space boosterism might still, in spite of everything, have merit? Show me you can take the long view.
This is the long view; immense progress can happen from random discovery or it can happen slowly and gradually over time. We pursue these avenues because we don't know where it will take us or how long, just that we pursue these curiosities because it is what humanity was made for. If we only had 100 people on earth then sure, maybe it wouldn't be worth looking to the stars. But we don't have only 100 people.
Of course it is! And so is yours.
If not from ideology, where come you by the idea that "we pursue these curiosities because it is what humanity was made for?" That statement has zero factual content and can be meaningfully parsed only as a statement of belief. How do you mean me to imagine it as not ideological in origin?
I would, though, prefer it if we could stay on the same page with regard to what we're discussing. At no point for example have I said I have a problem with placing satellites in Earth orbit, and not by accident have I been specific in phrases like "putting humans in space". Robots in space, serving our ends, are cheap, easy, durable, and worth the trouble. Meat in space, at vastly greater expense and fragile complexity, is not.
Certainly we can do more than one thing at once, too. But every thing we do has an opportunity cost. My point is simply that the opportunity cost of putting humans in space has yet to be justified by any result - very notably including any output of the Space Shuttle program, where my opinion largely tracks Cegłowski's wellknown 2005 review [1], albeit perhaps with a touch more charity - and with no realistic prospect of that changing, I see no compelling reason to throw any more good money after such a vast sea of bad.
I don't need an ideological justification to allow people to do things that they want to. I'm not the one looking to reduce people's rights to pursue their interests; you are. That's why there is a distinction between my position and yours.
> At no point for example have I said I have a problem with placing satellites in Earth orbit, and not by accident have I been specific in phrases like "putting humans in space".
> > Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
I think a reasonable interpretation of this is that you do not think humanity has not "earned the stars." It would not reasonably be interpreted as only referring to sending humans into space.
> Robots in space, serving our ends, are cheap, easy, durable, and worth the trouble. Meat in space, at vastly greater expense and fragile complexity, is not.
Why not? What is the criteria for it being worthwhile?
> My point is simply that the opportunity cost of putting humans in space has yet to be justified by any result - very notably including any output of the Space Shuttle program, where my opinion largely tracks Cegłowski's wellknown 2005 review [1], albeit perhaps with a touch more charity - and with no realistic prospect of that changing, I see no compelling reason to throw any more good money after such a vast sea of bad.
Putting humans into space is a remarkably new thing that has largely been interrupted by its lack of funding. What are you even comparing this against? What returns would be required for it to satisfy your need for an ROI?
But for now, we have to just observe how countries enact progress, and it does seem to be that the ones that delegate and diversify do the best at it.
HN is one of the most reliable sources of those that I know, and developing a thread in this way is one of the more reliable methods I know to improve my odds of eliciting one. Luckily for me, I have enough of a prickly, disputatious streak in my own nature to appreciate the process quite as much as the result.
To get more explicit then: what did you mean to imply with this?
> It's rare I find myself reaching for the adjective "Panglossian".
2) There's also this graph, if you want to see how the other income brackets are changing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Th...