> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
Spaceflight aside, how exactly has humanity started to outgrow war, inequality, and climate mismanagement? Call me cynical, but I'm not seeing it.
So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.
Obvious post hoc fallacy
And in the case of lifting most of humanity out of poverty, two things are responsible: capitalism and technology.
You can argue that China is a communist state, but it’s the allocation of capital to things that matter that has enable China to thrive.
These don't appear to be the words of someone who understands what the post hoc fallacy is.
In any case, the subject is not "capitalism and technology" generally but rather manned Moon missions specifically.
Happy now?
However, sometimes it is true that the first thing caused the second thing.
Therefore, it’s only a fallacy when it’s fallacious.
My argument is that going to space was an allocation of capital that mattered in driving technology forward and improved the lives of everyone.
You alleged above it was due to the moon landings that people were lifted out of poverty. Do you understand the difference here?
It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.
You’re arguing against the misanthrops. To them, nothing humans could do would be good enough. We could end slavery in the West and they’d accuse us of not ending slavery enough.
You didn't provide any citations that show any of the above has lifted people out of poverty. Please go on, and maybe tell us how ships navigated the seas before GPS, sounds impossible.
There are no causal connections between going to the moon and lifting global poverty. In fact, the money spent on going to a dried up satellite could have lifted people out of poverty.
Or, put differently, space exploration is one of the few things "feeding the right wolf" for humanity at large.
Obviously, but there's no evidence that the previous Moon missions were a step toward solving the problems.
> notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc.
You think these problems will be solved with... photos?
How many more photos do we need? Everyone has seen the photos already. I'm sure Putin and Trump have seen the photos of Earth.
Could you please explain exactly how these would help to stop war and inequality?
As far as I can tell, space exploration is going to exacerbate inequality, for example, by making Elon Musk even more obscenely wealthy than he already is.
What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.
This can happen at the same time a handful of people become obscenely wealthy from it.
Though in Musk's case, I suspect the wealth is a bubble which will pop before he can cash out more than 8% of it.
According to the OP, inequality: "Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement."
> What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.
Are you talking about manned Moon missions or unmanned Earth-orbiting satellites? To use your own words, those are not the same thing.
In any case, poverty is a policy decision, a refusal to redistribute the wealth.
Bro, have you considered that NASA, the topic of this submission, is government redistribution of wealth via taxes?
Hope that helps.
It doesn't.
I think that helping the less fortunate is cool, and launching people to the Moon is lighting money on fire for utopian and inevitably corrupt money transfer schemes.
So SpaceX made space cheaper, was good value for the US taxpayer, and was also a money transfer scheme from the government to him. (Worse with Tesla, but this isn't about Musk just SpaceX).
That said, now there's questions about if Musk is corrupt with all those US government ties that result in suspicious direct pressure on non-US governments, including with Starlink which even if theoretically separate to SpaceX is obviously functionally inseparable at present.
FWIW, SpaceX did literally what NASA paid them to. It might be no one dared to hope that the Commercial Space budget will turn out so spectacularly effective at disrupting legacy structures of corruption, but the point of the exercise was still to pay private players like SpaceX to make access to space cheaper, and they absolutely delivered on that. This wasn't a competition between public and private interests, it was a successful cooperation.
> So SpaceX made space cheaper, was good value for the US taxpayer, and was also a money transfer scheme from the government to him.
Obviously paying someone to do something is a money transfer, and if the payer is the government and recipient a private organization, it is a transfer of money from government to private interests. Same happens every time a federal employee buys a coffee on their way to work.
Literally 100% of taxes work like this, it happens every monthly paycheck.
There was a confidence underlying all of them. From the New Deal to the late 60s, there was a public belief a better future was possible.
2020s tech is defined by fear, pessimism, and dystopia. The utopian edge has either gone or been replaced by horrific anti-utopian tech - surveillance, manipulation, exploitation, and irrationality.
Tech has become anti-science. Musk's DOGE cut around $1.5 of science funding, science education, and NASA exploration.
The naive sense that a better future is possible, and tech will make it happen, has almost disappeared.
But, alas, I agree with you. There's no way out but through I guess.
I am completely against this military excursion. Just an honest takeaway. A lot of rhetoric in America on religion is due to people's religious trauma. I blame American evangelicals.
These things do take time though.
What’s the term for antibiotics having been so successful that we forget all their benefits?
The Montreal Protocol worked [1]. It probably couldn’t have without our satellite data.
QED
> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.
I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.
“Regardless of what you think about X, you must think Y about X” is a particularly tiresome rhetorical device, but its also being deployed as part of a motte-and-bailey argument here.
> It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did
Blue Marble (1990) is a completely different image than Earthrise (1968), and Earthrise was only adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement because the movement was already ascendant when it came out, not because it was the trigger for it.