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"When a Kid loves space and rockets, when he spends countless time reading science-fiction books, it's because to him it's fun, fascinating and exciting, not because it's supposed to feed starving children. I doubt an adult rocket scientist or engineer is fundamentally different. Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa."

I appreciate your focus on measurable behaviors. But make no mistake, there are lots of people involved in space science because they want to improve people's lives.

There are unique opportunities to measure climate change from space, for instance, and significant numbers of people in this area have literally devoted their professional careers to finding out what's going on with climate change. They will tell you that straight out, and their decisions in other areas of their life mirror that outlook, so you can tell it's not lip service.

The people who study planetary atmospheres can be motivated by similar considerations (hello, runaway greenhouse effect), also terrestrial weather (hurricane intensification, tornado genesis, etc.), space weather (solar flares, etc.), ecological forecasting, etc. Some folks are drawn to these areas because they matter in an obvious way.

You are correct that some space scientists/engineers are motivated by pure curiosity, tenacity, novelty, etc. -- inward-looking things. But by no means all, and in some disciplines, it tilts rather the other way.

Beyond that, this ignores people who loved space and rockets when they were kids and did go on to do things that people would consider more directly applicable to starving children in Africa because they learned to love science.

I'm an Epidemiologist. I've done work trying to address the Ebola outbreak, and prevent hospital acquired infections. And I started doing it because, when I was a kid, space was awesome.

> When the kid asked him what were maths used for, he answered : « and you, what are you used for? »

I think there's more than one way to read that statement. It seems overly cynical to interpret that anecdote as implying that children have no use (present or future); I think the implication is that while they may have no present use, they will have future use when they develop into adults.

Similarly, new branches of mathematics or space science might not be used for much today, but will develop into fields that have uses in the future. Just as humans must invest in rearing their children, so too must they invest in developing their science and math.

Not everyone is effective at solving every problem. I don't know anything about agriculture or logistics or politics or many other fields that would be needed to begin to tackle hunger in other countries, or even my own country. I solve the problems that I know how to solve, and we all cooperate as a society. The technology developed in one field like robotics or global positioning makes other fields like agriculture more effective (automated farming machinery). It would be shortsighted to suggest that everyone put their field on hold and inefficiently try to tackle world hunger. A better question is "do we have the right amount of people and resources dedicated to solving world hunger?" which gets back to the budgetary and governance matters discussed in the letter.

I don't think it's true that a rocket scientist necessarily "doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa". It's probably more that he doesn't know anything about the issue and has no expertise with which to solve the problem, and so he focuses on problems that he can solve, like launching satellites for weather, communication, GPS, which may in turn assist people in other countries with problems like food distribution. Without the rocket scientists, satellite equipment shuts down, and everyone in every field is worse off. We should trust to the natural equilibrium and distribution of human interest, balancing that with the government we've created, to make sure that problems get solved adequately -- we should not judge people for the field that they've chosen if it contributes to society.

Even fields like computer science, as applied to building Internet forums like this one, contribute in their own way by bringing people together and allowing them to have discussions like this.

> I think the implication is that while they may have no present use, they will have future use when they develop into adults.

I think even this assumption is dangerous, and besides, you're just kicking the can down the street (how do you define a human's usefulness?).

The simple truth is that not everything on this planet needs to have a use, let alone a positive use. This goes for both things and matters that we have control over (science) and things we have no control over.

But the point of mathematics is not to be useful. Sure, math is very applicable, but that is not why mathematicians study it.

The point of the anecdote is that just as a single person does not have to have a 'use' to justify their existence, mathematics does not need to be useful to be studied.

>If you spend some time on a spaceflight forum, you will read enthusiast posts about how cool it would be to see other words, to experience micro-gravity, or how interesting the science behind rocket engine is, but I rarely read about how space science will solve hunger,

If I go to a video gaming forum, do people talk about how to end world hunger? For the price of one new video game, you can feed someone in Africa for two months.

Video games aren't routinely justified as the solution to an extinction event on earth.

Because they are not. Colonizing other worlds is.

...?

Hence it is appropriate to discuss how the problems would be solved on a spaceflight forum, but not so appropriate on a video game forum.

Not really. Even if multiple extinction events hit Earth, Earth’s still going to be much more hospitable than Mars is now.

> For the price of one new video game, you can feed someone in Africa for two months.

Once you've killed the person who wanted to see the person you're feeding starve to death.

These days, starvation is political, as it is a weapon of war.

Well, if you go to a forum about space exploration video game, you might indeed find some intalligent discussion about world hunger, among other things ;).

I doubt an adult rocket scientist or engineer is fundamentally different. Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa.

With your hypothetical scientist, while she might spend her career with rockets, I am not sure that is enough to tell you whether she also does or does not give a crap, deep down or shallowly, about starving children, or what the rough geographical location might be of any she disregards.

People are a lot more varied than that. There is no neat little box marked 'rocket scientist'.

> Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa.

This is a pretty uncharitable reading of the article. But I agree with the assessment that scientists' main motivation doesn't tend to be altruism but probably more things like curiosity and competitiveness, and of course always needing more funds. Which I think is fine.

It doesn't matter what the scientist's motivation is, what matters (in the context of the letter's argument) are the eventual results.

Applied to the microscope-argument: Even if the inventor and early users of the microscope were only interested in satisfying their curiosity, the results are immeasurably valuable many years later.

It's not that he doesn't give a crap. It's that his priorities are different. The real question here is "How can someone have priorities different from me?".

I submit the answer is "Why would they share yours? They aren't you.".

> When a Kid loves space and rockets, when he spends countless time reading science-fiction books, it's because to him it's fun, fascinating and exciting, not because it's supposed to feed starving children. I doubt an adult rocket scientist or engineer is fundamentally different. Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa.

While I agree with the emotional motivation (hell, I'm a geek because of Star Trek, and note that includes me wanting all of humanity to have a bright future), I very much disagree with the conclusion that a rocket scientist "doesn't give a crap about starving children". Not only giving a crap is not related to being a space enthusiast, I'd wager that on average, your rocket scientist (or even space geek) has more things to say about the hunger problem than an average person.

Not only many of them care, they actually have the intellectual tools to rationally address the topic.

And RE video games, space and world hunger tangent downthread - only today I saw people debating environmental issues on a Kerbal Space Program forum. So nope, those dicussions in fact are there (usually in a subforum dedicated to off-topic discussions).

You're just being very unfair and making unsubstantiated claims based on reading a web forum. I think the writer was very sincere and it is true that advances in science via exploration can lead to many indirect improvements. Technology that may be developed to make, say, Mars more habitable could help on Earth as well. It is not because, as you say, he does not "give a crap about starving children." The author notes correctly that much of the problem of starving children is political; it has to do with regimes and unstable governments. It is not simply there is not enough food or technology on Earth to feed children.

The world is more than is dreamt of in your web forum browsing.