I heard somewhere that the military industrial complex plays the role of socialism-like wealth redistribution. (Corporate socialism, that’s it.)
Lefties such as myself talk about the massive price of the military, bit that cost is largely sunk into the DoD, contractors, boeing/raytheon/general dynamics, and so on. Which are all US entities, with US employees, all who get taxed on their pay all the way down. If we spent a trillion on a war, I betcha the federal government recovered at least 60% within two years, and is on course to make a profit over 25 years.
Totally spit balling it. And perhaps it is less about a profit than it is about monetary churn and velocity.
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But why can’t we spend trillions on space exploration instead?
I say (as someone who has worked on military projects, though not for a while, and a different military) swap the budgets for the DoD and NASA around, and transfer all the engineers across accordingly.
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I don’t disagree, and during Apollo we did. I just think voodoo science like economics are fun, like astrology 
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That’s the kind of cynicism I like to see.
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About as reliable too.
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It’s no coincidence that the rulers of today are surrounding themselves with economists in the same way rulers of yesterday teamed up with astrologers.
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You know that step beyond cynicism? I think it’s called Acceptance? I’ll meet you there for a martini. :D. US policy when it comes to violence is so fucked up I am grasping for a rational explanation.
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Yeah, I’m continually amazed by how much credit so many economists get when their theories are so detached from reality…especially when you start getting into stock exchanges and such.
What we’re really talking about is people who are good at min/maxing a really bad LARP that everyone’s forced to play but only a few people have all the resources.
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To what end? It isn’t like the 7 billion people alive will ever benefit directly from it, right?
They don’t really benefit from war either and, unless we get a self sustaining population off the planet, the species is in the cross hairs of the next extinction.
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(Lunar base, asteroid mining!! Mooncrete!!)
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Here’s one likely scenario for you: we’re never leaving this planet in any numbers. Our solar system is inherently more hostile than the Earth ever will be and there is no political will to populate it. We’re completely incapable of interstellar colonization.
We’re far more likely to kill ourselves than to leave our planet.
As to who wars benefit, some wars certainly benefit the population of the planet. Ask anyone who fought in WWII.
I realize, as a lifelong SF fan, I’m a heretic for saying these things but I really do doubt we’re going to live on Mars or around Jupiter. Not as human beings at least.
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We certainly won’t be skimming lots of people off of earth, that’s for sure. And significant amounts of people living on an uninhabitable planet? Uh, no as well.
Small moon base (named the Japhroaig I) so we can launch exploration from a smaller gravity well? Raise my taxes and call me Shirley. It’s not that far away.
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Pretty much nailed it in one sentence there. Anything other than Earth is REALLY hostile to our biology.
We’re pretty much stuck hacking our machinery before we can even consider long term survival in space, much less reproduction…and by that point the options are so vast it’s unlikely that we can really predict what we’ll look or be like. Plus it’d be a long, long time from now
Makes it super hard to write that stuff in Sci-fi, and definitely not as friendly to a casual reader as Star Trek.
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I wouldn’t go so far as to say extinction. There’s a bunch of ‘lots of us die’ scenarios and a few ‘most of us die’ ones but the contrived ‘we’re all going to die if our plucky heroes don’t save us all’ scenarios are more for entertainment purposes than they are based on reality.
We’re currently one of the most resilient creatures on the planet. We’re the cockroaches that we warn ourselves about.
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Shirley, you jest.
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Never is a tough word. Never from our perspective right now. But never & forever are very long times. Yes, we are far more likely to spoil the nest and are already well on our way to that outcome.
OK, let’s paint one scenario. Let’s say that we manage to overcome our collective egos and not spoil the nest and kill every living thing on the planet, deforest it and turn it into a nuclear & chemical waste dump.
If the last 100 years are an indication of future success, then we will probably turn spacegoing from something that cost billions and a huge chunk of the economy, to something that costs hundreds of millions, to where we are now just on the brink of space travel costing tens of millions, to in about 10 to 20 years, it will be in the single digit millions, and then 10 to 20 years after that, the hundreds of thousands. And then, within about 50 years, just getting to space will be equivalent to a very expensive first class plane ticket.
That’s not to say we will colonize anything. Who knows about that. Probably we will engineer something. But as far as the space travel itself, it is already on a decline in cost and accessibility. Paid for by you and me and mother nature.
Colonizing is a different story. My bet is that underground facilities will play a much bigger role than they currently do. With robotic mining, burrowing into a planet to create human habitat can solve many problems simultaneously. I am betting that we will design smallish metal containers, but the real living space is going to occur underground and be built mainly with onsite materials.
So, never… sure… right now it looks like never. But a moon landing was just a pie in the sky idea in 1930 and then suddenly became reality in the 1960’s. Don’t tell me you’re a moon landing denier, Mr. Al?
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But if we do the same thing here we also have the advantage of having all the resources we need a short trip away, true?
I mean, I don’t say ‘never’ either, but I think there are some sequences of events that are far more viable than others.
Sending people to colonize (and therefore raise kids!) in an environment without any ecosystem is amazingly expensive and questionably ethical. We’d need a gravity well to survive for any length of time (so Mars, the Moon, not much else) and getting resources to those poor people would be pretty pricey…and then we get to the fact that living there would be amazingly boring.
When we’ve improved our biotech greatly those become more reasonable options, but not necessarily for humans-that-resemble-us in a typical Sci-fi way.
