So were you also saying this about making Gravity, which as we saw cost more than this spacecraft, or the Hobbit trilogy which by itself cost half a billion dollars? Because my experience has been that people rarely complain about spending that kind of money on frivolous things, except when it is on understanding the universe around us, at which point they suddenly bring up poor people.
As if space was the huge expenditure keeping us from helping them, as opposed to say interesting science with a completely negligible cost compared to say the military and its constant engagements. And yeah, asking âwhat do you hope to learn?â in advance is essentially saying you donât believe that knowledge can ever have value.
Thereâs no false dichotomy here. Money spent on a fruitless space program is money that cannot be spent elsewhere. Thatâs an actual dichotomy.
Should the world be spending more of itâs resources on healthcare and housing and sustainable energy and sustainable farming and fixing social ills and the like? You betcha!
Should they be spending less money on bombs and guns and government sanctioned murder? Of course!
Does that in any way change the argument that Indiaâs space program is a waste of time and resources that would be far better spent elsewhere? No!
Youâre trying to excuse wasting money in one particular manner by arguing that there are other -worse- ways that people waste money elsewhere.
This isnât a contest. No one is impressed that your pet luxury is not the -most- wasteful one around. Itâs stil lwasteful, and it still is being put to a use other than alleviating extant human misery.
And for what? What do we get out of Indiaâs space program?
Not true. How did they know, before someone dared to cross the sea?
As far as we know, the solar system does not have life as we know it, but there is more to life, and science, than just finding more trading partners.
What can we learn about the solar system, and maybe even Earth itself by exploring? Weâll never know if we sit smugly at home, confident in our ignorance.
Iâm just as much against big-budget Hollywood films as I am against Indiaâs space program. Just because other people waste money too - often even more than you are wasting - doesnât mean you are except from being blamed for your own wastefulness.
You are trying and failing to deflect the argument and change the topic. There is little to no tangible gain from Hollywood movies. There is even less tangible gain from Indiaâs space program, or anyone elseâs for that matter.
And so we wouldnât remember him, but we might still remember Amundsen, who pushed forward into exactly that. And while I canât tell you that his expedition was a good idea, or that we have profited from yet, I will note we are still learning about Antarctica and someday may find something useful our 19th century friends could not have anticipated.
If youâre just as much against them, where are your comments indicating so? Because while in theory we all might deserve to be blamed for wastefulness, Iâm going to be upset when Iâm criticized for indulging in a video game by someone who was silent when my neighbor was indulging in a yacht. When someone does that, I donât think Iâm wrong in taking it less as hatred of waste and more hatred of games.
For the same reason what youâre saying here sounds an awful lot like simple hatred of astronomy, and thatâs reinforced by crying that you donât see how what we learn might be useful. As it happens, pure science has gradually been faltering in the last few decades, and one of the main reasons is pennywise managers insisting we need an idea of what profit it might have in advance. That chokes off all but the most mundane discovery.
âTangible gainâ is a phrase that sounds so important, yet somehow always means deriding curiosity and creativity. So many people have learned to love science thanks to space exploration, and we have learned so much because of them, but none of that sort of thing is ever considered on balance sheets.
The same could be said of all art, music, literature, poetry, or any number of things that make life worth living. Gods forbid that anyone pursue anything that doesnât provide an immediate, concrete, tangible benefit to the most impoverished people on the planet.
Of course I wasnât there. But there are these things called historical records, and this thing called human culture, and these things called self-evident truths. âWater is wetâ could be called a self evident truth. Likewise, âSailing takes you to other placesâ is another one.
And when you sail places, you find other people. Why? Because people are there to be found, particularly as the majority of all human population in all time has been located in coastal regions and on riverways and other bodies of water. And weâve been sailing since⌠say it with me⌠âtime immemorialâ.
Maybe you donât know what âtime immemorialâ means? It means time beyond memory - literally it means so long ago that no one remembers it, but figuratively it means so long ago that it precedes recorded history.
The earliest humans were sailors. They knew through basic experience that boats brought you to other parts of the world, and in doing so brought you to other people. No one had to show them, and they certainly didnât go out looking for other people. They just stumbled on them in their wanderings.
âOh hey, that land across the river looks like good farmlandâ someone said. So they crossed the river, picked a few fruits from the trees, hunted a bit, and then met another group of people. âHello?â they asked cautiously. âनऎसŕĽŕ¤¤ŕĽâ the others said, and they were united in their mutual confusion.
But back on topic, your argumentation is so flimsy itâs absurd. Youâre saying that we should spend untold resources on further exploration of a place we already know is empty, lethal, impossibly far away, and perhaps most damningly, not economically viable.
Your justification? Knowledge for knowledgeâs sake! And if thatâs not justification enough, toss blind expansionism on top! Screw those starving poor, Iâm curious about moonrocks and Martian soil moisture! Screw sustainable living, all we need to do is find new places to exploit before we render the earth uninhabitable!
Itâll totally happen, you guys! Weâre just years away from wormholes and FTL mass effect hyperjump gates - I can feel it! We just need to believe hard enough and we can push past the obstacle of trillions of miles of lethal emptiness and find The Garden of EdenShangrilaAtlantisa new frontier of limitless possibilites and boundless resources sailing between the stars!
Since the kidâs habit of buying comic books technically contributes to his family going bankrupt, I am entirely fair in accusing him as being the cause, never mind its scale compared to his parentsâ cocaine and gambling problems. How dare he read under such circumstances! Sure, Glitch, very rational way to look at things.
I donât even know what to say to someone who would treat the idea of knowledge for knowledgeâs sake as a joke, certainly nothing compared to the great importance of what is economic. Itâs such a bizarrely hollow idea of what should motivate people.
Do you have any idea where we would be without people questing for knowledge for knowledgeâs sake and art for artâs sake? Itâs them, not people who have been interested in material gain, who have driven nearly every advance. That someone can sit here on the internet, with even the idea that we might build a world with less poverty, is entirely based on that kind of work.
And yet here it is: knowledge for its own sake spat out as some kind of contemptible insult, just like the politicians who ridiculed fruit fly research and have been working to starve our learning ever since. What a sad place we have reached.
You accuse me of False Dichotomy, then turn around and go for the olâ Slippery Slope argument.
âYou really shouldnât drive a Porsche - itâs an unreasonable and needless luxury.â
âOh, next youâll be telling me that I should become a monk and forgo all earthly possessions!â
ââŚuh⌠no?â
You mean the same 1970s when we were locked in a nuclear arms race with the USSR, teetering on the brink of global annihilation, expecting the end of the world at any moment, with both sides so desperate for any sort of meaningful political or ideological edge that they poured untold resources and colossal effort into the biggest dick-waving competition of human history?
See, it wasnât -really- justified back then, but we did it anyway because we had screwy priorities and because it was a nice distraction from nukes hanging over our heads. You canât invoke that same reasoning NOW, though, because today itâs even less justified.
Funny. I thought trolling had more to do with making snarky comments about whether I âwas thereâ to witness firsthand whether something that obviously never historically happened did not, in fact, happen.
But by all means, please, handwave away the key points of my argument, focus on peripheral or tangential details, and if all else fails accuse me of trying to get my jollies by mistreating people instead - because clearly thatâs what Iâm doing here.
For one reason, Iâd say to make it such that humans arenât quite so easy to make extinct because of [name your species-killer here]. And why else? Because itâs in our DNA. Why bother to do any science at the bottom of the ocean or at 150,000 feet? Because itâs there and we donât know much about it. @Brainspore said it better than I did,
"Sorry! No particle accelerators until we solve human greed and avarice!"
Oh no, not a bit of it. I share your conviction that I know, in precise detail, everything the solar system and universe has to offer; that every inch is a barren wasteland from which we can profit neither monetarily nor intellectually. We should stop spending a dime on anything that does not promise a concrete return of, well, at least a dime. There is, after all, no other metric by which humanity can be measured other than monetary return. And of course, every penny we save will be spent buying food for the hungry and shredding AK-47s. I say we stop all non-applied research and solve the problems of war and hunger once and for all.
Frankly, I think the moment Galileo pointed his telescope at the planets we were on a course that would not end well. Hell, right there youâve got a needless expenditure of money on telescopes. Ok, maybe we did need to take a peek just to make sure that space was a waste, but now we know, beyond all shadow of a doubt. And besides which, our economic and technological systems can never develop in a way that would make this sort of thing sustainable even if there was something out there. That much is absolutely, 100% certain. Itâs not sustainable now; what possible reason can there be for assuming anything will change, ever?
The whole thing reminds me of the research that mathematicians did in centuries past, calculating large prime numbers. What an incredibly worthless pursuit. Their intelligence could have been put to much better use, but instead they just locked themselves away for hundreds of years calculating a bunch of silly numbers. Why? Because they found it interesting! No other reason at all! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
So, you neednât look to me for criticism. The future and the frontiers are as clear and obvious and as fully mapped as the nose on my face, in exacting detail out to the nth degree â as is history, I might add. There is nothing that is not known, or at least nothing I wonât claim to know at absurd length on an Internet thread. Even if by so doing I am depriving society of brainpower that could be better spent, you know, bringing peace to all Mankind.
Wow, a person from India commenting on a subject that matters to him (or her, sorry canât tell). Something of an improvement on Glitch dictating what some people in another country on the other side of the globe should do because he has an opinion (and is almost certainly male, white, American and relatively privileged and therefore worth listening to when he gripes)âŚ
I am strongly in favour of as many countries as possible, and even more private enterprises, getting into space. Because we donât know what that will lead to, and it could be fantastic. The potential upside is huge, the downside is relatively minimal. That doesnât mean we should be ignoring our current problems, but it is not zero sum.
They knew there were riches in China, but they werenât aware of America.Assuming you live in the Americas, where would you be if everybody had your attitude?
The riches of technology are obviously not enough for you. I would suggest to stop using computers, mobile phones, etc cause each component in there, was not provided on a silver plater as some people think, but discovered through tough labour.
I am well aware its cold and hostile. But hostile was the Atlantic in 1492. Still is, but we have the technology to overcome it.
Better get lost in a âpipe dreamâ than stagnate in your present.
Its hilarious you are against a space program aimed to push the boundaries of human knowledge but not against the US going for a stroll to Iraq or Afghanistan. You do not object about the trillions in military spending. Have you any clue how many people that money could feed? or how many problems could solve? For one, if today that military spending was cut to zero there would be no more wars. No more loss of life cause of guns, no more loss of life cause you donât have enough people cultivating the land. You donât have land seeded with land mines and depleted uranium bombs.
Keep in mind that you cannot have infinite growth in a closed system which is the Earth. Without growth you canât have your monetary rewards. Then again the US for example could fuck the world and grab all the resources. But then those resources will eventually decline and so will the US or whoever. And without looking further than our noses, you, we, everybody will be fucked.
Orbital research aboard the ISS orbital station is the sort of cutting-edge science that NASA should be doing.
Routine crew and cargo transport to and from that orbital station is not.
So NASA is in the process of transitioning routine cargo & crew transport to private providers, who are designing and building a new generation of commercial launchers and spacecraft that can be used, not just by NASA, but for a variety of other missions, by anyone willing to pay for them.
Two different privately-built robotic freighters, the SpaceX Dragon and the Orbital Sciences Cygnus, are already operational and making deliveries to the ISS under contract to NASA.
Three different manned crew transport vehicles - the SpaceX DragonRider, Boeingâs CST-100, and Sierra Nevadaâs Dream Chaser spaceplane - are in various stages of development, with DragonRider scheduled to debut next year, and the others to follow not long after.
The fact that we can pay the Russians to provide routine crew transport to the US-Russian-European-Japanese-Canadian orbital laboratory while we transition between the (far-too-expensive for routine transport) shuttles (which have honorably retired from a long and impressive career of building that massive orbital station - among other things) and the privately-built-and-operated crew transports that will be coming online starting next year and providing US transport to the ISS going forward, is actually one of the cooler features of the 21 Century.
As for other users, SpaceX launchers and spacecraft (together with Bigelow Aerospaceâs privately-built expandable habitat modules, in some cases) figure in the plans of two different private ventures planning manned flights to the moon, and three different manned missions to Mars.
Additionally, SpaceX and/or ULA launchers figure in the plans of three different companies in the initial survey & prospecting stages of long-range asteroid-mining programs, and one privately-funded survey hoping to provide usefully-early warning of potentially catastrophic impacts.
All privately financed, with no taxpayer funds needed.
Really, itâs hard to see the current situation as anything even remotely like âsadâ unless youâre still trapped in the 20th-Century Cold-War paradigm of space exploration featuring spectacular but not-terribly-useful astronautic stunts employed as nationalistic dick-swinging exercises supposedly proving each nationâs technological superiority.
Thatâs not how space works in the 21st Century.
The current situation is one of the most fecund, most exciting, most promising periods ever in the history of manned and unmanned space exploration, and Americans are at the very forefront of it.
