I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…
Yes. For those who consider it wasteful spending, consider that a lot of problems are not fixable by just throwing more money at them. There’s a saying that “9 women can’t make a baby in one month” even though 1 woman can in 9. Many ills of society are as much about political/social motivation, entrenched opponents/regulatory capture, NIMBYism, etc and not problems that you can fix just by spending more. There’s also the concept of a “marginal dollar” - spending one more dollar in an important area that already has a lot of money (and has problems that aren’t really addressed by just having more money) may not be as impactful as a less important area where that dollar would go a lot further.
I think so.
How high the priority should be is a debate worth having, but space has many ways to wipe out a planet. Having two planets, having a permanent space station, could go a long way to increasing survivability.
Not only that, building in a vacuum, building in zero G, even building things under great pressure, all can allow us to build new materials with brand new properties.
Also, being able to sustain a small group of people somewhere completely contained an inhospitable can be utilized on earth to feed people at home, or recycle water at home.
One important feature is the psychological unification. Space becomes a “common enemy” to humanity. And humans work well under a common enemy.
Yes, we need to do things like space exploration because these are the endeavours that advance humanity. Even in practical terms, plenty of discoveries that are useful here come from technologies developed for space exploration. If you’re really worried about unproductive use of resouces, maybe worry about how we deal with the pedo elites that rule over us and hoard resources on unimaginable scale.
The point is the advancement of science, not simply the travel itself. Space science is integral to many advances we take for granted these days.
Do you rather propose we stop producing movies, adult content and series and use that $$$ to space exploration?
Strictly, no. The human spirit yearns for it though, and I think it shoukd be given a treat from time to time.
There are just so many things that should be trimmed first. Like the oligarchy, who hoard money and use it to make the world worse. Space travel is science. Science’s value is intrinsic.
Space exploration falls into the category of “luxury spending” for me. Only when every human on Earth is fed, clothed and housed should we be looking out to the heavens.
Solving problems for the sake of solving them yields great joy (and unexpected benefits). You don’t need to have a stable job to solve a sudoku or crossword once in a while.
If not for space exploration, we’d not have soo many technologies. We’d not have pushed so many boundaries that a lot of advances would have happened way too late than we did.
not strictly necessary, no. but so is a lot of what we do today.
it’d be cool.
Well… short term no it’s not necessary (although as other folks have said on the thread it does give some technology advancements, and gives humanity a warm fuzzy sense of achievement)
Long term, it depends on the eval criteria
- If we want the human race to live as long as possible, then I would say yes - to diversify, distribute and minimise the risk of planetary (Earth) failure
- If we don’t give a toss about the human race then no, the Universe will be just fine without us
How else will we be able to someday mass travel through space to find another planet once we inevitably kill this one?
All attempts to discover how the universe works benefits us. Even a lot of really esoteric stuff has proven useful in fields like medicine and civil engineering.
Honestly if we can pivot our high tech innovation efforts from being mainly driven by military to being driven by basic research (basic in this case meaning researching the natural world directly without any particular goal other than learning), we’d be a lot better off.
Yes, but I think the efforts right now should go into solving the climate crisis rather than going to the moon.
We CAN do both. They might contribute to each other.
But what we can definitely fucking all agree is that spending all of our money on weapons in an effort to kill each other over which colour clothes Santa is wearing is pretty dumb.
And world hunger, world peace… there is a list of things that should take priority.
yes. there’s two branching discussions here:
- Space as a scientific topic, it needs to be understood. Our observation of reality is very local, and although we can prove that some of our assumptions about physics, life and civilization work on our neighborhood, it doesn’t mean that they’re the same everywhere. That alone is sufficient reason for me, to explore.
- Space as the new frontier. Many if not all exploration done on planet Earth has been, in some shape or form, resource-motivated. Lands, food, medicine, minerals, routes, are all found through exploration and normally through people spending money looking for a return over investment. Space is no different.
I think the interesting part is where this two branches touch: If we ever plan on capturing an asteroid for mining, the technology needs to be there to do it, and hopefully the technology is about the benefit of all humankind. This kind of development is showing us the way to move forward and solve problems. Imagine a world when we don’t need to destroy ecosystems in order to get iron because all iron comes from off-world.
I used to think this, but here’s the problem: new resources to extract mean absolutely fuck all under the current global paradigm.
There’s enough iron out there to make several tons of it available to every human in existence for whatever they need or want to do. Will that happen? No. It’s not profitable for the owner class to do that. Instead, they will fight amongst themselves until someone has an effective monopoly on asteroid mining, and then limit the supply so they can generate maximal profit (De Beers, anyone?)
We have the capability, right now, to feed everyone on Earth. To clothe everyone. To house everyone. We don’t. Any resources out there that we might find useful will be gated behind the same greedy, psychopathic group of leeches that currently control everything else.
The planet isn’t being destroyed because we had no choice. The planet is being destroyed so a bunch of MBAs could show off a nice graph at the quaterly meeting. It is very much delibrate. Any resource extraction in space will solely be done in that it is more profitable than doing it on Earth, climate be damned. We need to fix that problem before asteroid mining for the good of Earth and humanity is even an option.
If we could get resources from space without having to extract them on earth that seems inherently better even if the same MBA shitheads are running the space mines. It would make it a lot easier to prohibit harmful resource extraction methods if they can also be economically accomplished without having to destroy irreplaceable ecosystems, for example.
