Unless they hope to meet a friendly alien species or kill a hostile one, it’s a waste. If there ever was life on Mars that will still be the case if and when we get hyperdrive technology.
There are some medical and technological advances that have been achieved thanks in part to the space program, but I don’t think they’re worth the money. The only way I can see the space program justifying its existence is if it eventually allows us to intercept an asteroid or something.
Risking the Earth? This is progress. You sometimes have to risk things like money and even people (yes, I do tend to think that death sometimes is justified). People invest money in something hoping for it to become useful. That’s simple business.
maybe they explore space to get away from all the trouble on earth and to see if we can move on to a new planet that doesn’t have poverty and global warming on it.
You could make exactly the same argument about building massive particle accelerators.
I guess you could! I suppose getting knowledge for its own sake is fine, but I guess I’d prefer the money to be spent on something with more practical applications.
The space program is an absolute necessity and has given us huge leaps in technology we wouldn’t have had yet. By your criteria we’d only venture into space if everyone on the planet were happy and fed, and by that time the population size would be such that no one could be happy and fed. It’s clear that eventually some of us will leave Earth, and the space program is the groundwork to make that happen down the line. There’s a good argument that private industries will soon be the forefront of space exploration, and if that’s the case, more the better, but there will still need to be a non-profit just-for-science organization that continues its work.
>The space program is an absolute necessity and has given us huge leaps in technology we wouldn’t have had yet.
war calims the title of Mother of Invention. Not only violent conflict though – the space race does represent one facet of the cold war. Necessity seems hyperbolic to say the least, and it’s given us huge leaps in technology? While the space program research has provided us with useful results (along with all other areas of scientific research, to an amount according to the amount invested, I imagine) who’s to say we wouldn’t have benefitted as much or more if those minds and that money hadn’t been allocated to other ventures?
Exploring space and all that is great, but it’s not something taxpayers should be responsible for. Many Brits donated money towards our part in the mars effort by choice.
Funny story; the Americans spend millions of $ developing a pen that can write upside down. Everyone else uses pencils.
Funny story; the Americans spend millions of $ developing a pen that can write upside down. Everyone else uses pencils.
That’s actually an urban legend involving a pen company who wanted a good PR story.
Necessity seems hyperbolic to say the least, and it’s given us huge leaps in technology? While the space program research has provided us with useful results (along with all other areas of scientific research, to an amount according to the amount invested, I imagine) who’s to say we wouldn’t have benefitted as much or more if those minds and that money hadn’t been allocated to other ventures?
Ventures that someone else would just say was not worth it unless you were feeding the hungry. The point here is that the OP’s meaning was that any time or money not spent on directly solving a social or survival problem is wasted.
Regardless of it’s comparatively low cost and economic benefit, I personally believe that NASA would be a completely justified organization even if it was nothing more than a hole in our collective pockets. The search for better understanding of our universe is well worth the money. Some ventures are quite worth it even if not economically beneficial.
The money is well spent, the entire economy of the western world is based on out sciences. Without continually pushing forward in those areas we simply cannot compete with the cheaper labour and materials in the rest of the world. Besides the direct benefits to our economies, supporting the leadership of large portions of our high-tech industries, it’s beneficial to humanity as a whole.
I do know that we are having serious trouble with our economy, but with the advances in space exploration, we can be safe from whatever. In another thread we where talking about the end of the world in 2012, and it made me think that if we could just live somewhere else, we would have the chance of surviving everything. Scientists have already found a planet that would be suitable for human life, but all we have to do is get the technology to travel faster than light. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/plan-m29.shtml
It is estimated 20.5 lightyears away, and could be a good place to live with water, and a good temperature.
I am not saying that I beleive in this stuff, but it would be great to know that we have a place just in case the world does happen to have some trouble. Remember that there is a possibility of the destruction of the whole human race.
I know it seems impossible, but once we believed that we couldn’t fly, we proved that. We thought we could never get to the moon, we proved that. We thought breaking the sound barrier was impossible, we did that. And we also thought that creating anti-matter was impossible, but we did. It costs a bundle of money to create though. I wouldn’t be surprized if we go faster than light.
Space exploration is expensive – primarily because of the energy it costs to escape the effect of gravity. But it’s not a question of money, it is our biological imperative for being aware of the space/time matrix to go out there and to colonise it.
To keep things in perspective, compare USA’s expenditure in Iraq ($1,300Bn 1 between 2002-2008) with NASA’s stipend ($108Bn 2 over the same period).
Yeh, I know… money well spent on bringing freedhum and democrashy to the Iraqi people at the expense of scientific knowledge and anthropic sustainability which half the US voters don’t seem to give a damn about.
I know it seems impossible, but once we believed that we couldn’t fly, we proved that. We thought we could never get to the moon, we proved that. We thought breaking the sound barrier was impossible, we did that. And we also thought that creating anti-matter was impossible, but we did. It costs a bundle of money to create though. I wouldn’t be surprized if we go faster than light.
It’s not the same – from both a physical and mathematical sense, traveling at a speed above that of light is impossible. While perhaps we’ll eventually be able to utilize wormholes or otherwise manipulate spacetime to our advantage (and thusly create “shortcuts” in the fabric of space – allowing traversal of the universe beyond the rate at which light would traditionally be able to traverse it), traveling at a velocity higher than that of light just doesn’t make sense; it would require literally infinite amounts of energy.
