Eh. I never understood the gnashing of teeth at the idea of China or Russia taking the lead of space exploration. As emerging nations, they still have a need for the nationalism it fosters. America always bitches that we have to spend all of the money on pharmaceutical research. You’d think we’d be thrilled that someone else is picking up some of the research bill for once.
Should they happen to figure out something useful, do you really think we wouldn’t be able to reverse engineer that stuff? The hard part of research is figuring out the idea. Getting the technicals down on the space elevator or whatever would be pretty easy if we knew it could be done. Just like China has spies in our tech programs, we have spies in theirs. We could get all of the benefits, with less of the outlay.
And the goal is some manifest destiny business about getting off this rock, right? If this is a huge, long, human-wide dream, why would it matter if China or India takes the lead for a bit on humanity’s quest for the stars. Why is it less good if it’s not 'Merica doesn’t lead every little step. Anything substantial is a long, long ways in the future anyway. The current geopolitical order will probably be complete irrelevant then.
I say give it to China. Let them throw their money literally into space for the ego boost.
Fugawi tribe taking the figuring out where-the-fuck-are-we off the priority list… great, so when will the starting gun go off so we can all get our heads out of the sand?
In terms of space priorities, I’d think unmanned exploration, engine technology, sensor technology, power generation and storage, etc. ought to come first before the manned stuff if only the public payback from related technologies from such research would likely come much quicker.
But I’ll let the space scientists work out the details on that.
You make it sound like we gave up space to make Earth a better place. It’s more like we gave up space AND the rest of Earth to make ourselves more comfortable in the here and now.
If I’m interpreting you right, you seem to think it’s a matter of research vs implementation, or more broadly, of science/technology versus social projects.
In terms of policy priorities, that’s a false dichotomy; it’s usually more a matter of all three of those versus lower taxation, defense spending, welfare for citizens, etc.
In terms of public mindshare, maybe social problems are stealing brain time away from the space program, but what the public may not realize is that they could easily have both if their governments reshuffled the other priorities that constitute more than 95% of the pie.
How does one implement a vision without skilled manpower? What makes a “great” country? Do you think they got there absent help from technology?
I’ve never heard this before. Do you have a cite that says China’s government is mostly engineers?
And I’ve usually heard the musing as “What would the government be like if it were all philosophers?”, not scientists or engineers, implying not that our leaders would be specialized into specific fields of research or construction, but that they’d have a good understanding of a broad range of fields, enabling them to ultimately practice good citizenship and leadership to benefit all those fields.
You’re making an awfully clean cut between science and the rest of Chinese society, one that makes little sense.
China exists today in part because of its scientific and technological pursuits in the past… whether that’s development in the military or things like the development of a writing system, of paper, of agriculture, wheeled transportation, naval vessels, improved construction techniques, etc., etc.
And today’s Chinese businesses? The government didn’t just flip a switch and say “You can all do business now!” (though that’s part of it); there was significant infrastructure upgrades happening concurrently with the improving business climate. They went from agriculture and poverty to modern manufacturing (in some areas) precisely because of science and technology, and to the extent that free-market economics is a science, it helped guide their policies as well.
It just makes no sense to untie science and technology from the rest of their development.
Again, what the heck does that have to do with the space program? NASA isn’t preventing world peace. Other conflicting national and international priorities are.
In all of this, the only aspect I can get on board with is that it’s not the right time for manned space exploration, at this moment in time.
Otherwise, there’s been too much hubris upthread, and mostly in the OP, about “generational” movements and prioritizing of ideals.
First of all, technology is far outpacing the idea of “generations”. It’s all a mixed bag of ideals, especially with the last 100 years being so well documented and accessible, it’s all to easy to cherry-pick any perspective that supports your stance.
Second, exploration and pure scientific research are the foundations of applied science (read: Technology.). NASA is seen as a tentpole scientific government agency. One of the more altruistically founded, at that. To atrophy it to the point of being ineffective, or looked upon as a money-sink would be tragic; especially if the reason for doing so is little short-term payoff (which is to bang your head against the rafters of myopic thinking).
Third, comparing the space program, and all that it has achieved (and the people who have died in the name if it) to the vein dreams of a girl wanting to be a princess is to totally undermine any ideal you try to put forward yourself thereafter. I mean shit, most boys I grew up with wanted to be rock stars, not firefighters or astronauts.
Fourth, research and exploration is a gamble, but one that’s usually taken under by evaluating the risks and costs (sometimes with the costs weighed in human lives) against the challenges and pragmatic issues known. Benefits in technology, either profound or subtle are usually seen immediately, taken for granted now, or are much farther downriver ingrained in complicated and poorly understood ways. Without taking some risk… some risk… we’ll remain a stagnant species wringing our hands and contemplating everyone else’s pierced navel.
The Apollo Program achieved the one singular thing that I think most everyone takes for granted: It showed all future generations what’s possible.
So, no – today, manned exploration doesn’t make much sense. But someday, it will again. Robotics and probes will fill the gap nicely before we decide to take the next literal step.
I must have missed some important news. When did our manned space flight program end? When was a moratorium enacted? I know that the space shuttle program was ended. I know that President Obama scuttled human mission to Mars plans, but how has “space exploration” declined at all? How has public support for it declined at all? If you were specifically discussing “manned space exploration” then why didn’t you say so? It’s uncontroversial that it’s expensive and better handled internationally. It’s called the International Space Station and the only nation’s astronauts that have not spent time on it are China’s.
Your link says nothing of the sort regarding space exploration. You’ve extrapolated into deep space from very little information.
Yeah, it’s best to act like a 3rd world nation and steal/reverse engineer your knowledge. That way, when the countries that develop technology start dictating the terms to us we can start whining like 3rd world countries always do.
I’d really hate to live in one of those ignorant countries where they can’t make bleach or nets. What the hell is wrong with those people, we’ve had net technology for maybe 5000 years? Bleach? How hard is it to make bleach? How about fire for boiling water? How long have humans mastered fire for?
It’s not the fault of developed nations that developing nations simply seem completely unable to utilize basic technology to solve their problems. It’s certainly not caused by the fraction we spend on technology related to space exploration.
It is global. It has been global. It isn’t going anywhere. All your premises are baseless. Space exploration is not preventing a cure for malaria.
So you’re saying “space isn’t as high a priority to most people because of more pressing social problems”?
Maybe that’s actually the case. I hope that isn’t true, but if it IS, well, since this is GD, I want to try and argue that it shouldn’t be true, dammit!
If people have stopped dreaming about space to start dreaming about social solutions, they should realize that both dreams share the same political and economic roadblocks.
I dream about both, and I certainly don’t want the space program aborted because people are dreaming that NASA’s somehow holding back their do-goodery.
Speak for yourself. I’d like to see a cite that proves that space no longer holds the imagination as it once did. It may not hold yours, but not all of us are “seasoned world travelers” who have connected with the inner souls of the poor, or whatever it is you peddle around here.
And, I have the answer to the malaria problem - DDT. Science solved that one decades ago, but the environmentalists put the kibosh on that, trading off thinned shelled bird eggs for millions and millions of lives.
Here is an example of the evolution of popular opinion about the space program. People generally express support for the space program, but there isn’t much more than a bit of moaning when large chunks of it are cut. Most of the political will is no longer there, and it’s not coming back.
Meanwhile, while the X Prize has pretty much been a bust, the Jimmy Carter Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global fund and millions of NGOs have made real progress. This is a new phenomena. the role of NGOs have exploded from the 1990s on. And accordingly the decade of 2000-2010 has been the best for human development.
Space travel is not going to stop a cure for malaria. That is absolutely right. But the world’s leaders care about a cure for malaria a lot more than they care about space- especially manned space travel. We are still showing future generations what is possible. We are still dreaming and doing. We are still applying science and research. It’s just in a different realm. Not better, not worse, but perhaps more appropriate for our generation.
Thanks GIGO for the data. I will do some more research, and I was using a sloppy shorthand by setting up Carson as the fall guy. But, I don’t think I need to point out the limitations of bednetting, and I do think that some of the boogeyman hype about DDT has been spread by anti-science environmentalists. Either way, thanks for the info.
I am bowing out of this thread now, though, because even sven’s unbelievable arrogance at speaking for “our” generation is making my head explode. This is a great debate (get it?) but her heavy-handed self-righteousness is poisoning the well.
Unfortunately, such arrogance seems to be a marker for our generation as well.
We, as smart people, ought to do something about that then? I’d think our posterity would approve of us paying a wee bit of attention to figuring out where in the hell we are.
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to look at the data another way: How has employment in relevant industries changed over the last two decades?
Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s industry-separated employment-over-time stats (not easily linkable), I came up with this rough graph. The actual data is on Sheet1.
It shows a ~35% decrease in space employment following the end of the Cold War, and then it’s held more or less steady. On the other hand, there’s been a steady increase in the “Social Assistance” industry. Other “social” industries have stayed mostly the same.
Thought this was interesting, not necessarily proof of anything.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I skimmed the paper and looked at all the graphs. The best conclusion I could draw was “perception varied year to year, but overall it hasn’t changed a whole lot since Apollo”.
I will quote the author’s own conclusions:
How did you go from that to concluding that political will has decreased? At best it shows that following a significant funding cut to NASA following the end of Apollo, the public support hasn’t increased significantly… but neither has it decreased significantly.
(Sorry to split it up into so many, well, Replies)
Why do you think the X-Prize was a bust? We went from pretty much no private industry space travel to a passenger-capable plane in less than 10 years with $100 million spent.
Commercial personal space travel is now a reality for the very rich, and development continues as we speak.
As for the human development, why do you say that this most recent decade has been the best? According to the UN Human Development Index trends (Table 2), the last three decades have maintained 0.65 to 0.66 year-to-year percentage growth in global HDI. Certain regions (Europe, Central & South Asia, South & Sub-Saharan Africa) have seen an increased growth rate over the most recent decade, but the rate actually slowed down in other regions (Arab States, East Asia, Latin America). Perhaps more relevantly, the HDI growth rate is increasing for the least developed countries, but how did you attribute that to NGO actions instead of other developments (war, investment, technology, foreign aid, etc.)?
I hate to be so nitpicky, but you’re throwing out a lot of assumptions that you probably take for granted, but I for one apparently missed out on this whole thing happening. When did the world’s leader start caring more about malaria than space? Says who? As far as I can tell, neither has been a big priority following the end of the cold war, the recent Russian and Chinese push into space aside. I’d love to see data that suggests otherwise.
I love science. Richard Feynman, Neil Tyson DeGrasse and Carl Sagen are the authors of a beautiful quest for knowledge that I adore. I love stars, I love knowing the names of constellations, working to understand string theory, explaining to a small child how an eclipse works. Innovation is fascinating, and true leaps in human knowledge and experience are noble and worthwhile.
However, I have 0 interest in the space race. I agree with the OP in that “our generation” has a very different idea of what success looks like and what is dreamable. For example, a colony on the moon seems too simple and too expensive to want to even attempt. We grew up thinking that we were on the edge of ecological and environmental disaster. There is no strong appeal of spreading that elsewhere until we have our own situation under control.
Where I disagree with the OP is that there is a common vision among our generation of what our dreams look like. The legacy of 10 years of war, a poor economy and massive student debt has stifled a huge portion of the 25-35 year old generation. Al Queda does not provide a competitive enemy, as there was during the Cold War, and it’s hard to justify focusing innovation in areas that we could previously.
So the sky is blue, I got my shit to do and got bills to pay…?
“No strong appeal to spread elsewhere” until the day human beings do really need to… oh, so we will start thinking about it then? Okay…
It doesn’t bother you that we really don’t know where we are or what this is we call reality? Doesn’t it comfort you that at least we are studying, exploring and discovering as one who doesn’t know where or what he or she is ought to be doing?
Actually, at even sven, don’t even worry about what I said. It just doesn’t really matter. This isn’t an argument about data. You don’t think space is a high priority, fine. I accept it.
