Before we get a moon base don’t we need NASA to make the Ares series of vehicles a reality? That seems like it could take awhile…and then the moon base could be fun, but don’t kid yourself into thinking it won’t cost a metric fuckload of money. I mean, it’s a friggin’ moon base! What are we talking, a trillion dollars maybe? As long as we get lots of help from other countries like the IST (100 billion there and it’s in earth orbit) it could be manageable. If we have to do it by ourselves…uh oh.
I guess it doesn’t REALLY matter though, does it? I mean at this point we’re just printing money left and right without any consequences. Let’s go for it!
I think the point is that, if you look at this from a purely money in/money out perspective, or from an increase in standard of living for society perspective, then it’s not clear that manned space exploration is a poor vehicle (no pun intended) for benefiting society.
Frankly, I feel like supporting any serious and cutting edge scientific research is likely to benefit society as a whole, particularly when it’s research of a practical sort (medical, engineering, etc).
And, this isn’t a zero sum game (certainly not with the amounts of money we’re talking about, which is coming from one funding source). It’s not like we have an option to either a) cure cancer in 30 years or b) put a station on the moon.
And, I believe that Lord Ashtar was also trying to say (if I may put words in your mouth) that funding in medical research will always be necessary. There are always going to be diseases and conditions to cure, but does that mean that extra money is always going to be best spent in medical research?
If so, then you have a situation in perpetuity where any research funding is going to be pooh-pooed as ‘frivolous’ because it’s not working directly to curing [insert common or uncommon cause of death or disfunction here].
Certainly, but until we have a cheap and reliable way to get things in orbit, we’ll never be able to launch enough material to set up actual colonies. Such aspirations are realistically centuries away. With current technology, I doubt we could get a proper self-sustaining Martian colony going even if we dedicated the entire US GDP for several decades. For now, we should stick with unmanned exploration and continuing development of launch technology (scramjets anyone?).
What makes you think that spending money on a moonbase means you ignore scramjets? A moonbase may provide money for development of solar energy, battery technology, scramjets and a mountain of other technologies we don’t even know exist.
It’s not just that project like this set the groundwork for future projects, the things we learn may be critical for new technologies to be discovered that make future projects possible.
But what if the key to finally destroying all cancers is something that could only be discovered by confronting the challenges of going to space? Maybe some researcher that would never have been drawn to medical research in and of itself tackles the problem because they’re fascinated by space and want to prevent radiation damage to DNA? What if there is a nano scale compound that targets only cancer cells that can only be synthesized in zero or micro gravity? This kind of serendipity in research happens all the time, it’s much better to spread X amount of money around on several projects going in different directions than one huge project with one stated goal IMO.
Why go to the moon again?[ul][]Because we can.[]Because it’s there.[]It’s on the way to Mars and beyond.[]It’s the best place to find moon rocks and green cheese we know of.[]It’s part of the game plan in 2001 (we’re just a little behind schedule).[]Wallace & Gromit have been there, and it was a Grand Day Out.[]We need to retrieve the Lunar Laser Ranging Retroreflector Array left behind by Buzz & Neil so we can get our deposit back.[]Conspiracy theorists need something new to not believe in.[/ul]
Doubling the amount of money devoted to cancer research is not going to halve the time to a cure. It’s more likely going to result in giving money to researchers with bad proposals. It’s not like we’re not spending any money on these things already, after all.
I never buy into the “cool gadgets” argument. How many more cool gadgets could we have gotten if we had spent the money specifically in the development of cool gadgets? Moreover, what if we develop a cure for MS that allows somebody to live who invents Coolest Gadget Evar!
I’ve got a great high-tech project the nations of the world could collaborate on: preserving the terraforming of Earth.
Seriously, this planet’s already up and running. A moonbase will surely cost a trillion or so. We could sink that money into reducing carbon emissions, preserving wildlife and plant habitat and ocean fisheries, and so forth. Pretty much everyone on this planet would benefit significantly, as opposed to the very few that would ever arrive on the Moon or Mars in the next 50 years.
I’m all for unmanned exploration of space - much cheaper than manned, and the only real point to going anywhere else is just so a few of us can say we did.
What do you base this figure on out of curiosity? I’ve seen a few hundred billion thrown around as the price tag.
Except not everyone is convinced that this would do any good. What has Kyoto cost thus far in terms of money? I’ve never seen anyone be able to quantify the exact costs on either side. What has our return been thus far? Whats the projected total cost of Kyoto and the projected total return? The return on a moon base of course is a moon base.
I’m going by the fact that lifting things into orbit cheaply and efficiently makes the rest of the task of space travel far easier. If we can do this, there won’t be nearly the restriction on payload or fuel for any interplanetary mission. The currently proposed program will use the Ares rockets; essentially minor updates of technology we already have.
We don’t need to set up a moon base to continue development of better launch systems.
I don’t disagree with you on the potential for technological development from such a project. My argument is mostly one of cost: we can learn a lot with research programs we currently have in propulsion and unmanned exploration (for example) without spending hundreds of billions. If the government had the money, then hell yeah, let’s get to other planets. But… the government can’t afford it (which brings up a whole 'nother Great Debate)
From the bit of googling I did earlier, the few hundred billion dollars was the cost for the earlier proposal for the manned missions on the Moon and eventually Mars. Add a moon base, and the price could easily double or triple.
Exactly. And in a lifetime spent mostly in the D.C. area, that’s the sort of inflation I’m used to seeing in the numbers, be it the space station or the Iraq war. If its proponents say it’ll cost a few hundred billion, assume a trillion.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but did anyone expect Kyoto to demonstrate ‘returns’ this soon - especially with the biggest economy of the world on the sidelines?
The return on combatting climate change is either: (a) we keep it from happening, or at least slow it down; or (b) if it happens anyway, we’ll at least have tried. If I live to see massive starvation-driven population migrations out of the tropics in the 2040s and 2050s, I don’t want to have to tell my grandchildren that maybe we could have done something about this, but we didn’t fucking bother.
I’d rather have that any day, than an expensive but useless bauble on the Moon.