When I was a boy, my grndfather grousd about the billions of dollars being spent on the space race. I remember being in sixth grade and watching with wide-eyed wonder as Alan Shepard and then Wally Shirra and thn John Glenn blast into space. When Grandad grumped, “What the hell are we gonna do on the moon?” I could only answer, “But Grandad! Why would we not go to the Moon?” He’d inevitably answer that we had plenty enough problms right here on earth that needed solving poverty, dirty water, dirty air, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation – and we ought to be spending our money on solving them instead of going to the Moon. “Seems to me we’re tryin’ to run away from our probelms.”
This evening, Razorette told me that, according to the water cooler chat where she works, there is apparently renewed interest into returning to the Moon, and some people are seriously talking about using it as a launching pad for journeys to Mars. And my comment was, “What the hell do we want to do that for?! We need to solve the problems we have right here on Earth first!?”
Am I doomed to a future of curmudgeonly grousing, or is the whole NASA thing truly a waste of time, money and technology?
(Mods, if this belongs more in GD, I’ll understand.)
The thing is what we don’t spend on the space program won’t get spent on what you think it should get spent on. What happened to the “peace dividend” we got at the end of the cold war?
“Feed the Poor” just means slash NASA’s budget. It doesn’t actually mean feed the poor.
No, they won’t. You can’t take so many people off Earth and put them anywhere else that it would represent a significant portion of the people who live here.
It’s been said before, and it’ll come up again so I may as well be the first: if you want to move to an inhospitable, uninhabited place, there are lots of places right here on Earth where you’ll have room for more people than you would ever be able to convince to go. Antarctica, for instance, is quite a bit larger than the United States, so why not go there? Lots of space and it’s fifty thousand times cheaper and easier to get to, and you don’t need to bring oxygen.
You could move people into the Great Australian Desert, or the middle of the Sahara, or the top of some mountain. You could start populating Ellesmere Island, which is about the same size as Great Britain but is, except for a few tiny military outposts, totally uninhabited. If you want space that’s really, really hard to live in, we have lots of it here, and compared to the Moon it’s paradise.
I personally think space travel is really cool and if we all have to pitch in $50 in tax dollars I’ll pitch in my $50, but let’s not pretend it’s a cost effective way to find new places to live.
We’ve spent practically nothing on space for decades, and have our problems been solved?
In fact, maybe they’re getting worse. I think lots of people from my generation went into science and technology fields because of the inspiration we got from the space race. I know I did. Wouldn’t it be nice if an exciting return to space (which the current proposal isn’t) could inspire the best and the brightest of a new generation to be engineers and not hedge fund managers and lawyers?
There would no doubt be unexpected discoveries and spinoffs, but the inspiration might be even more important.
True, but even a fairly small number of people living in a totally new environment might have insights that will help the mass of people back on earth. Don’t you think the American colonists became different from the British in important ways, with new insights on government?
The only realistic reasons I can think of to go to space are to 1) escape an oppressive regime, or 2) start an oppressive regime (which would presumably be frowned upon back home). I don’t see monetary reasons as a justification for actual colonization; even if we found a planet made entirely out of money, what you would see would be more akin to an oil rig than a colony.
Does that have to be the goal? Europe didn’t pack up and move to North America but the US now has 300 million people in it.
I’ve said it before and I might as well say it again, earth is the only place we know of in the universe where life exists and it’s like a big nature preserve and the goal isn’t necessarily to pave over Antarctica just because it’s easier to do than figuring out how to colonize space. Besides, Sunrazor isn’t asking if humanity should migrate to space, just if we should even bother going and looking. You know, exploring and stuff. I assume that’s what Sunrazor is asking.
The reason our government is willing to fund the move to space - to the degree that it is being funded - it’s all about profit and military advantage. For a long time it was all about who had the best spy satellites, and that’s still a factor. Very little of it is about pure science or adventure or any of the scifi stuff, although the science experiments are great PR. It’s mainly about spying and paranoia that some other country is going to get something we might want.
The computer that you typed that on and the internet that you transmitted it were not developed and advanced to their present level of utility by the funding from Chicago Reader so you would have access to the Straight Dope.
That technology grew because NASA and DARPA and DoD wasted time, money, and technology.
Pick up a copy of Expanded Universe, and read Heinlein’s testimony before Sen. Fuqua’s joint committee; as it happens, what he says happens to be true for me too. Not quite three years after his death, they used the same fibre-optic probe to determine that I needed a triple (actually quadruple) bypass operation. I’m alive because of devices invented for space program telemetry.
Second, why would anyone want to go to the North Slope of Alaska? I mean, Arctic egology is interesting from a science standpoint, but it’s not worth the money to send an expedition there. What’s that? Oil, you say? Well, we discovered those resources when we got there.
Mars and the Moon are complete planets, with natural resources that have never been tapped. Even with present technology, it’s possible to list a few things rare on Earth that might be worth using the fuel to ship back from either world – not to mention what we might discover that we don’t yet know is there.
(As long as you have Expanded Universe in hand, another suggested reading, the (very) short story “Colombus Was a Dope.”)
It has been beneficial (although, unfortunately, not imperative) that we evolve advanced intelligence - just like it has been beneficial to invent technologies, develop opposable thumbs, and have lots of babies (well, not so much is very recent times). The humans on the front of the evolutionary curve will also realize (realization/comprehension = intelligence) that we need to spread our seed (just as your ancestors realized, sexually, that they needed to spread their seed).
Evolution takes place on levels or stages of complexity. We are newly experiencing this ‘intelligence’ stage. For example:
Humans evolved with very different diets for thousands of years = humans get fat
Humans die/evolve due to weight and health problems caused by new diet
But intelligence is now being “learned” faster than we can evolve
Before we have a chance to equalize and get use to these new abundant foods, we will learn to regulate our diets and not eat them
We can calculate the inevitable death of our planet in several billion years due to the sun’s changes, and we can envision many possible reasons for human extinction at any time. Thus, we fall upon these evolutionary ideas of space colonization.
It is true that we waste so many resources and so much money, but the space program is not a source of waste. Let us relate this to spending money on global warming:
“So if AGW (anthropogenic global warming) doesn’t exist we will just have wasted all of this money”
These two are similar because they both involve spending money on science and technology, and giving jobs to the people who are professional scientists and technologists. The inventions and discoveries found will certainly lead to improvements in the economy and in society. Furthermore, we will not be spending federal dollars on: employing favorite companies to rebuild destroyed countries, manufacturing copies of the same weapons we could build 50 years ago, and providing salaries for soldiers/meat-shields (instead of scientists, educators, and all the rest of people who enrich society - including those funny stand-up guys who amuse scientists and add to brighten their lives so humans can have a better chance at longterm survival - catch my drift?).
Not only will NASA positively stimulate the economy (for the longterm - unlike war), but it will hold careers for people you want in your society.
