Conflicted. I get totally worked up about spending…squandering!..money for bigger and better useless weapons that could be better spent on education and food stamps for gay whales, you know the drill…
But space stuff just gets me, I love it to death! I watched just about every damn minute of the moon landing, even Walter Cronkite telling me they were still sleeping…Jesus, what a pathetic astro-junkie. Burned incense and chanted for years hoping to see Hubble funded, and then when they told us it didn’t work, gotta fix it, just be another year or so…ran screaming from the room, gibbering and tearing my hair.
I love space stuff. Got a whole set of lame rationales for it, but the truth is I just fucking love it! Let’s go! Let’s just go! Because its our destiny, because of all the great technical spinoffs, because anything you want but let’s GO!
Then why go? On the one hand, you have location A with people X, and on the other hand, you have location B with people X. The only difference is that location A has breathable air, abundant resources, and other people who can help you when there’s a disater, while location B has none of those.
I don’t like the farm bill, either. (BTW, that wasn’t $286 billion per year, was it? The farm bill authorizes farm subsidy programs for a 5-year period, IIRC. I’m just saying I believe it’s more like 3.4 times as big as the space program, not 17 times as big.)
Look, if Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Sam Walton heirs, the Mellon family, and a bunch of people similarly situated want to fund a Mars program, I’d be all for it. It sounds like they could afford to do so, unless the Mars mission ultimately required a big increase in NASA’s budget, since presumably a good chunk of NASA’s costs are devoted to unmanned operations, the space station and space shuttle, and other things unrelated to going to the moon and Mars.
But I have no interest in funding manned space travel at this time. To me, at least, it’s far more clearly a waste than the farm bill is, because space travel is clear and simple, and the farm bill sure isn’t. I know some of the farm bill subsidizes rich farmers and quite profitable agribusinesses, but how much of that it does, and how much it helps struggling family farmers, fuck if I know.
If I thought that the money that is being spent on space exploration would actually go toward solving human problems like poverty and disease, and if I thought it would actually be enough to make a difference to those problems, I’d be all for that. But I don’t think that’s what would happen if we stopped spending money on the space program. I think the money would get spent on more of the same stuff that the rest of the federal budget gets spent on, without much difference in the outcome.
This is why you have things like, oh, I don’t know, keys on the doors that could be used to empty all the air out into space, and you make it so that not just anybody can get one of those keys without a good reason for having it. You make it so it’s not easy to do damage to vital systems, just like people who run banking networks or nuclear power stations or dams or chemical manufacturing plants on Earth do.
I think space travel is pretty much ridiculous at this point, until we can get that light speed limit revoked. Exploration by robots, super duper telescopes, that sort of thing.
As I said in the last thread on this subject, I think space travel proponents drastically underestimate the difficulty in getting large numbers of people to the moon and mars, as well as the incredible hostility of the lunar/martian environments. Antarctica is a much better bet for colonization, and you can go there now, yet no one is clamoring to settle there.
I think there’s a quasi-religious component to a lot of this. We must colonize the stars, therefore we will colonize the stars. Real-world problems are to be hand-waved away, should anyone have the poor taste to mention them. Just as persistent and annoying atheists are shushed by such phrases as “man should not presume to judge the ways of God,” so space-flight skeptics are shushed by irrelevant and non-sensical comparisons to Columbus, as though the one thing had anything to do with the other.
However, this is the forum for witnessing, so don’t let me stop you.
Okay, well that’s fair. But I’d just as soon he grow and learn right here where there’s plenty of air and plenty of other people to help stop him if he grows the wrong way and learns even worse things than he knows now. I’ll trust him more when he has set about to use his technologies to feed people and such. Once he’s grown and learned good things, he’ll have my blessings to settle the moon.
We do it to learn about ourselves. What is really needed for us to exist. We do it to explore and learn, to know what is there and what we can do with it. We do it to open doors to our future, not that we won’t have a future, but to look to see if there are more options.
Example: One thing that the moon has that we really don’t on earth is He3, a potential source of clean fusion, with apparently enough energy that it may be worth the effort to mine it on the moon and transport it back to the earth. Is it any coincidence that as people are talking about running out of fossil fuels (though even if oil is running out we have nat gas and coal for quite some time) and or the potential damage of burning fossil fuels that there opens up a whole new and clean source of energy just waiting for us.
I don’t know if He3 will do anything for us at all, I just express to show a possible reason, a possible future, to see that doors may be opened to a better future or OTHO may lead to a worse future, but it is exploring the possibilities.
So? What other reason can you think of for humanity t exist? Just… to exist? To survive? To produce another generation? Sounds pretty dull, to me. I’d rather we existed for our achievements. And what greater achievement can there be than space travel?
The amount of money funnelled to the aerospace industry through NASA is a small fraction of the money funnelled through the Department of Defense. Realistically, the aerospace industry doesn’t need NASA. The United States spent as much developing and building just the F-22 Raptor as it spends on the entirety of NASA in four years.
If human civilization is completely lost here on Earth, it’s going to be lost in space as well. There isn’t anywhere to go that can be self-sufficient.
I went to a talk by Burt Rutan, and he showed a chart comparing deaths in early aviation with deaths in early space travel. A lot more people, relative to the number of pilots, died in early airplanes. Explorers die. People become explorers knowing the risks. I don’t think we’ll have a problem getting volunteers. We do have a problem with a public who thinks this isn’t an inevitable thing.
As for money, is funding for space really less important than keeping big tax breaks for hedge fund managers? It appears that some people think so.