youname4321 t1_ixeee48 wrote on November 22, 2022 at 8:31 PM

Can’t wait til we land there. Reflect on the billions spent and many lives lost. Then just stick a flag or something, look around and go whelp guess that’s it. Sure glad we didn’t spend all that money feeding starving children cause now we can say we’ve been here.

wgp3 t1_ixeiruz wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:00 PM

Yeah how dare we spend several billion on space exploration to advance our knowledge. All that money could have gone to feeding starving children. Good thing we don't spend 100s of billions on video games every year. Could have used that to feed hungry children. If people would just not buy new electronics and instead spend that on feeding hungry children that would be great. Less research on renewables and instead funneling that towards hungry children would be nice. We shouldn't be worried about long term issues like that when children are dying today. Fix people not having food before worrying about those other issues that will cause problems later.

youname4321 t1_ixek15n wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:08 PM

Now explain to me how walking on mars creates renewables. Does it generate any advance in our quality of life?

bookers555 t1_ixeoltu wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:39 PM

The technology that comes from space travel absolutely does help with our lives.

If it wasn't for the Apollo program computers wouldn't be nearly as advanced today, for example, and the ISS helps, not just with weather tracking, but with deforestation and crop tracking, along with the myriad of satellites we have. Other things that have come from space travel research are water filters, anti-corrosion coating, scratch resistant eye glasses, hearing-aid devices...

And since you care about the enviroment, i'll tell you that, in order to reduce the polution created by rocket launches, specially the one on natural soil around launch bases, they came up with a little something called emulsified zero-valent iron, a solution that can be injected in groundwater and eliminates a huge variety of chemicals that can be a huge risk to the enviroment. For 10 years now this thing has been used by a ton of companies from oil to chemical companies, and helps reduce their enviromental impact significantly. It's NASA's most succesful licensed product so far, too.

And if you care about money, are you really going to throw a fit over NASA's yearly budget of 25 billion, when the US military has one of 750 billion and they haven't fought any real conflicts for more than 20 years, and 80 since it fought a conflict that actually affected the US?

wgp3 t1_ixentkl wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:34 PM

Never said it would create renewables. You pointed out it was a waste because there are children starving now. So clearly you think starving children is the priority and money shouldn't be wasted on other advancements that may have longer pay off times.

I pointed out that renewable energy investment doesn't help starving children now either.

Define quality of life? Do video games improve quality of life? Does faster computing power? Better displays? Do sports improve quality of life? What about astronomy? What about quantum physics? Geology? Art?

There's a lot of things out there that either don't directly improve quality of life or don't improve quality of life at all depending on your definition.

Should we funnel all money related to video games into feeding starving children? Literally a 100 billion dollar business annually. Think of how much that would help starving children. Which is more important? Playing games instead of going outside or feeding starving children? Creating art museums or feeding starving children? Funding space telescopes or feeding starving children? Having YouTube or feeding starving children?

If you can't answer any of those it's because they're stupid questions. If you answer feeding starving children and aren't willing to ever speak out against every other thing then why speak out over this one?

Truth is you will never eliminate every single injustice or bad thing in the world. It's a ridiculously stupid goal to say you can't do something until every other issue is solved or unless it provides some strict utilitarian function defined by something as ambiguous as "quality of life".

It's especially hypocritical when the use case is unknown. How can we know what all may be learned or discovered when we haven't done the thing yet? People could have argued for feeding the poor instead of building out a highway system. Or instead of funding research on electromagnetism. They couldn't have predicted how useful it would be for making life better from a quality of life standpoint. Nor does quality of life capture how important it is for people to dream and be inspired by things. Even if those things have intangible benefits.