this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Hot take: defund any space research outside geostationary orbit and move these resources to fixing Earth. Really, we don't need to know if there were bacteria on Mars 2 billion years ago, we need more green tech, more monitoring of Earth systems and an attempt at carbon scrubbing.
This isn’t a particularly hot take. It’s been a steady drumbeat since at least the instantiation of NASA… and it’s probably traceable all the way back to the folks standing around eating raw meat and laughing about the fool trying to tame fire.
The two biggest drivers for innovation are exploration and war. Exploration is the useful force in your proposed endeavor, teaching us how to survive in hostile environments and giving us insights about other resources or natural systems that we can adapt to our own. Exploration keeps the human race learning, thinking, and working together. You need those things.
What isn’t going to help you is the piddling handful of spare change that is spent across the world on space exploration. If your goals look inward, I respect that - you’ll have better returns by reforming the health and education mafias that siphon cash and stifle innovation. You’ll find more money and progress by far if you can divert funds and engineering focus from the military to environmental renewal.
What you shouldn’t want is to stifle any existing area of peaceful collaboration and innovation; this isn’t an either-or, it’s a yes-and. The target should be any societal aberration that makes it harder for people to get higher on Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got valid goals, but bad aim.
Thanks for this. Much more clearly put than I would've done, had I tried...
Beautifully sad. The value of space exploration on society goes far beyond the the important yet not very far reaching science that we get from missions. NASA was pivotal in the development of more capable computers, many formats of data compression, and many other technological innovations that we take for granted.
At the heart of the OC’s question there’s a valid and useful impulse. We should, as a society, always be asking whether we’re putting our resources in the right places. I just think that the case for space exploration dovetails pretty nicely into where OC wants to focus. Folks that want to shift funding into environmental reclamation are the natural allies of us space exploration nerds. It’s all science, it’s all toward improving humanity. Just need to get us all on the same side of the ball. :)
(of course alongside defunding 75% of the military)