Slashdot Mirror
Why Space Exploration Is Worth the Cost
mlimber writes "The Freakonomics blog has a post in which they asked six knowledgeable people, Is space exploration is worth the public cost? Their answers are generally in the affirmative and illuminating. For example David M. Livingston, host of The Space Show, said: 'Businesses were started and are now meeting payrolls, paying taxes, and sustaining economic growth because the founder was inspired by the early days of the manned space program, often decades after the program ended! This type of inspiration and motivation seems unique to the manned space program and, of late, to some of our robotic space missions.'"
When I was 15 or so (ten years ago), I read Carl Sagan's Billions & Billions which was a book more about his thoughts than science ... or maybe I'm repeating myself.
... but I digress.
But anyway, at some point in that book, he talks about ordering this novel device that is a world in a globe. It's a nutrient mix in water with some sort of tiny aquatic animals. But the globe is sealed. The instructions are to leave it where sunlight can hit it and let nature do the rest. So Sagan puts it on his desk.
The next day, the water is foggy. Soon after it is teaming with microscopic life.
But after a short amount of time, the globe goes silent and there is a dark residue on the glass with nothing else in the water. Sagan pondered if the earth had a similar "maximum capacity." Now, there are differences, we can cite different natural processes that replace what we take making them a replenishable resource. But our numbers and pollution threaten them. He also discusses population control and ends up with the general conclusion that war, diseases, natural disasters and the like will cap us out somewhere around 2010. I, unfortunately, don't see our growth slowing as much as he projected.
In fact, it made so much sense to me that, at the age of fifteen, I wrote a letter to my Minnesota senators urging them to push for more spending to NASA & even subsidizing the private sector--after all, how many billions go into defense? Surely some of that could be better spent to begin the lengthy process of insuring that we will not have a glass covering over the earth. My words fell on deaf ears as I received no response. I don't believe I've written a letter to a politician higher than the county level since then although I have received a letter from the vice president for completing the Eagle Scout Award
The point is that if we continue down the path we are taking with pollution, don't invest in space travel and continue to procreate, we are sitting in a glass casing. It's only a matter of time before we put ourselves in a near suicide contention with constrained resources. If we don't have peaceful space exploration and means of growing outwards, our only solutions are war, mass genocide, famine, disease and many horrible ugly scenarios.
I still see the need for making extraterrestrial planets sustainable to human growth and development.
My work here is dung.
You're right. We shouldn't have to justify our ambitions economically, it's such a depressing way to see the world. Lets just do something because its awesome.
We should be capable of deciding what are the goals for mankind, especially those we cannot realise as individuals. I suppose the economic benefits help to sugar the pill for those who are not inspired by exploration and understanding of the universe.
... is usually a very bad idea, knowing how much times the basket fell in the past. But space exploration is not just searching for a backup to save a sample of us. Just trying to do that, either in things we must develop for it, or things we find doing that, or things we discover out there, are short term benefits that must not be discarded (put the question before there were communication satellites and think in how much we could had lost).
I loved the "Why do it now?" question of a senator... you can ask the same question every day, except the day that is already too late.
It's the best way to ensure the survival of humanity, and in the long run it's a very good economical investment (as it's a n investment in science and technology). However, in the short run it brings nothing to the common man (except pride and owe, maybe). So the question is, what do you want.
By the way, I've seen someone talking about private space exploration, but we must remember the amazingly high costs and the relatively high chances of failure in any specific operation. There is no way a private "for profit" organization will take such expenses with this odds against it, not until it's relatively safe and simple due to government-funded research. It is no coincidence that most modern inventions (computers, for example) were made by government-funded bodies or at least, by a company that it's main costumer is the government.
The 16 Billion NASA gets is .01% of the 1.6 Trillion that goes into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid every year. Funding space exploration at this bargain-basement budget level should be a no brainer
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
Well here is a question why do anything? Most things like flying, driving, and so on did not seem useful. Let's take the car as an example. Look at the first model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car. In 1885 could you have seen that thing be more economical than say a horse? I doubt that the first model as proposed by Benz could even travel more than a couple of kilometers. And yet here we are with millions upon millions of cars.
The problem with space is that humanity dropped the ball. We should have done more sooner. Of course part of the problem is that America had to keep footing the bill. But think about what space travel has brought:
GPS, Satellite Media, The Ability to detect global warming, Satellite phones, etc, etc...
I am even thinking if we had traveled and lived in space quicker we would have less of a global warming problem. After all to be able to live in space you better be efficient and learn how to recycle...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
We don't need to waste our money on an army that just inspires douchebag politicians to start shit. Put 10% of the military welfare towards space exploration, and tone down the aggressive rhetoric.
I mean, why should my tax dollars finance an over-powered military which sucks hard at stopping current terroristic threats? Because you're pants-filling fear says so?
(Hyperbole used for effect)
Blar.
It has changed before and it will change again, homo sapiens or no.
In my opinion, the capricious nature of Nature is an even better argument for extra-terrestrial human colonization.
In other words, saying we need to develop space travel because we are screwing up this planet is pretty lame. A big rock can fall from the cosmos next month and kill us all. That should be motivation enough.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Space Exploration serves economically as an impetus for invention and innovation, and as general inspiration for the nation at large. It is a national contest, and national contests have positive economic impact. Space Exploration isn't a broken window -- it's the game of baseball.
The most common form of national contest is war -- if you're having a hard time understanding it, think of it this way. Space Exploration is a way to have the economic benefits of a nation-at-war state, without the significant economic drains from the actual war.
The problem is that economics provides no real way to quantify the relative benefits of either space exploration or curing childhood leukemia, apart from the obvious jobs created, non-stick pans, boring etc. How do you economically measure the magnificence of space travel or the fulfillment of human ambition? Can you put a value on knowing how the Earth looks from space?
By the way I am a medical researcher, and although I think my work is valuable, I often wish my job was more about achieving something positive for mankind, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I also sometimes am involved in health economic assessments, and to see a year of healthy life expressed in its worth in $$ is also quite depressing.
parent is a troll...doesn't provide even the most basic support for his contention
please mod down
on topic, i think private space exploration is great...too bad no one is really doing it. right now, the only active presence of private industry in space is for SPACE TOURISM, not exploration...it's all about some rich guy doing a sub-orbital shot and going 'whooopppeee!' during his 10 minutes of 0g
space tourism is not the same as true exploration, no private industry has any legit plans/funding to actually DO any exploration...all they have is a power point presentation and a sales pitch...slashdot has discussed this thoroughly...can't we accept this and move on now?
Thank you Dave Raggett
John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Before I get started: I actually quite like the space program, and I do think that some advances were made for it. But the "it created jobs!!!" argument is IMHO still a fallacy.
There's a more subtle version or relative of the broken window there. The fallacy is assuming that those jobs wouldn't have been created by someone else, for another purpose.
The thing is, since we've been Keynesian all along, all the governments have known about the Phillips curve too. In fact, applied it.
The short and skinny is that there's an interdependency between inflation and unemployment. So for more than half a century what all governments did was try to stay at a point of their choosing on that curve. That's the reason the Federal Reserve tries to keep inflation at a given point, for example. Because too much inflation is bad by itself, but too little creates unemployment.
So in doing so, it fixes the employment where it wants it too.
Basically if those jobs hadn't been created by the space program, then they would have been created somewhere else. Not the same jobs, mind you, but a roughly equal number anyway.
The even more insidious part of the "but it created jobs!!!" sophistry is that it tries to imply that something was gained where nothing would have been created instead otherwise. People already nod and imagine that all the things those people achieved in those jobs, are surely better than nothing at all, because they wouldn't even be employed without a space program. Which just isn't so. Those people would have been employed, and would have produced _something_ in all this time, with or without a space program. Each job there, came at the expense of exactly one job somewhere else. Every 8 hours day spent reviewing why the shuttle's heat tiles broke, are 8 hours that weren't spent (by that guy or someone else) on some other project.
A point could still be made whether we benefited more from those jobs, than from the alternate history version without a space program. Unfortunately, none of us knows what would have really happened in an alternate history. Maybe all those jobs would have been cabbie and McDonalds jobs instead. In that case, sure, we're better off with them working (directly or indirectly) for NASA instead. But at least theoretically it's equally possible that they would have worked on some better project instead. Maybe in that parallel universe without a space program, all those smart people worked on fusion power instead and now have cheap energy everywhere and a bunch of innovative electronics trickled to other domains from _that_ research. We don't know.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Spread or fail. If humans don't spread beyond this planet, we fail. Plain and simple.
The purpose of life is to survive. Being stuck on this planet will lead to your extinction either caused by ourselves or external forces (aka. asteroid). It is just a matter of time. All the talk about military in this discussion (see other threads) just underscores that we are still thinking small. We'll kill each other for the tiny resources on this small planet instead of taking what is freely available elsewhere.
We should be at war with universe*, not ourselves. We must shed our stone age mentality, now.
* - this means in terms of "conquering" new places that are deemed inhabitable and making them habitable. Like Moon or Mars or Ganymede or Titan.