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Space Vs. Poverty Debate In India
MarkWhittington writes "Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was obliged recently to defend his country's space program, which involves the spending of billions of rupees when India still has a large number of people living in abject poverty. The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
1) Humanity eliminates all poverty, is subsequently wiped out by asteroid....CONGRATULATIONS!!!
2) Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space. If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
You cannot eat research.
Those early men who tried to make fire by rubbing some sticks together in vain were obviously wasting their time. They could have better spent that time chasing a mammoth, and humanity would have been far better off.
Yes, because driving West in a wagon with a gimpy wheel and grandma strapped to the roof to some new homestead next to a river and zap apple trees is perfectly comparable to development of the Moon- an airless, irradiated wasteland a quarter million miles up slope on a large gravity well.
Ah well, at least they won't die of dysentery.
they hire workers with it.
"The poor you will always have with you"
http://bible.cc/matthew/26-11.htm
We will always have poor, and we will always have the responsibility to care for those who cannot help themselves, and help those who can help themselves to begin helping themselves (you have my welfare policy in a nutshell). But, we cannot allow it to be an all consuming policy that detracts from allowing those who do earn from progressing and from mankind as a whole from advancing.
Spave vs Poverty debate is a false dichotomy and I encourage Slashdotters to not fall into this trap.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Right. Because the space program's goal is to load tons of rupees into a launch vehicle and launch them into orbit. And that's not counting the rupees stuffed into the launch platform to muffle the rocket exhaust or the solid fuel boosters whose fuel consists primarily of shredded rupees.
The money spent developing these capabilities is spent on Indians working on jobs. Developing a technological industrial base will help far more people over the long term than just dumping truckloads of rupees on the streets in Calcutta would.
Space programs may require a lot of high-tech work, but all high-tech work requires low-tech work. Ie. someone's got to dig the ditch to run the cables, someone's got to build the giant silos and buildings, someone's got to run the steel mill.
Money is like energy - it is not created or destroyed, simply transferred (at least, for ordinary economic activity - there are exceptions). Their space program is funding things on Earth, not shooting barrels of money into space.
Now, maybe it's not the most efficient way to create jobs for the poor, in the short-term, but think long-term. You cannot deny that the space program is a good thing in the long run. So when you look at it that way, it isn't a bad idea to spend some money "inefficiently" now, in order to improve things in the long run.
The point of going to space was not simply to say, "we've done it." but all the advances it caused us to make, and to be able to better explore the universe, we need to start somewhere.
And we're still reaping the rewards of having raced to space.
The experience gained from government sponsored space exploration allows the government to tackle large problems in a coordinated way.
Basically it's a good team building exercise.
Now as to your comment about Indians not being smart enough to staff a call center with people who speak the language of those whom they will support. A reminder, they are the ones getting paid for this, not the ones paying for it, from their end it's working out quite well.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
They eat plenty of water buffalo, although a lack of big walking steak isn't their main problem. Raising cattle takes a lot of water and land, and any well-irrigated land will produce far more vegetable matter. If a field is big enough to raise one buffalo then it's big enough to feed a family year-round, so you have a choice of daal bhat (rice & lentil soup) for a year or steak for six months and then starving. In addition, if you have a buffalo then you use it as a tractor, it'll produce more food alive than it will by slaughtering it. The question is akin to asking why so few people in the US fly their own plane when there's thousands rusting in the desert.
Most people in India will eat meat maybe once a week, a little chicken with the daily daal bhat. Even if they all decided that cows were fair game, they'd be back to square one in a few months, with less fertilizer.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open your own wallet to help them, you're a saint.
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open someone else's wallet to help them, you're a thief.
That is all.