Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
So India should put all its poor people on the moon?
"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.
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.