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Please consider the last stanza of JFK's Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, you may not have heard the whole thing before (emphasis mine):
by thescriptkiddie 11y ago
Please consider the last stanza of JFK's Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, you may not have heard the whole thing before (emphasis mine):
> We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
Isn't that the whole point? The main reason we want to go to Mars in the first place is because it's really, really difficult. Humans like doing things that seem impossible because when we prove that they are possible, our capabilities expand. That's what evolution has programmed us for. We need to do more shit. You can't just say "we know we can go to Mars but it's too expensive and dangerous", because until you demonstrate you really can, that actually means "we can't go to Mars".
- cousin_it 11y agoThat was to beat the Russians.
- trhway 11y agoone can only imagine how human space programs would immediately fire up if we find an alien probe with yellow note attached clearly stating that the invasion is going start on 1st January of 2025 :) Nothing stimulates the creativity and enthusiasm like a firm stick.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 11y agoSee also: Neal Stephenson's newest novel, Seveneves, in which instead of an alien probe with a post-it, something just blows up the Moon. A great book with tons of interesting ideas.
- yongjik 11y agoIf we have to try hard things, how about eradicating poverty across the world? That's gonna be really, really hard, and accomplishing that will fill anyone's heart with justifiable proud. ...With an added benefit that once you accomplish that, there will be several billion people who no longer have to search for food all day long, and they can start to worry about other hard and interesting stuff, like going to Mars.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoSolving poverty is a much harder problem than going to Mars. It's not that we don't have the resources - by most estimates everyone in the world could have a comfortable working-class lifestyle if wealth was evenly distributed. The difficulty is political. Nobody, not even the superpowers, has enough power to make changes like that. Even if they did, they would have to trample on the rights of hundreds of millions of people to exercise it, and that would inevitably turn violent. Changes like that have to be slow and according to the will of the people. No amount of money can help. But the governments of individual countries can work towards it in small steps, and most liberal-leaning countries actually are. Relatively uncontroversial socialist policies like progressive taxation, social security, universal healthcare, welfare payouts, and public works projects reduce inequality within countries over time. More controversial policies like free immigration and free (really free, not TPP) trade reduce inequality between countries. Continuing advances in worker productivity and growing support for things like universal basic income mean the situation will only get better with time. On the other hand, going to Mars is just an engineering problem. A whole 10-year campaign of Mars missions could cost less than what the US spends on its meager socialist policies in a single year. Progress down here and progress up there aren't mutually exclusive.
- idlewords 11y agoGoing to Mars may be "just an engineering problem", but securing funding for it is a political problem.
- meric 11y agohow about eradicating poverty across the world? We're doing it. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/poverty3.jpg https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/poverty3.jpg