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Historically, the research needed for moonshot projects has increased the quality of life for everyone. Think of all the improvements to mundane parts of lives
by ori_b 9y ago
Historically, the research needed for moonshot projects has increased the quality of life for everyone.
Think of all the improvements to mundane parts of lives that we can attribute to satellites. Improvements in weather prediction increasing crop yields. Improvements in geolocation with GPS inproving search and rescue efforts. Improvements in fabrication technology making all consumer products cheaper. The list goes on and on.
I just wish that the kind of funding that would go to a space corps was instead directed at NASA for fundamental research.
- ivanbakel 9y agoTrue, but I've always seen that as a side-effect of the sheer amount of money that flows through the military, which ends up sponsoring so many of these projects in the first place. If the major take-away from this is "money can improve our lives", then why are we spending so much of it on military programs in the first place? A fraction of the money dedicated to human lethality is capable of producing ARPANET or GPS - what can the rest of it do?
- ori_b 9y ago> "money can improve our lives" No. The takeaway is that trying to achieve something that we don't know how to do has knock on effects which improve the things we think we know how to do.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]