3 ms·
Honestly I think you would find thousands of volunteers to do space exploration with a much higher risk than we are willing to entertain today. I sometimes won
by rurounijones 7y ago
Honestly I think you would find thousands of volunteers to do space exploration with a much higher risk than we are willing to entertain today.
I sometimes wonder just how much we are handicapping ourselves as a civilisation with the risk averseness we take to some tasks while being pretty blase about others where the reward is nowhere near as high.
- adamsea 7y agoI would argue the bigger handicap is the resource constraint for large projects - from lack of funding as well as lack of resources since the major sources Of taxable income (Amazon, Apple, etc) don’t pay tax.
- pjc50 7y agoResources are a choice. Nobody ever did a cost-benefit assessment for the trillion dollars of Iraq war. (Arguably the space programme worked as a proxy war with the Soviet Union; America didn't want to let the Russians ""invade"" the moon first.)
- adamsea 7y agoApologies - not sure I understand. But I think I agree that societies choose how to distribute their resources?
- wongarsu 7y agoI suspect the risk avoidance is simply a political necessity. In the US, ever since the Apollo program ended NASA has to fight for their budget, they can't afford highly public deaths for fear of entire programs being cancelled. Meanwhile Russia's space program is mostly noteworthy for being a reliable launch provider with one of the most reliable rockets ever built. With no budget for bigger ambitions and little competition until recently there was no incentive to change anything.
- mumblemumble 7y agoI doubt it's about what the astronauts themselves would consent to. It's about congressional hearings, what the talking heads on MSNBC and Fox News would say, and what all of that might mean for the lives and careers of many thousands of additional people who have no intention of going into space themselves.