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Too much human intelligence is spent on space missions. Imagine what we could achieve if this intelligence was spent on useful things which affect regular peopl

Too much human intelligence is spent on space missions. Imagine what we could achieve if this intelligence was spent on useful things which affect regular people in our society. The costs vs benefits of space exploration are not balanced at all.

mschuster91 7y ago
Quite the other way around: Many if not most progresses in human tech history came from such endeavours. Space travel was helped/made possible by military research (beginning with the Nazi regime), and then over the decades each r&d helped the other side to advance. Internet? Military origin. Some forms of long range comms? Space. Or, when we want to generalize to all forms of r&d deemed "wasteful", much research in the car space was being done in the Formula 1 and later trickled down to consumer cars - the only case in which trickle down politics actually work. Many antibiotics and other medical agents came from researching rare animals in remote countries.
- cryptica 7y ago
  This argument is highly speculative and very likely misleading too. Common sense would say that the best way to hit a target is to be aiming at it. If you're aiming all over the place, it's possible that you could end up with a few bullseyes but how many shots have you wasted? How many bullseyes would have been achieved if you had been aiming right at the target? My point still stands that it's a wasteful way to reach those targets.
  - p_l 7y ago
    By concentrating you risk getting over focused and boxed into some small branch. Having many, many directions with cooperation across them means you get significant interdisciplinary benefits, from just "someone looked at it the other way" to (quite common!) "we need some fancy material, fortunately space R&D already prototyped one that fits!"
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    Your premise is flawed: you assume we already know what the targets are. Quite often in science we do not know the targets beforehand. Quite often we just happen to study/research something and out falls something else with very practical use (after minor adjustments and a little bit of out of the box thinking) we did not imagine was there.
jogundas 7y ago
Since the other commentor has already tried to address the benefits, I would like to point out that the costs are far from infinite: eg, NASA budget is 0.5% of total US budget (not GDP!). That is arguably a good investment, even if the only return is increased motivation to study STEM.

mschuster91 7y ago

Quite the other way around: Many if not most progresses in human tech history came from such endeavours. Space travel was helped/made possible by military research (beginning with the Nazi regime), and then over the decades each r&d helped the other side to advance. Internet? Military origin. Some forms of long range comms? Space. Or, when we want to generalize to all forms of r&d deemed "wasteful", much research in the car space was being done in the Formula 1 and later trickled down to consumer cars - the only case in which trickle down politics actually work. Many antibiotics and other medical agents came from researching rare animals in remote countries.

cryptica 7y ago
This argument is highly speculative and very likely misleading too. Common sense would say that the best way to hit a target is to be aiming at it. If you're aiming all over the place, it's possible that you could end up with a few bullseyes but how many shots have you wasted? How many bullseyes would have been achieved if you had been aiming right at the target? My point still stands that it's a wasteful way to reach those targets.
- p_l 7y ago
  By concentrating you risk getting over focused and boxed into some small branch. Having many, many directions with cooperation across them means you get significant interdisciplinary benefits, from just "someone looked at it the other way" to (quite common!) "we need some fancy material, fortunately space R&D already prototyped one that fits!"
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  Your premise is flawed: you assume we already know what the targets are. Quite often in science we do not know the targets beforehand. Quite often we just happen to study/research something and out falls something else with very practical use (after minor adjustments and a little bit of out of the box thinking) we did not imagine was there.

jogundas 7y ago

Since the other commentor has already tried to address the benefits, I would like to point out that the costs are far from infinite: eg, NASA budget is 0.5% of total US budget (not GDP!). That is arguably a good investment, even if the only return is increased motivation to study STEM.