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How does investing tons of valuable money and man hours into investigating said probably pointless rock make our any colony better today?

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
>>> A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"? The thing about the space race was not how much money it got but how it was allowed to define problems using measurements to the millimetre and then solve them at the edge of what was technically possible. They were free of politics because no one had ever done it before. But politics is itself how we decide what the problem is. The concept that the US could have spent the moon money on fixing its self is ... a stretch. But to give in to that line of thinking is to abandon all hope. Not spending money on space is not the same as spending it on fixing our deepest problems. Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them. Instead let's fire spaghetti at the walls on local levels - maybe we can find solutions local interventions first.
- nxmnxm99 6y ago
  > Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them. So instead spend billions staring at dead rocks? Going to the moon had tremendous political and strategic value during wartime - the same conditions don’t exist in the world today.
- rlanday 6y ago
  > Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"? Well, we have 2020s America as a comparison. Whether or not you think we’ve recognized the problem, it certainly hasn’t been solved to the extent that e.g. we actually flew people to the moon and back.
simonh 6y ago
All of science is worth pursuing because we never know what we will discover and how it will turn out to be useful. Vast arrays of our current advanced technology and industry depend on discoveries at first thought to be completely useless or mere curiosities. There is of course a reasonable debate to be had about the extent to which various endeavours should be funded, but history has shown time and again you can’t pick and choose up front which avenues of investigation will eventually turn out to be important. For example wandering interstellar objects might seem irrelevant to human life, but we literally discovered one flying through our solar system just a few years ago. It now seems this is a very regular occurrence. These things are shooting past our planet all the time. Maybe not so irrelevant after all. Maybe it would be nice to know more about them, their relative abundance, properties and behaviour, since we live down range in their shooting gallery.
- nxmnxm99 6y ago
  Yep so let’s keep throwing many multiples of billions at pointless crapshoots like CERN hoping the cure to some debilitating cancer magically pops out as a byproduct

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

>>> A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"? The thing about the space race was not how much money it got but how it was allowed to define problems using measurements to the millimetre and then solve them at the edge of what was technically possible. They were free of politics because no one had ever done it before. But politics is itself how we decide what the problem is. The concept that the US could have spent the moon money on fixing its self is ... a stretch. But to give in to that line of thinking is to abandon all hope. Not spending money on space is not the same as spending it on fixing our deepest problems. Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them. Instead let's fire spaghetti at the walls on local levels - maybe we can find solutions local interventions first.

nxmnxm99 6y ago
> Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them. So instead spend billions staring at dead rocks? Going to the moon had tremendous political and strategic value during wartime - the same conditions don’t exist in the world today.
rlanday 6y ago
> Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"? Well, we have 2020s America as a comparison. Whether or not you think we’ve recognized the problem, it certainly hasn’t been solved to the extent that e.g. we actually flew people to the moon and back.

simonh 6y ago

All of science is worth pursuing because we never know what we will discover and how it will turn out to be useful. Vast arrays of our current advanced technology and industry depend on discoveries at first thought to be completely useless or mere curiosities. There is of course a reasonable debate to be had about the extent to which various endeavours should be funded, but history has shown time and again you can’t pick and choose up front which avenues of investigation will eventually turn out to be important. For example wandering interstellar objects might seem irrelevant to human life, but we literally discovered one flying through our solar system just a few years ago. It now seems this is a very regular occurrence. These things are shooting past our planet all the time. Maybe not so irrelevant after all. Maybe it would be nice to know more about them, their relative abundance, properties and behaviour, since we live down range in their shooting gallery.

nxmnxm99 6y ago
Yep so let’s keep throwing many multiples of billions at pointless crapshoots like CERN hoping the cure to some debilitating cancer magically pops out as a byproduct