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You defined the limitation as "looking after the people on earth first," which has basically no meaning, so no, I would not say that you adequately defined thos

• throwanem 3y ago
  > which has basically no meaning I don't think it has less meaning than the idea that the most sere and hostile environment for our species that we've yet been able to access - the deadliest imaginable desert, accessible only at vast effort and expense - has for our taking the boundless cornucopia of riches that space maximalists constantly promise, and with no more support than you complain I offer. Meanwhile you blithely argue that some significant fraction of a trillion dollars, available in this happy counterfactual from what had been the war department's budget, should be devoted to this and nothing else, with no thought to the opportunity cost - and demand I justify myself in arguing we should better do otherwise! That opportunity cost would be measured in human lives, consigned to neglectful death in the service of your cause - but whether by neglect or murder, dead is dead. You'd be far from the first so to act; history is replete with examples, even ignoring the one we live among now. Such people are sometimes called to account. What would you say if you were?
  • least 3y ago
    > I don't think it has less meaning than the idea that the most sere and hostile environment for our species that we've yet been able to access - the deadliest imaginable desert, accessible only at vast effort and expense - has for our taking the boundless cornucopia of riches that space maximalists constantly promise, and with no more support than you complain I offer. We've already benefited greatly from just the process of trying to get there. Even if there is no "riches" to be had in terms of extracting resources from alien planets, we still gain from our endeavors. This can be indirectly through technological advancements made in service to that mission (which we've seen plenty of already), or it can simply be in the pursuit of knowledge in the understanding of our universe. > Meanwhile you blithely argue that some significant fraction of a trillion dollars, available in this happy counterfactual from what had been the war department's budget, should be devoted to this and nothing else, with no thought to the opportunity cost - and demand I justify myself in arguing we should better do otherwise! Why do you assume that there is not thought to the opportunity cost? It's quite clear that we have different priorities on how humanity should allocate its resources but to say that it's not a consideration is just crass. The amount of human productivity we dedicate towards space exploration is a remarkably small percent of what's available, and a lot of that is driven by individual's interest in it. The space program's budget is minuscale compared to what we spend elsewhere, maybe around 5% of a trillion dollars. That's a significant amount of money, but you seem to think that could be better spent on... what, exactly? Let's say we reallocate that budget to social security. That'd be adding less than 4% to its budget, which is already over a trillion dollars. Or the combined spend of medicaid and medicare, in which case it would be less than 3%. > That opportunity cost would be measured in human lives, consigned to neglectful death in the service of your cause A lot of things have indirect consequences, positive and negative. Many things that have dramatically improved the livelihoods of humanity have come at a great cost. > but whether by neglect or murder, dead is dead. You'd be far from the first so to act; history is replete with examples, even ignoring the one we live among now. Such people are sometimes called to account. What would you say if you were? The advancements made by curious people has made the world less impoverished and less "dead." Even if 100% of human productivity was allocated towards protecting human life, people will still die. That is life. At what point in your hypothetical world where you got to make these policies would it be acceptable for humanity to start exploring space again? When humans stop dying? Humanity's driven by curious people willing to explore well beyond what seems rational to most people, not myopic luddites who would eschew entire avenues of exploration simply because they can't understand the utility in it.
    • throwanem 3y ago
      These justifications aren't novel, and aren't really much better than you claim mine to be. You gesture vaguely at technological progress, as every humans-in-space booster does. I have yet to hear anyone defend any of those advances as both useful enough to be worth wanting, and impossible to achieve on Earth. That's an easier job in this case because we're discussing a counterfactual, so you're as free to invent something novel to defend as I am to imagine a trillion dollars going to an aid organization that actually manages to put the money where it does the most good, rather than serving as a combined graft slush fund and political football as most such organizations do now. > At what point in your hypothetical world where you got to make these policies would it be acceptable for humanity to start exploring space again? When there is no human on Earth who suffers in a way that money can prevent, I'll no longer consider a dollar spent on putting a human into space a dollar culpably wasted. > Humanity's driven by curious people willing to explore well beyond what seems rational to most people, not myopic luddites who would eschew entire avenues of exploration simply because they can't understand the utility in it. I grew up suffused in the US space program. Huntsville was my favorite vacation. I read everything I could get my hands on - which, thanks to my grandfather, was a lot - I dreamed of astronaut school, at least until I learned it had visual acuity requirements. But even that little dampened the dream; I still spent most of my childhood studying with the intent of becoming an engineer and ultimately joining NASA. There are a lot of reasons that didn't happen, but none of them had to do with the dream itself failing - and in some ways, it still hasn't; do you think, if I still could believe there was anything for us either to find or to offer out there, I wouldn't want my people to go to the stars? If, even in the face of all that, I still can be unconvinced by the case for putting humans as we are now into space, then that case needs to be better made. But dreamer though I was, the thing I came eventually to understand about a dream is that, however beautiful it may be, eventually you wake up and find reality still there. As far as "human curiosity beyond rationality" goes, I would have been much more sympathetic to that argument before it became inescapably obvious that in its pursuit we have quite literally set the world on fire. In the face of an error on that scale, I believe only a fool would fail to adjust his perspective, at least to encompass the possibility that, in the argot of my youth, we have gotten quite a bit too big for our breeches. That we should reach beyond our grasp is something even I consider creditable in the species. That we should reach into the gearbox of the world and have it tear off a couple fingers, and then want to go right on reaching without a thought at least to stanch the bleeding, at some point becomes self-destructive madness. An individual human displaying such behavior would be restrained for his own good. As a species, we would have to do that for ourselves, or reality will do it for us. It is doing exactly that now. We would be wise to take that into account in deciding our next actions. We won't. But we could, and we should. Humans aren't going anywhere any time soon, and I see nothing meaningful to choose between Mars today and Mars a hundred years from now, or two hundred, or a thousand. In that meantime, our efforts could make a meaningful difference as to how many billion humans are alive to celebrate that happy day. You really want to convince me that space boosterism might still, in spite of everything, have merit? Show me you can take the long view.