6 ms·

sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other plan

sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.

patio11 17y ago
If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa? I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  feed starving man. starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him. we've just doubled suffering in our system. when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity should you really continue aid? see also: dead aid http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254067031&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...
  - btilly 17y ago
    This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations. The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population. Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance. And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.
    - eru 17y ago
      Thanks for putting this right.
    - berntb 17y ago
      All this is of course totally off topic, but... First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children). I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative. About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished). About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?) Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.) Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no. Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil). But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh... The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation. Edit: Syntax and more syntax, sigh.
    - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
      in india and china? no. in africa? yes. sending resources to places in contention is an easy way to cause further destabilization. see: cia in south america in the 60's. if india and china's government's collapsed I would want to immediately cease aid to them as well. an aside: this line of reasoning is my problem with libertarianism too. if historically under precondition X A caused B, it is quite silly to talk about A and B in a vacuum. see: nick szabo ranting about tort law :)
- alex_c 17y ago
  I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y? How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.) We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Why does it have to be X or Y? Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money. Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.) Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)
    - 17y ago

sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.

patio11 17y ago

If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa? I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
feed starving man. starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him. we've just doubled suffering in our system. when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity should you really continue aid? see also: dead aid http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254067031&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...
- btilly 17y ago
  This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations. The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population. Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance. And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.
  - eru 17y ago
    Thanks for putting this right.
  - berntb 17y ago
    All this is of course totally off topic, but... First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children). I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative. About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished). About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?) Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.) Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no. Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil). But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh... The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation. Edit: Syntax and more syntax, sigh.
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    in india and china? no. in africa? yes. sending resources to places in contention is an easy way to cause further destabilization. see: cia in south america in the 60's. if india and china's government's collapsed I would want to immediately cease aid to them as well. an aside: this line of reasoning is my problem with libertarianism too. if historically under precondition X A caused B, it is quite silly to talk about A and B in a vacuum. see: nick szabo ranting about tort law :)
alex_c 17y ago
I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y? How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.) We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.
- patio11 17y ago
  Why does it have to be X or Y? Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money. Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.) Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)
  - 17y ago