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Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr.
by jedmeyers 12y ago
Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. (http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html)
- 7952 12y agoWell feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).
- JabavuAdams 12y agoThere are so many structural / societal problems in the way of feeding the poor that it's not a very interesting problem. You would have to re-engineer our society and power-structures. Better to make incremental progress on poverty, without constraining the innovators to work on problems that don't interest them, or that seem even more intractable than e.g. space travel or AI.