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Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa

• pif 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6695429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6695429
  • js2 12y ago
    No comments on that submission. Here's a previous submission with discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372563
• chriskanan 12y ago
  Many comments on this previous post about the letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372563
  • GrantS 12y ago
    It's interesting to note how much has happened in the short 891 days since that previous discussion occurred in mid 2012. At that point, the space shuttle fleet was retired but SpaceX hadn't yet flown a commercial resupply mission to the ISS. Curiosity hadn't yet landed on Mars. Rosetta/Philae arriving at their comet, etc. I'm sure someone can come up with a more complete timeline, but I've been following space exploration as a layman for a number of years and these last couple of years have been some of the most exciting in quite awhile.
• john_b 12y ago
  I've found that objections to space exploration share a fundamental axiom with the more general objections to federal funding of scientific activities of any type. Namely, that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is an inherently worthless activity. If that knowledge happens to have some immediate positive impact on a problem affecting presently living people, then it may be worth pursuing if such a pursuit isn't "too expensive". While it's trivially obvious that the value of unknown knowledge is unknowable, this doesn't often occur to such people, focused as they are on the limitations of the present instead of the possibilities of the future. Even if the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake were a completely useless activity which diverted resources away from more pressing problems, societies everywhere have accepted that their tax dollars inevitably fund certain things which are unnecessary. Clean parks, public support for the arts, city fireworks on holidays, etc. Yet people generally find these latter sinks of funding less objectionable than things like space exploration and federal support for science. Perhaps it's because the enormous scientific illiteracy afflicting the populace as a whole (which can be observed simply by reading any popular journalistic account of scientific developments) places scientific developments and scientific pursuits into some mental category of "abstract, probably useless stuff".
  • mnl 12y ago
    Let's talk about real science. How come the SSC got cancelled in favour of the ISS? The Higgs could have been found in Texas, around 2002. There would have been no need for the HEP community to build further hadron colliders, it would have run at 40 TeV and upgrading it would have been easy. Now we're stuck with the 27 km LEP->LHC tunnel and only this year the LHC will start running at 13 TeV... The Congress made its choice after spending $2 billion because it would cost $11 billion. The ISS has cost U.S. taxpayers $75 billion and the science there is more or less an excuse. It never was a scientific decision. There's science and PR "science".
    • IndianAstronaut 12y ago
      Both the numbers are drops in the bucket as far as federal funding is concerned. Out of a $3 trillion budget, we could have easily afforded both. Also, to defend the ISS, there is a lot of science done there for private companies that is not made public. It is also a post where many nations get together and can really study how man will survive and cooperate in space for the long run.
      • ethana 12y ago
        We know the answer to that question already. Man will not survive in space in the long run with biological limitations. The ISS had essentially proven that. There should be more interest and development in the quest to preserve and backup the brain in foundations such as http://www.brainpreservation.org/ http://www.brainpreservation.org/ The current conception of space travel as displayed in much of popular media is next to impossible and wrong. The biological factor will impede any of such fantasies. The only way to sustain human space travel is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.
        • pavel_lishin 12y ago
          I don't necessarily disagree with you, but we haven't really explored the full range possibilities of canned apes in space. For example, there are no centrifugal artificial-gravity generators anywhere in space - setting some up could show us whether the various problems with free-fall environments could be mitigated.
• gcb0 12y ago
  love how they both ignore the fact that children only starve because of war and such. mostly for resources that are paid handsomely on space exploration, changing hands on wars often dressed as religious ones.
  • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    Or that policies banning or limiting birth control and abortion, almost universally pushed by the religions of the world, lead directly to starvation, suffering, and lack of resources for children. From a moralist's perspective, we shouldn't be defending rational inquiry and space exploration to a nun. A nun should be defending her anti-child beliefs to us.
    • nsxwolf 12y ago
      You certainly lack the charity of Ernst Stuhlinger.
      • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
        Yet somehow every single metric about human happiness, life, security, etc has massively risen up since we've given up on theocracy or strong theological aspects in government and society in general. The countries that still have these beliefs are middle east hellholes that are exporting terrorism around the world over cartooning.
        • nemo 12y ago
          Why do you assume the nun is a theocrat? Religion is still fairly strong in peaceful secular states and hasn't dragged them into hellholes. That some religious fundamentalists hold odious beliefs doesn't mean that the nun who wrote the letter does. For all you know she's some kind of liberation theology type who doesn't subscribe to anything you've generalized about. Religions are very complex things, simplistic black-and-white thinking and generalizing about them doesn't really help anything at all, nor does it promote anything beneficial to humanity, it just empowers fundamentalists by supporting their ignorant simplistic black-and-white thinking about religion and science.
• ixtli 12y ago
  "significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work"
• theneb 12y ago
  The "invest in earth problems instead of space problems" has been a common rhetoric among people as of late with various missions such as to Mars. What I find an excellent addition from this letter is the discussion of goverence of tax money in the letter. It isn't a simple case of just deciding to redistribute funds from one department to another.
• dmead 12y ago
  where is the nun's letter?
  • pdevr 12y ago
    I really liked Stuhlinger's reply and I am for space exploration, but this question is relevant. Without knowing what she asked, it is not possible to know whether the answer addressed the concerns she raised.
    • joshmarlow 12y ago
      Agreed. I would also like to see what (if any) reply she had to this letter.
      • ctchocula 12y ago
        Footnote: Having read Dr. Stuhlinger’s letter, Sister Mary responded: “Thank you – from now on, I firmly believe in the profound value of the space program.”
• dmethvin 12y ago
  Stuhlinger's thoughtful reply seems like something very few people would do today. Not just the part about taking time to reply to a random letter, but the part about deeply considering the role of their work and its effect on humanity as a whole. Perhaps he's just rationalizing a greater good because he really likes space exploration, but if that's the case he did an excellent job of it.
  • scott_s 12y ago
    I see no reason to conclude that the number of people who "deeply consider the role of their work and its effect on humanity as a whole" has gone down since 1970.
    • dmethvin 12y ago
      I don't have any quantitative data, agreed. The Internet certainly provides a lot more visibility for such contemplation, and I can't recall seeing a lot of it.
      • dasil003 12y ago
        To the contrary, I think one of the defining factors of the Internet is that it creates an unprecedented amount of visibility to shallow contemplation, thereby drowning out any marginal increase in deep contemplation.
        • Kalium 12y ago
          Every era has its overwhelming amount of shallow contemplation. Historians and archivists are excellent at sorting out the deeper material in retrospect.
  • nsxwolf 12y ago
    Today you'd get a tweet written by Russel Brand calling the nun a stupid whore.
    • 12y ago
• jkot 12y ago
  It is not 'just' about starving children in Africa, but also about actual space research. It is crippled by huge manned projects with questionable scientific return. With money spend on Apollo, Shuttle and ISS we could have already explored every corner of solar systems. Just imagine hundreds of lunar and mars rovers.
  • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    This is the most bothersome and asinine aspects of Elon Musk fandom. Instead of a smart space approach we're degenerating back into a Star Trek-like fantasy of manned exploration. Sorry but our bodies are not built for space travel and the costs of fitting machines around us to keep us alive is incredible. I don't know why people can't be satisfied with robotic missions. Lusting after landing on what is essentially a dead and hostile planet like Mars is a bewildering prospect. I don't see these people going to Antarctica, which would be a comparable experience. Seems to me, cheap and effective terraforming is a prereq to any planetary migration or exploration. Even then it would just be a pick up and drop service to Mars or where-ever. Exploration, in general, should be done by robots.
    • Lambdanaut 12y ago
      Because SpaceX's end-goal isn't to land humans on Mars to conduct a bit of science. It's to start self-sustaining off-world colonies in order to increase mankind's prospects of surviving in the universe. You can literally put an infinite number of rovers on Mars and still not have this.
      • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
        Robots can do "a bit of science" just as well, if not better. With a comparable budget, you'd see some pretty incredible robots on Mars. Meanwhile we're pissing away dollars shoving meatbags into tincans in LEO and pretending its progress. Even during the madness of spending that was the Apollo program the time spent actually doing "a bit of science" was extremely limited. The cost per minute doing science with people is a whole different league than robots.
• Symmetry 12y ago
  One thing I see missing from these discussions is the notion of diminishing returns. In the end money is an abstraction over the productive capabilities of our economy. If I were to spend twice as much money on food I could get twice as much. But if the world doubled it's expenditures on food I doubt food production would go up by more than 30% or so. If you read charity evaluations at Givewell they always ask "How efficiently are they spending their money" but they also ask "Could they efficiently spend more money if it was given to them." Another is that it seems odd how selectively we apply this argument. I often hear about the need to stop space exploration until everybody is fed but I don't think I've ever heard someone say we should stop making movies until we end hunger.
  • avar 12y ago
    Your observation about diminishing returns is an excellent one, but your comparison about space exploration and movie making doesn't make much sense. The reason these people don't argue that we shouldn't stop making movies until we end world hunger is that (well, most of the time), the making of movies is not funded by the government, but by the private market. It's a one thing to to argue that we shouldn't do Y at all as a species until we accomplish X ("we shouldn't make movies when people are starving"). It's very different to argue that maybe the government should completely prioritize X over Y for the purposes of allocating tax money ("let's not spend money on space until we can feed everyone").
    • Kalium 12y ago
      It should be remembered that movie productions are subject to an impressive array of subsidies and movie companies the beneficiary of a great deal of government policy and enforcement. That aside, there will always be a better cause to which all resources should be devoted. And usually problems which would result from a solution. Would a more rapidly growing world in which everyone has food but in which nobody has a job be a better one?
  • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    >stop making movies until we end hunger. Or building interstates or sports stadiums or paying inflated union benefits and salaries, or military spending, etc. The problem is the above are all politicized and directly financially benefit some voters, thus have cheerleaders and other irrational actors holding up this spending and defending obvious corruption and abuses. Science, when done right, is non-politicized and doesn't financially enrich voters directly, so there's very little "I got mine" mentality here like there is with other programs. Many of which turn into "make work" programs (bridges to nowhere, etc), if not outright entitlements (welfare). Not to mention the philosophical and practical problems with welfare in general. Once you establish a system where being poor is favorable to not being poor, then who will pay for all these resources. As a Chicagoan, CHA housing is a lot better than what you can rent on your own unless you make a decent wage. My wife and I used to wake up every morning in the winter and shovel snow only to watch the CHA housing across the street have city employees do this for them. Hell, if the government is going to house you, feed you, shovel your snow, etc what incentive do you have to ever leave that system? None as far as I can see. Now we have an idle class of people involved in drug abuse and gang related crime and shootings, as well as epidemic of unwanted children used to further game the system for benefits. Give up on space exploration for the sake of the insatiable welfare state which inevitably creates massive ghettos, massive taxation, angry youth mobs, and religious radicalization? No thanks. We've watched this path unfold in Europe and want none of it.
• grondilu 12y ago
  One of my math teacher told me once a short story about Henri Poincaré arguing with a child about the use of mathematics. When the kid asked him what were maths used for, he answered : « and you, what are you used for? » I don't know if this story is true or not. I suspect it isn't. But frankly I have the feeling there is more sincerity in this answer than in this long letter to a Nun in Africa. If you spend some time on a spaceflight forum, you will read enthusiast posts about how cool it would be to see other words, to experience micro-gravity, or how interesting the science behind rocket engines is, but I rarely read about how space science will solve hunger, world peace and whatnot, and when I do it's precisely as an answer to someone who brought this up, and in this case someone who does not work in aerospace. When a Kid loves space and rockets, when he spends countless time reading science-fiction books, it's because to him it's fun, fascinating and exciting, not because it's supposed to feed starving children. I doubt an adult rocket scientist or engineer is fundamentally different. Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa.
  • Kalium 12y ago
    It's not that he doesn't give a crap. It's that his priorities are different. The real question here is "How can someone have priorities different from me?". I submit the answer is "Why would they share yours? They aren't you.".
  • IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    >If you spend some time on a spaceflight forum, you will read enthusiast posts about how cool it would be to see other words, to experience micro-gravity, or how interesting the science behind rocket engine is, but I rarely read about how space science will solve hunger, If I go to a video gaming forum, do people talk about how to end world hunger? For the price of one new video game, you can feed someone in Africa for two months.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • vacri 12y ago
      Video games aren't routinely justified as the solution to an extinction event on earth.
• deleted 12y ago
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• araes 12y ago
  Funny. I appreciate the want for more exploring, but the logic he lays out is almost the exact rationale that has slowly eroded NASA from 1.6% to 0.5%. Maybe not all for "think of the children," but after we lost the fear/competition of Russia, space always comes second when you pose the question as "...when we could do X with the money." Why not spend it on something that will fulfill our lower needs as a group (hunger, health, shelter, happiness)? More annoying, the political defense to try and keep the votes for it makes it all the more silly. It spreads over multiple states and locations to ensure votes, which naturally makes it more diffuse and internally fractured. But you're still arguing with the increasing conservatism of an aging country whose Reps know that voting stability and order gets them back in. OK. It would also help if they had a goal that wasn't just "stay up." Well projected vision can set fire to a thousand hearts. (cue Superman joke)
  • dinkumthinkum 12y ago
    I think it is more complicated than that. There are political factors at play. It is not as if every American has a direct voice in the budget. It is less than 50% of what is was but at the same time it is a 0.9% drop so I think we should be careful what conclusions we draw here.
• putzdown 12y ago
  Stuhlinger's letter expresses a basic optimism toward science that was characteristic of the modern era in general and the middle of the 20th century in particular, and which has tarnished a great deal since then. Their faith held that science has a sort of generalized power to produce good; more specifically, that given a relatively small cost investment (in terms of money, time, effort, attention, education, etc.) in scientific endeavor, a very large and concrete benefit is likely to eventually result. His story of the lens grinder captures that expectation. Without arguing the case, I think it's fair to say that a much smaller proportion of the people in Western societies (at least) now hold this faith as strongly. The costs of modern "progress" have become more apparent over time: cures often harbor severe side effects; machines have their wastes and their dangers; knowledge that seems sure at first often proves less sure with further study. Our confidence that the costs of science are as low as we once thought they were has weakened; our confidence that the benefits are as great or as inevitable has also declined. His argument that reapportioning money from science to humanitarian causes is not as simple, in a democratic, bureaucratic country, as it seems it should be is still as strong as it was when he gave it, if not more so. But the underlying assumption that, "If we just do something ambitiously scientific, vastly great goods for humanity will result," is harder to sell than it was. We no longer accept that a manned voyage to Mars (for example) will result in concrete benefits for humanity in a way that is remotely analogous to the support of a lens grinder at the dawn of optics. Proponents of space exploration must continue to both show the rest of us the concrete benefits of investment and, at the same time, limit their expectations. It will never again be like it was in the 60s and early 70s.
  • contingencies 12y ago
    Thanks for an extremely thoughtful and well reasoned contribution. FWIW, I wonder if the decentralization / popularization of access to space technology will contribute to lower costs that can iteratively enable higher research goals without needing to cajole wrist-slashing degrees of government spending?
• not_that_noob 12y ago
  What I find remarkable is that Stuhlinger worked for the Nazis at Peenemünde, where he undoubtedly was part of the machine that rained rockets and death on the Britain and the rest of Europe. Imagine being at the spear tip of something so evil as being part of the Nazi killing machine - and then, fast forward a few decades, transform into a sage statesman, arguing so passionately for the oneness of humanity and for the peaceful uses of space. I wonder if he ever chose to explain that dichotomy to his children before he died. It blows my mind.
  • sanderjd 12y ago
    I don't know much about this, and even less about Stuhlinger and Peenemunde in particular, but I suspect that some blame for raining death on people can be laid at the feet of quite a few rocket scientists on both sides of the war, that those scientists possessed a wide range of individual views on the justness of their cause, and that they were nearly all pleased to be able to apply their talents to a good and peaceful cause after the war ended.
  • leaveyou 12y ago
    Well, spare your mind. Stuhlinger switched from the nazi killing machine to the american killing machine. The only difference is that the results of the work he did for US were not used in a war yet (ICBMs). Like many other governmental programs, the space program served military purposes first. See early history: wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA
• marktangotango 12y ago
  >> The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. This sentence highlights the certainty a mission to Mars was during the Apollo program. Soon after this (early 70's) the NASA budget was slashed, and the mighty Saturn V mothballed.
• logfromblammo 12y ago
  TL;DR: We cannot solve any single problem faced by humanity any faster by focusing on it to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Indeed, the solutions to some problems are often found accidentally, while working on something apparently unrelated. Such serendipitous discoveries cannot be forced; they can only be encouraged by working on as many diverse efforts as we can reasonably sustain. How many of our problems could be solved simply by being more unified and cooperative as a species? Space exploration, by virtue of its great difficulty and its ability to refocus our perspective on something much larger than ourselves, drives us to become better as a species, and attacks in a single stroke all those problems caused mainly by our everyday selfishness and cruelty to one another. Here is a photo that fits every human alive, except the three behind the lens, into 3% of the field of view. I hope it readjusts your perspective as it has readjusted mine.
• morpheous 12y ago
  tldr;
• arianvanp 12y ago
  I was always under the impression that Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (who is Dutch, not German) invented the microscope. I can't find anything about a German Count who funded microsope research anywhere. Does anybody know a source for this?
  • snotrockets 12y ago
    To quote the late (and great) Billy Wilder: "The Austrians have completed the feat of turning Beethoven into an Austrian, and Hitler into a German." Stuhlinger was part of similar effort, downplaying von Braun role in Nazi war effort (including use of slave labour).
• underbluewaters 12y ago
  I'm always surprised by "starving kids in Africa" argument. Why would one assume that hunger is a solvable problem? As soon as there is more food, there will be more children. It's basic ecology. If anything, the Green Revolution that produced more food in the 20th century has devastated the environment (our life support system) and will probably lead to more starvation in the long run.
  • incompatible 12y ago
    I believe there's more of an inverse correlation: the wealthier a population, the lower its birth rate. One-off starvation events caused by unusual weather in agricultural societies are one thing, where temporary aid would be helpful. But poverty in particular places isn't caused by a global shortage of food, but local factors such as incompetent and/or corrupt administration or culture and subsequent lack of economic development. There may not be much that a US organization could do about it.
  • rtpg 12y ago
    Your model is simple, nice, but wrong. Experimentally proven wrong by the fact that developed nations (where food is not an issue for most of the population) there are declining birth rates.
    • lmm 12y ago
      But the developed nations didn't become developed simply by throwing food at them. In fact, one could argue that space programs were a significant factor in their development, and therefore prevented more starvation than food aid ever did.
  • dinkumthinkum 12y ago
    I think you need to take that ecology class again. Humans are bit different than tadpoles; I'm being serious there is more complexity at work than "more food --> more offspring." Your basic ecology simpleton logic doesn't include any conception of sociological factors that are inherent in human populations. Does your basic ecology conceive of frogs deciding to either delay or even not engage in reproduction in favor of careers?
• amadeusw 12y ago
  What a wonderful piece. The argument that space exploration is a catalyst to new discoveries was very well put, but what struck me most was the contrast between peaceful space exploration and earthly wars. He made the letter very easy to relate to.
• deleted 12y ago
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• dinkumthinkum 12y ago
  It's a very beautiful letter. I think this should be a standard reading middle school. It not only enshrines a strong purpose for scientific exploration but it is a wonderfully written piece.
• z3phyr 12y ago
  One example that comes to my mind after reading this is of the aboriginal/native tribes in various continents that decided not to explore alien areas. In my opinion, the natives were far less developed when the explorers from the old earth conquered them. This is primarily the reason that we should explore the space and try to find new and exciting things.
• facepalm 12y ago
  By explaining how space exploration could help fight hunger, he misses the point that we already produce enough food to end hunger. So clearly more science is not what is needed right now. Nothing against more science, better food production and so on. Of course they help - and perhaps people are also more willing to donate if they have more (which better production would yield). But the real problem is probably political (of course science could help with that, too). I just don't think you can justify space exploration that way, because clearly there would be more efficient ways to end hunger right now. Assuming we wouldn't have food anyway, and every dollar for the space program would have to be to taken away from a starving child, I don't think there would be any way to justify it.
• flavj 12y ago
  Working as a software developer in radio astronomy, I frequently get asked the same question. Where's the value in spending half a billion euros on a massive telescope array? I struggle to understand how people cannot simply accept the answer: to know more! This article will definitely help me to explain the value of radio astronomy and science in general in a more succinct and 'useful' way.
  • Qwertious 12y ago
    >I struggle to understand how people cannot simply accept the answer: to know more! When you say that, people are thinking "so would you let people die unnecessarily, JUST so you can know more?". What's important about knowing more? It's useful for its entertainment and curiosity-satisfying properties, but that ranks far lower than stuff like people starving.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      So I'd counter - where's the value of spending half a billion Euros on a few blockbuster movies? Or 10% of an Olympics game? Why do you want a right to watch soccer games and want to deny me right to knowing more about the universe around us? That being said, I'd go back to explaining very carefully how everything we have around us is built on top of people doing weird stuff just to know more.
• musesum 12y ago
  In 2004, NASA hosted the Virtual Iron Bird workshop. I attended. At the time, VPOTUS Dan Quayle proposed that we fly to Mars. But, because there was no additional budget, it meant that NASA had to re-budget funds from other programs. There was some grumbling. My argument for Mars exploration was to drive bio science. Because, by the time you get to Mars, you'd probably have cancer. It was meant to be a joke. But, not really.