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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 ty

by 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.
    - pyre 12y ago
      Travelling to (e.g.) Mars isn't in the realm of fantasy. Maybe you should say: > The only way to sustain human space travel beyond our solar system is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.
    - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
      > Man will not survive in space in the long run with biological limitations. The ISS had essentially proven that. It did no such thing. It proved that survival in space is not as easy as we had hoped, and gave us a list of specific problems to tackle. Perhaps it will ultimately turn out to be impossible, at least with any technology feasible in the near future, but we're still far from certain.
      - fudged71 12y ago
        Is there an article describing all of the specific problems discovered on the ISS? I have only heard tidbits here and there.
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
  The ISS has the benefit of more jobs and pork that Congress can farm out to various different congressional districts. The SSC would have resulted in jobs primarily in Texas, and mostly in short term construction instead of ongoing contracts.
  - restalis 12y ago
    You're right. Add there the fact that ISS serves also as a ground for international cooperation. There is therefore both an economical reason and a political one involved.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I feel like this is just another variant on the utility argument, though. You feel the SSC would have been more useful to scientific research than the ISS. But there is still the argument to be made that we don't know in advance what knowledge will be more useful. Maybe in the future, it will turn out that we really need to know how to keep humans alive in space, but the Higgs is useless for all practical purposes. But--what I just said is still the argument from utility! As the GP pointed out, we pay for all sorts of things that have little directly measurable utility, like fireworks and parks and the arts. Yes, towns with good fireworks, parks, and arts will have an advantage in attracting good companies and employees. And I'd say the same is true of space exploration (it helps the U.S. reputation). But once again, we're into utility. Why do those things create advantage in the first place? Because people like those things. So turn the utility argument on its head and consider: things have high utility because they allow us to do things that we like. Now consider that exploration is itself popular. Whether it's diving to the Mariana Trench, free climbing a new route on El Cap, or flying to orbit on the Space Shuttle, these are stories that many people love to read, and kids love to dream about. So I would argue that space exploration can skip the utility argument altogether...we do it because we like it--directly. The purpose of exploration is to explore. This is behind quite a bit of the history of science as well: people exploring places and phenomena simply because it was so interesting to do it. Edit to add: this sort of reasoning can make fans of science uncomfortable because it's not a logical or scientific argument. But the fact is that emotions like awe, excitement, etc. are often big reasons that kids begin to pursue careers in science. Not many 18 years olds start on a physics degree because of a deep-seated desire to add 0.01% to future GDP.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    the counter to this argument is that the ISS doesn't really help with exploration. We could have gone to the moon many more times with the same amount of money (and probably get really good at it too!)
  - Turbots 12y ago
    If you like exploration (like I do) then you'll like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs
notahacker 12y ago
I'm not sure many people opposing to federal funding of science consider the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake an inherently worthless activity. For a start, the federal funding thrown at the Space Race this article talks about - a bigger proportion of the US budget than education in the mid 1960s - wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination exclusively "the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake". The prestige of beating the Evil Empire, the serious worry that falling behind would render the US defenceless and undoubtedly juicy contracts for the regular suppliers to the military all played major parts. (Of course, NASA funding also paled in comparison with what was being wasted on the regular military at the time, including the highly targeted pursuit of knowledge for the sake of becoming more efficient at winning wars.) Then there's the question of whether the government is any good at establishing the relative merits of scientific endeavours. The fact that we ended up with GPS and satellite television (some of it even benefiting poor people in Africa in some way) and didn't end up with an efficient way of levelling Moscow from orbit says much about the fact that scientific progress takes different directions from that those authorising the spending may have intended, but I'm not sure that necessarily weakens the case for those opposing federal science funding.
- zenogais 12y ago
  Was just about to write something similar. It's absurd that the original argument characterized any opposition to the space program as born of ignorance or backwardness. Since when has science been about dogmatically supporting any endeavor?
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Indeed, you can't know what you know until you know it, and you can't know the value of knowledge until perhaps decades or centuries after it was originally acquired. Thus the logical choice is to be quite promiscuous in the acquisition of knowledge and to maintain a healthy degree of curiosity towards all manner of knowledge, no matter how seemingly abstract or useless. The study of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics in the 19th and early 20th centuries has resulted in an economic benefit somewhere in the range of quadrillions of dollars of value, and hundreds of billions of person-years of life/lives added which would not have been possible otherwise. And all from some nerds futzing around with things they thought were interesting. I think that sort of RoI justifies spending a few billion here and there now and again on seemingly esoteric research.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Case in point: think about lasers. They were described as interesting but totally useless phenomena when first developed in the 50s/60s. They were called a "solution looking for a problem". Look where are we now with them, just 50 years later.
vacri 12y ago
I find it disturbing that you think clean parks are a white elephant. In any case, your list has things that directly improve people's day-to-day lives. Sending men to the moon consumed a huge amount of money, but to the average person, it was just bragging rights; we beat the russkies.
- alblue 12y ago
  s/average person/average American/
rpgmaker 12y ago
To me is more like when people say "why are you fighting for animal rights when there are children starving to death in Africa?"
MarkMc 12y ago
Even if your goal is to pursue knowledge for it's own sake, the manned moon missions were enormously wasteful. Sending a robotic probe to collect moon rocks would have been worthwhile. But sending humans to do the same job was far more costly and provided very little additional scientific value.
- joshgel 12y ago
  The manned missions added tremendous additional scientific value, especially for the time period. They didn't have rovers with the ability to determine which rocks would be of value. The humans were trained to do just that. Plus that wasn't the (only) goal of the missions: beating the USSR there was a stronger motivator.
  - MarkMc 12y ago
    'We feel the need to beat the USSR' wasn't mentioned in the letter to the nun - perhaps because being able to boast about winning a race might appear to be less important than people suffering in Africa. Let me ask you this: Given the scientific advances made due to the first moon landing, do you think that the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth moon landings also added tremendous scientific value? Do you think there should have been a seventh?
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      Do you think there should have been a seventh? No, because we clearly weren't willing to commit the resources to make our efforts pay off in the long run. Who knows what might be possible now, if we had used the money we spent on the Viet Nam war to successfully establish a permanent manned lunar colony?
    - lmm 12y ago
      The sixth, certainly; it was the first that had become routine enough to send a professional geologist along. I'd go so far as to say that most of the scientific value in 12-16 was in making 17 possible. There absolutely should have been a seventh, eighth and probably ninth; scientific targets had already been picked for the next three IIRC. After that, maybe not so much. But the program was designed with ~nine landings in mind, and that's what we should have done.
icehawk219 12y ago
> 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". This is a bigger problem amongst the general public then I think many inside the bubble of science and technology really understand. I remember a conversation I had some years ago with a co-worker who was adamant that space exploration was an absolute waste of money. Because "we have enough problems down here we should fix instead." I tried explaining all the advancements that the space race brought about in terms of technology and medicine. And the go to response was: "Well scientists should have just invented that stuff anyway. They didn't need NASA as an excuse to build it.". A complete lack of understanding or appreciation for what goes into scientific or technological discovery and advancement is worryingly common within the general public.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Hence the dark side of democracy - we have to listen to people's opinion about things they have absolutely no clue about.

by john_b 12y ago

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.
  - pyre 12y ago
    Travelling to (e.g.) Mars isn't in the realm of fantasy. Maybe you should say: > The only way to sustain human space travel beyond our solar system is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    > Man will not survive in space in the long run with biological limitations. The ISS had essentially proven that. It did no such thing. It proved that survival in space is not as easy as we had hoped, and gave us a list of specific problems to tackle. Perhaps it will ultimately turn out to be impossible, at least with any technology feasible in the near future, but we're still far from certain.
    - fudged71 12y ago
      Is there an article describing all of the specific problems discovered on the ISS? I have only heard tidbits here and there.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
The ISS has the benefit of more jobs and pork that Congress can farm out to various different congressional districts. The SSC would have resulted in jobs primarily in Texas, and mostly in short term construction instead of ongoing contracts.
- restalis 12y ago
  You're right. Add there the fact that ISS serves also as a ground for international cooperation. There is therefore both an economical reason and a political one involved.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I feel like this is just another variant on the utility argument, though. You feel the SSC would have been more useful to scientific research than the ISS. But there is still the argument to be made that we don't know in advance what knowledge will be more useful. Maybe in the future, it will turn out that we really need to know how to keep humans alive in space, but the Higgs is useless for all practical purposes. But--what I just said is still the argument from utility! As the GP pointed out, we pay for all sorts of things that have little directly measurable utility, like fireworks and parks and the arts. Yes, towns with good fireworks, parks, and arts will have an advantage in attracting good companies and employees. And I'd say the same is true of space exploration (it helps the U.S. reputation). But once again, we're into utility. Why do those things create advantage in the first place? Because people like those things. So turn the utility argument on its head and consider: things have high utility because they allow us to do things that we like. Now consider that exploration is itself popular. Whether it's diving to the Mariana Trench, free climbing a new route on El Cap, or flying to orbit on the Space Shuttle, these are stories that many people love to read, and kids love to dream about. So I would argue that space exploration can skip the utility argument altogether...we do it because we like it--directly. The purpose of exploration is to explore. This is behind quite a bit of the history of science as well: people exploring places and phenomena simply because it was so interesting to do it. Edit to add: this sort of reasoning can make fans of science uncomfortable because it's not a logical or scientific argument. But the fact is that emotions like awe, excitement, etc. are often big reasons that kids begin to pursue careers in science. Not many 18 years olds start on a physics degree because of a deep-seated desire to add 0.01% to future GDP.
- rtpg 12y ago
  the counter to this argument is that the ISS doesn't really help with exploration. We could have gone to the moon many more times with the same amount of money (and probably get really good at it too!)
- Turbots 12y ago
  If you like exploration (like I do) then you'll like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs

notahacker 12y ago

I'm not sure many people opposing to federal funding of science consider the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake an inherently worthless activity. For a start, the federal funding thrown at the Space Race this article talks about - a bigger proportion of the US budget than education in the mid 1960s - wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination exclusively "the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake". The prestige of beating the Evil Empire, the serious worry that falling behind would render the US defenceless and undoubtedly juicy contracts for the regular suppliers to the military all played major parts. (Of course, NASA funding also paled in comparison with what was being wasted on the regular military at the time, including the highly targeted pursuit of knowledge for the sake of becoming more efficient at winning wars.) Then there's the question of whether the government is any good at establishing the relative merits of scientific endeavours. The fact that we ended up with GPS and satellite television (some of it even benefiting poor people in Africa in some way) and didn't end up with an efficient way of levelling Moscow from orbit says much about the fact that scientific progress takes different directions from that those authorising the spending may have intended, but I'm not sure that necessarily weakens the case for those opposing federal science funding.

zenogais 12y ago
Was just about to write something similar. It's absurd that the original argument characterized any opposition to the space program as born of ignorance or backwardness. Since when has science been about dogmatically supporting any endeavor?

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Indeed, you can't know what you know until you know it, and you can't know the value of knowledge until perhaps decades or centuries after it was originally acquired. Thus the logical choice is to be quite promiscuous in the acquisition of knowledge and to maintain a healthy degree of curiosity towards all manner of knowledge, no matter how seemingly abstract or useless. The study of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics in the 19th and early 20th centuries has resulted in an economic benefit somewhere in the range of quadrillions of dollars of value, and hundreds of billions of person-years of life/lives added which would not have been possible otherwise. And all from some nerds futzing around with things they thought were interesting. I think that sort of RoI justifies spending a few billion here and there now and again on seemingly esoteric research.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Case in point: think about lasers. They were described as interesting but totally useless phenomena when first developed in the 50s/60s. They were called a "solution looking for a problem". Look where are we now with them, just 50 years later.

vacri 12y ago

I find it disturbing that you think clean parks are a white elephant. In any case, your list has things that directly improve people's day-to-day lives. Sending men to the moon consumed a huge amount of money, but to the average person, it was just bragging rights; we beat the russkies.

alblue 12y ago
s/average person/average American/

rpgmaker 12y ago

To me is more like when people say "why are you fighting for animal rights when there are children starving to death in Africa?"

MarkMc 12y ago

Even if your goal is to pursue knowledge for it's own sake, the manned moon missions were enormously wasteful. Sending a robotic probe to collect moon rocks would have been worthwhile. But sending humans to do the same job was far more costly and provided very little additional scientific value.

joshgel 12y ago
The manned missions added tremendous additional scientific value, especially for the time period. They didn't have rovers with the ability to determine which rocks would be of value. The humans were trained to do just that. Plus that wasn't the (only) goal of the missions: beating the USSR there was a stronger motivator.
- MarkMc 12y ago
  'We feel the need to beat the USSR' wasn't mentioned in the letter to the nun - perhaps because being able to boast about winning a race might appear to be less important than people suffering in Africa. Let me ask you this: Given the scientific advances made due to the first moon landing, do you think that the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth moon landings also added tremendous scientific value? Do you think there should have been a seventh?
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    Do you think there should have been a seventh? No, because we clearly weren't willing to commit the resources to make our efforts pay off in the long run. Who knows what might be possible now, if we had used the money we spent on the Viet Nam war to successfully establish a permanent manned lunar colony?
  - lmm 12y ago
    The sixth, certainly; it was the first that had become routine enough to send a professional geologist along. I'd go so far as to say that most of the scientific value in 12-16 was in making 17 possible. There absolutely should have been a seventh, eighth and probably ninth; scientific targets had already been picked for the next three IIRC. After that, maybe not so much. But the program was designed with ~nine landings in mind, and that's what we should have done.

icehawk219 12y ago

> 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". This is a bigger problem amongst the general public then I think many inside the bubble of science and technology really understand. I remember a conversation I had some years ago with a co-worker who was adamant that space exploration was an absolute waste of money. Because "we have enough problems down here we should fix instead." I tried explaining all the advancements that the space race brought about in terms of technology and medicine. And the go to response was: "Well scientists should have just invented that stuff anyway. They didn't need NASA as an excuse to build it.". A complete lack of understanding or appreciation for what goes into scientific or technological discovery and advancement is worryingly common within the general public.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Hence the dark side of democracy - we have to listen to people's opinion about things they have absolutely no clue about.