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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 bee

• 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.
        • haneefmubarak 12y ago
          I have a poster I made that I can put up on imgur or something by Friday, if that's not too late.
          • carljoseph 12y ago
            I'd be interested in seeing something like this.
          • fudged71 12y ago
            That sounds great! Would love to see it
            • haneefmubarak 12y ago
              Sorry that it took so long, but I had to find where they hung it up in my school (and it was finals week). Nonetheless, this is more of a poster on general issues of sending stuff with people in it into space for long periods of time (not ISS specific issues), but it's a fairly good general big-picture idea (IMHO): http://imgur.com/a/7om70 http://imgur.com/a/7om70
    • vacri 12y ago
      Man will not survive in space Come on, it's 2015. Can we please stop with this sexist rhetoric? Particularly if you're talking about survival of the species, which definitely needs both genders.
      • olavk 12y ago
        When "man" is used without an article it means "mankind" - that is all humans, male and female. When used with an article ("a man") it indicates a male human.
        • duffmancd 12y ago
          Just to add, when we use man to mean humans as a whole, it comes from the old English mann which refers to a person of either gender, with wer (hence werewolf) and wif equivalent to current man and woman.
          • vacri 12y ago
            'black' comes from an old word for 'burned', but it would be silly to say that it still means the same thing. You wouldn't say that fashionistas like to wear burned clothing, for example.
            • drdeca 12y ago
              Well, people have not continued to use the word 'black' in that way, while they have continued to use the word 'man' in that way. I think that might make a substantial difference.
              • vacri 12y ago
                So... you're effectively saying that using words like 'nigger' or 'dago' should be fine, since we all know what they mean in the modern context? Exclusionary language is fine because we all know what it means? My point was that etymology (though interesting) is largely irrelevant to whether something is exclusionary or not. And it's a bit of a non-sequitor to point to the use of a word from a heavily sexist era as some sort of argument against it being sexist. Words have a social affect beyond the pure literal meaning of them. And really, it's not hard to not use exclusionary language.
    • lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Life has survived this long in space with just air and a magnetic field as protection. What we have found is that we need good shielding and to simulate gravity. So at the simplest, we need a lot of mass and we need the bit we live in to spin. Also, biology and technology are not particularly separate. Stuff like Dyson trees should not be written off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_tree
  • rgbrenner 12y ago
    Saying we could afford both is the excuse of people who don't want to admit there are opportunity costs and the federal budget is not unlimited. It's like me saying I have a choice between two news cars and deciding that I can afford both (by ignoring my mortgage, food, and all other expenses)
    • IndianAstronaut 12y ago
      >It's like me saying I have a choice between two news cars and deciding that I can afford both (by ignoring my mortgage, food, and all other expenses That is an exaggeration if we look at it in terms of the federal budget. If we compared the annual federal budget to say a median income, this is more a decision of if we should buy a plane ticket or two, not if we should buy a car or two.
    • jfoutz 12y ago
      Indeed! there are many other things we absolutely need to cover. Like the joint strike fighter. It catches on fire too often to actually fly much, but when it does, boy howdy. the absolute best thing for shooting down those ISIS terror-jets.
      • Chathamization 12y ago
        I don’t get this argument. It’s fine to make poor investments as long as they’re better than our worst investments? I mean, the joint strike fighter proponent could make this argument as well. “Hey, we wasted over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, at least the boondoggle I'm advocating won’t screw up the world and will fund some R&D that might become useful.” Maybe we should be looking at the best ways we can spend our money, and not any way to spend our money that’s better than our biggest failures.
        • jfoutz 12y ago
          I agree, it's a somewhat silly argument. 2 points. First I dislike the JSF. If there was any actual R&D, it's all seekrit and classified, in spite of China already having obtained the plans. (50 terrabytes worth of data, perhaps not enough to recreate the thing.) The JSF is its own trillion dollar expense, and didn't help with Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria. Second, and in the spirit of the letter, R&D is one of the best things we can spend money on. It's an old argument, but the lives and property saved by carbon monoxide detectors alone are probably worth nasa's budget. For a more recent example, consider all the Soylent discussion last year. Research into space exploration has to pin down exactly what nutrition is required, making products like Soylent better, with the added improving food aid - literally saving starving children like in the letter. This aid doesn't need to come from the government, any aid organization could take advantage of the knowledge. Finally, and a little closer to home, NASA has one of the very few research computer labs. If you want to argue that pair programming is effective or not, you're pretty much going to have to rely on nasa research. Even for google, it is too expensive to try to understand what programming practices actually produce good software. Government funded research proving feasibility does pretty great things. There is 0% chance google would have a self driving car without the years spent on the darpa grand challenge. By showing it's possible the government opens up new markets for anyone to exploit. When you look at algorithms like bandit, you see the trade off of exploration vs exploitation. I think it's very hard for any company to do much exploration. They need to make money - developing new technologies is a big honking cost center. At least some resources need to be consistently allocated to exploration.
• 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