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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

>I am flabbergasted that as a society we aren't rushing to build a 100 metre wide telescope mirror large enough for us to directly image the spectra of the potentially habitable exoplanets around us.

This is because most of society is still struggling with day-to-day tasks like getting housing, clean water, reliable food, healthcare and dealing with physical conflicts.

Even people rich enough to not be stuck in the short term future have to be concerned with near term risks like political destabilization countries and climate change.

So it's hard to rush to do something like this as a society when we are already rushing to solve acute issues.

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The world had less reliable housing, less clean water, less reliable food, worse healthcare, and more physical conflicts in the 60s, and we still had the Apollo program put people on the moon.

Only the most pathetic hacks would argue that we are the worse for having invested that money to push the bounds of exploration.

At a point, there are 6 billion people on the earth, and there will always be _some_ problems unsolved, whether that is because a few countries are trying to collapse, or because we have found new first-world problems to agonize about in the US.

It's a question of whether we will spend 10x the cost to solve the last 10% of those problems, or spend that money moving forward as a civilization.

> The world had less reliable housing, less clean water, less reliable food, worse healthcare, and more physical conflicts in the 60s, and we still had the Apollo program put people on the moon.

You could (more or less) translate the fascination of the moon landing into an excuse for less reliable housing and so on in the 60s. You can't do so today.

The Apollo program did result in significant advances in science and technology.

Had we put the same resources into solving other more earthbound problems would we be better off? Maybe we could have developed a better, standard, safer nuclear power plant design and could have left coal and oil behind 30 years ago. And we would not be discussing climate change or at least not the idea that it was man-made.

We have designs. The problem is they aren't also capable of creating nuclear weapons so they are irrelevant to NATO. IIRC.

> The world had less reliable housing, less clean water, less reliable food, worse healthcare, and more physical conflicts in the 60s, and we still had the Apollo program put people on the moon.

Of course, you do realize that statement could also read: "When we ran the Apollo program, the world had less reliable housing, less clean water, less reliable food, worse healthcare, and more physical conflicts."

Neither of these statements are particularly good at answering the question: How much do we gain by investing money in space exploration versus something else?

>and more physical conflicts in the 60s, and we still had the Apollo program put people on the moon.

The Apollo program was part of the space race against the SU. See my comment about conflicts motivating people to invest in this stuff.

Money isn't the problem here. It's mainly a political problem.

Once you resolve the issue of poor political leadership, the problem basically solve itself as money and investment engender a positive feedback loop that take care of itself.

There are some very good arguments for increasing space funding, and this is not one of them. It seems like you're just saying "social problems can't be fixed, so we should ignore them." It's also weird that you don't consider bringing clean water, health care, etc. to more people to be "moving forward as a civilization".

You might, for example, instead point out that even extravagant space budget proposals are a drop in the bucket compared to military spending.

Let's assume a 100-meter telescope is 10x the cost of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope. That means it would cost about $14 billion to build. If the U.S. and E.U. split the cost it would take about $14 for every person and child to build this. If you split the cost out to a decade, it'd be about $1.40 everyone had to pay out every year. This is a matter of priorities, not there being a lack of resources.

where do I send my $56 check?

Let’s set up a kickstarter?

The US spent hundreds of billions to attack a country on the false pretense it got weapons of mass destructions. I'd argue that having the resources is not the problem here.

Trillions at the last count.

It is because of episodes such as this that we do have a problem with resources.

They're not mutually exclusive.

There's more than enough money for both. It's a lack of political will that holds us back.

Whataboutism. We shouldn't be held back to the lowest-common-denominator.

>This is because most of society is still struggling with day-to-day tasks like getting housing, clean water, reliable food, healthcare and dealing with physical conflicts.

It's been nearly 100 years since anyone struggled with that in the West. Nobody's expecting Eritrea to put a satellite in orbit.

Yes even most people in Pakistan/India have access to those, plus broadband internet. Yes I've been there.

> Yes even most people in Pakistan/India have access to those, plus broadband internet. Yes I've been there.

Indian here, lot of people in metro cities dont have clean water. Most middle class and rich people use water filter to clean the water in their house. Forget the villages.

Oh well I stayed in Pakistan cities and villages and farms and there's clean water, housing and mobile broadband... Sorry to hear the state in India - I incorrectly assumed they were ahead due to higher GDP per capita.

From https://www.dawn.com/news/1319157

"ISLAMABAD: Eighty-four per cent of the population does not have access to safe drinking water in a country where commercial banks posted windfall profits exceeding Rs475 billion in three years, the Senate was told on Tuesday.

Quoting a study, Provision of Safe Drinking Water, conducted by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), Minister for Science and Technology Rana Tanvir Hussain said only 72pc of water supply schemes were found to be functional, and 84pc of those had supplied water that was not fit for consumption."

This article was published March this year. Maybe the report in question was alarmist, I don't know.

In case dawn.com isn't a reputable source, here's a number of other articles covering it:

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/03/09/safe-drinking-wa...

http://nationalcourier.pk/editorial/pcrwr-report-eye-opener/

This one has a slightly different focus, and also links to reports claiming the same agency has found contaminations in bottled water too:

http://pakobserver.net/arsenic-detected-above-permissible-li...

http://pakobserver.net/pcrwr-declares-11-mineral-water-brand...

Here is the agency's actual report on Punjab province, with a quote below:

http://pcrwr.gov.pk/images/document/Water%20Quality/Water%20...

"The outcome of the survey conducted in the domains of 21 districts of the Punjab province, has revealed that water supply schemes are providing piped water supply for drinking purposes to meet household needs and for other multiple uses to an enumerated population of 19.017 million persons on 2408 surveyed water schemes. The survey has however, summed up that the performance of these schemes in terms of providing water in an adequate quantity and of safe quality, is extremely poor. This inability and inefficiency may be scaled from the fact that 35 percent of the schemes are presently not functioning. As a result, nearly 61 percent of the total enumerated population remains unserved by the water supply schemes. More alarming situation is that 88 percent of the functional schemes are providing unsafe drinking water to the consumers. It is also notable that, on province basis, the average water charges per scheme figure out to Rs. 64 per month. "

Ok apparently I have been served unsafe drinking water.

"For Pakistan’s majority, the main source of drinking water is groundwater. The most common instrument for extracting groundwater in rural areas are the hand pump and the motor pump. Hand pumps and motor pumps together provide 61 percent of households with drinking water; in rural areas this percentage rises up to 70. "

http://nation.com.pk/blogs/13-Jun-2015/provision-of-safe-dri...

"In 2015, 91% of the population had access to an "improved" water supply.[15][16] This was 94% of the population in urban areas and 90% of the population in rural areas."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...

Note that the point was not to criticise Pakistan - it seems like they are putting in quite an effort to modernise the systems. It's just that lot of these things look better on the surface and so are easy to underestimate the seriousness of the challenges.

E.g. if you have a well or running water, and no alternative, you use it, because no water is far worse than bad water. And most of the time chances are it'll be ok.

That makes it easy to conclude that it's probably safe even when there are flaws in the supply that can quickly render it unsafe or that makes it unsafe for sustained consumption.

E.g. arsenic leaking into the supply won't kill you from a drink here and there - arsenic is difficult to kill with, because too high concentrations makes you puke it up - but sustained ingestion of smaller doses may have severe and lasting health effect and may ultimately kill you.

(Arsenic is "interesting" in that a lot of arsenic contaminated water from pumped wells in developing countries is a result of inadequate testing in the rush of upgrading water sources from surface sources prone to bacterial contamination - as such, a lot of those pumped sources may in fact still represent an improvement, but in some cases also still represents a severe health risk)

Overall there's a great deal of progress in securing basic safe water supply. We're just not there yet. Even many developed countries regularly run into water supply issues.

Nobody's expecting Eritrea to put a satellite in orbit.

Worth pointing out that Ghana just did.

If we waited until we "solve all our problems here at home," as the GP suggests, we'd still be calling to each other from neighboring trees in a jungle somewhere.

Slightly pedantic but it's also worth pointing out that Ghana basically used Japanese technology, academic resources and equipment to launch the satellite.

So what you're saying is, if the US or someone else develops amazing new space telescope technology, Ghana will eventually be able to buy it from them instead of the Japanese.

> It's been nearly 100 years since anyone struggled with that in the West.

You have go to be joking.

You can nitpick the exceptions, but his general point about affluent living standards existing for 100 years in the West for most people is true.

Anyone does not mean most, you may infer he meant something different but I prefer responding to what people actually say rather than what I think they meant as I'm not a mind reader and neither is anyone else and much disagreement comes from not listening to others words because you incorrectly think you know what they're trying to say. Tons of people (tens of millions) in the west continue to struggle with basic life needs, poverty is not remotely a solved problem in the west and he quite literally said it was.

What is most? Is it more than 50%? Then maybe, but certainly not for 100 years. Or is it the vast majority? Because GP did say "anyone" in his post. Then I'd like to quote:

Almost every fourth person in the EU still experiences at least one of the three forms of poverty or social exclusion. Monetary poverty is the most widespread form of poverty, affecting 17.3 % of EU residents in 2015. Severe material deprivation and very low work intensity follow, affecting 8.1 % of the EU residents and 10.6 % of EU citizens aged 0 to 59, respectively.

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

If it were an exception, we wouldn't be having a debate about healthcare coverage in the US.

We will always have this debate since the scope of healthcare will continue to grow.

Today advanced robotic bionic prosthetics are experimental prototypes. In 100 years, people will be arguing that access to bionic limbs should be a universal human right.

And they would be right to do so, because "rights" are not inherent, they're simply social agreements and are thus always up for negotiation. Nature doesn't provide people rights, people do.

>It's been nearly 100 years since anyone struggled with that in the West.

The privilege is palpable. That's almost insulting.

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