However, it's far more likely that $400B in cancer research will do more for curing cancer than hoping for side effects from $400B in other research.
Cancer is a systemic problem, it isn't measles or polio or TB. You have to understand the system in order to fix it and pushing humans into new environments will give us better insights into the system we call human life.
[1] https://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/the-never-ending-war-...
That's a pretty absolutist statement. We've spent more preventing murder, but murder still happens. We have developed many treatments for cancer that have added many quality life years for millions of people.
1a) What causes a cell to decide live forever (metastasize)?
1b) What causes a person to decide that killing another person is the solution to some problem?
2a) How can we detect a cell that is about to metastasize? How can we stop it?
2b) How can we detect a person that is about to murder? How can we stop them?
3a) What would have to be true for cancer to never be the cause of death ever again?
3b) What would have to be true for murder to never be the cause of death ever again?
See? Both are systems where individual elements within the system have decided to work against the system rather than within its constructs.
There is no drug, no treatment, that will 'cure' cancer until we understand exactly what is going on in a cell that knocks it out of line. And there will be no end to murder until we understand exactly what is going on inside a person's head when they decide that is the correct course of action. Everything we do on these two fronts (cancer, and murder) are delaying actions to minimize their impact on the greater whole.
The other part that some people have assumed (but the GP did not) is that spending this money on Mars exploration would reduce the amount of money that is currently allocated to cancer research. It wouldn't, it was specified as 'new funds'.
So what? Even if everything you say is true, the outcome of the research is possibly hundreds of millions of additional quality life years.
And there are many treatments that 'cure' cancer. Many people have cancer, are treated, and never have it again. Many have it, are treated, and live much longer than they otherwise would have. I'm not sure what you are saying, or why research that saves and prolongs lives has to meet some other standard (and what is that standard?).
It's rude to make such assumptions about me. I do not take the positive side effects from research for granted.
You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.
All research will have side effects that can't be anticipated. It's stupid to perform research with "random, unknowable" side positive side effects as a primary justification.
You made the original claim that spending that money on cancer research would be more beneficial. The burden of proof is on you, not me.
Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.
More cancer research is not going to stop an asteroid.
And yet perhaps one of the blocks with modern science is people hitting the grave before they can finish innovative research. It takes at least 26 years to train a human from scratch to advance to basic research level in a field. You can add another 10, 20 years before proficiency. At least half the human life until total proficiency (as it stands) is reached and perhaps a quarter of the human life for which researchers can make meaningful contributions.
Arguably, focusing on problems on Earth - like eliminating mortality, solving longevity, curing cancer and dealing with death - will do more for our species long-term than exploring space right now. When your scientists live longer, more discoveries, contributions, and innovations can be made.
Spending $400B on dealing with the greatest tragedies and sources of sorrow known to mankind today - death, disease, illness - would be far preferable to most people than investing in space.
There was little, if any, explanation of why this should be done; and the posters arguing the opposite are, in my view, suggesting some of the "why not" arguments. The burden of proof is still on the fellow who made that "we should" claim. My 2c.
Going to Mars will have myriad discoveries & side effects, if we knew what they were what would be the point of going?
Also, what if curing cancer is harder than going to mars? One is by now a fairly quantifiable objective, the other is debugging a mind bogglingly complex system with no version control.
The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.
This wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar) suggests a huge military involvement from the 1930s onwards
I will, however, not count pulsing as more than an improvement to the basic invention of distant object detection with radio waves.
As you can read on the page you linked Hülsmeyer made a working system, clunky as it was, for detecting ships in mist. Taking a system from prototype to mass produced, worthy as this investment might be, is not inventing it.
For example, almost all cases of cervical cancer are traced to HPV infections...so the research into the HPV vaccine arguably did more to reduce future cancer cases than research into cancer has. Further research showed that HPV can also cause a number of cancers in men (though at lower rates), which is part of the justification for offering the HPV vaccine to boys.
Sunburn, smoking, chewing tobacco, HPV, acid reflux, can all cause cancer. Saying those are all different cancers that require different cures is a good way to waste a lot of effort and money. It is more accurate to say that inflammation is a cause for cancer, and focus on that.
While you're chastising your mom for her lifestyle, the rest of us will be looking/hoping for a cure.
You should know that even you will experience increased and chronic inflammation as you age, no matter how much better than your mom, your lifestyle is. Increased chronic inflammation and aging are linked and we're still trying to understand why.
At the individual level finding a cure would be great, and during late-stage we would definitely want to understand how to have more successful treatments, but to remove the long-term load of the cancer problem on the medical system would mean better environmental and lifestyle interventions which act at a level of root cause instead of proximal treatment. If anything maybe we would find common ground have having cheaper diagnostics so that we could find more motivation to engage in preventative measures concretely rather than as a catch all.
My mom died of ovarian cancer after living a lifestyle that even you would approve of. Victim shaming pisses me off.
Shaming the victim with this lifestyle bullshit is not productive, and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
Yet you’re going right ahead and assuming that someone else’s experience is not _real_ cancer because they survived it and your mom didn’t? You really don’t have the right to be calling anyone else an asshole.
> and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
It seems like your feelings about your mom are preventing you from thinking objectively about this. Lifestyle can be a cure as well as a preventative, an extremely effective one, but that’s often overlooked because it’s easier and more profitable to get someone to take pills than it is for them to change all their dietary and exercise habits. Attitudes like yours, that say it’s wrong to call it anyone’s fault, really don’t help.
Posting like this is a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you for this because it's clearly a personal topic, but if you post like this again, we will. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.