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Comment by smokelegend | Hacker News Reader

This is a major life altering question. If we can't learn to all live together peacefully, learn to help each other solve problems here on earth; what makes anyone think that we will survive in space & beyond...

I love everything about space exploration, but I'm not naive enough to believe its the solution to our problems here on earth. One might argue its a distraction from our ongoing global humanitarian crisis.

People everyday are dying from lack of food, water, shelter, etc...

What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs. IMHO...

Food for thought...

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It's a bit of a false dichotomy I think. Injustice causes our global humanitarian crises and while rocket scientists are very smart they're probably not the best people to solve corruption and injustice.

There are 7 billion people on earth. That gives us a bit of leeway to multitask. We can have activists and rocket scientists solving different problems.

> What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs

This is often repeated but makes no sense at all. The time and resources humanity as a group spends on those activities corresponds to 0.1% of our output. Infinitely more is wasted on mundane stuff like manufacturing cars, golf carts, office jobs or reading online forums.

The world and our lives are very interconnected. You can't just focus on a single task nor would that actually lead to any better progress.

I suggest you read this: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/

> "In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center ... Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation ... later published by NASA, and titled, “Why Explore Space?”"

I think you started great, but didn't follow through on your own thought.

"learn to help each other solve problems"

The most important problem we need to solve, is how to survive in the universe, where any large rock falling from the sky can wipe out our civilization, if not the whole mammalian branch.

We don't have to abandon efforts to improve human life on this planet while trying to expand to more than one.

The root causes of many (but not all) of our major problems are political or social in nature and can't be solved by throwing money or engineers at them. Also, there are many people on Earth, "we" can work on multiple problems simultaneously.

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