Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't yet seen the wonderful "Sagan Series" on youtube, start with this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHuve33yOVY

or this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxsJeND_D-k&feature=relat...

Honestly, watching this chokes me up a little bit. Watching the last shuttle flight, then seeing SETI have to realistically think about parking all of their listening equipment is just...sad.

Too many people get caught up in the "why" of this stuff. You're looking at it wrong. Look at space travel as an expression of humanity, and a really important one. Ancient people built Pyramids, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum. I wonder how many Romans thought building the Colosseum was a waste of money.

The shuttle, or SETI are our Pyramids. It's disgusting that we can spend as many billions of dollars a year as we do on blowing each other up, but things like "Let's see what's on the other side of that proverbial mountain" get defunded because they're "pointless".

View on HN

I think we've built/done plenty of cool things as a society and I don't think ending the space program negates that (or what was achieved with the space program in the first place).

I would really be more comfortable with a space program being funded directly by people like yourself in the form of donations to a gov-independent organization, because I for one don't really care all that much about continued space exploration and don't think the government should pay for it. Not that they don't spend tons of money on other stupid stuff, but hey, one step at a time...

Weren't the Pyramids an expression of ego, and the Colosseum a sports arena? That said, I love the Sagan Series and agree with the spirit of your post.

Wasn't the Apollo program just a show of force against the Russians? Wasn't the shuttle the same thing?

Wasn't SETI just a pointless project by a bunch of those pesky nerds?

Do you think that the Pyramids or the Colosseum were a waste of money?

HN is probably not the best arena in which to antagonize nerds.

The space program was a way to get photographic intel on Russia something America didn't have much of. By letting the Russians get into space first we were then allowed to have photographic satellites that went over them without having legal issues which was worth the trade off of letting them get up their first.

One of the features of the Shuttle was that it provided a way to carry large items to and from space while safe and hidden inside of the vehicle.

The Pyramids and the Colosseum were both build by slaves. With a tax rate of 100%, it's easy to believe that money was wasted.

>It's disgusting that we can spend as many billions of dollars a year as we do on blowing each other up, but things like "Let's see what's on the other side of that proverbial mountain" get defunded because they're "pointless".

?? The SETI institute is a California non-profit organization. The government cannot defund it, because it receives no government funding. It is financed entirely by private contributors.

Think bigger.

We as a species devote a tremendous amount of our resources to killing each other. Why don't we devote more to exploration?

Wars are justified by governments as an investment in the future. We want to "secure the middle east", etc.

Why isn't science looked at in the same light? It's an investment in the future.

My point was simply that SETI isn't related to the NASA funding debate, and the OP wanted to connect the two via an emotional space shuttle reference.

>Why don't we devote more to exploration?

Maybe because people are failing to communicate its benefits clearly? For instance, the OP:

war==bad + assertion of disgust --> X==good

X could be anything. ANYTHING. Why aren't we investing more in wooden shoes? Didn't you know war is bad? Even if X==good, I hope people are inoculated against these type of arguments.

Well said

Can I upvote more than once? Getting out beautiful soup and 1000 proxies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com