Instead of doing X why don’t we do any of the Y other things we could do?
Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X, right?
…but, is it?
Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food?
Could we not say, spend a little bit less on building guns and use that money to do it instead? There’s loads more money in guns than space and hell, and wtf are the people crying for us to stop doing that?
My observation has been, that people who want space funding redirected are not familiar with the benefits it provides, and fail to understand that the funding is, actually, insignificant.
There’s a good write up of this here: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
What wrong with investing in science?
:(
And, with the crumbling infrastructure, declining middle class, poverty stricken working class, and so on, how's that worked out for us?
I don't understand what argument you are trying to make.
No, it's poor because the same logic that invests that "tiny part of the budget" in space (and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on), also runs the other investments and public policy decisions.
That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...
> also runs the other investments and public policy decisions
So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?
Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary policy anyway, but ok. Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP, or facilitating lending to the already rich, to use to stock their fireplaces, VC bets, and in general, getting richer on a cheap supply of money...
>So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?
On the contrary, I like government. I just with it did things as a government of/for the people, as opposed as a lackey to oligarchs. You know, reigning on them, instead of high fiving them and being in their pockets. Or printing money to keep the bubble alive, so they can play with their phallic rockets.
Nonsense, QE was done already 100 years ago and more.
> Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP
Not that new in history of money and bad measure anyway.
Your understanding of monetary policy is fundamentally flawed. Your idea that if the central bank just collapsed nominal spenidng to 'destroy' the 'bubble' is about the worst possible thing you could do. That is literally how we totally unnecessary had the Great Depression. Congratulation 'Bubble Burst'.
But I guess you have bought into some of the leftists conspiracy and nonsense propaganda about central banks so there is like not much to talk you out of it.
> phallic rockets.
Ask yourself who is actually obsessed with thinking about phallics.
What spending we do have is usually focused on militaristic applications.
How does this reflect poorly on space travel research? If you're using the current status quo to argue that spending priorities are broken, you're not arguing against NASA funding. You're arguing against the military-industrial complex.
If important research is done through public agencies, the public reaps the benefits of this research. If private industry is allowed to take the reins, corporate interests and shareholders are the ones who benefit.
Right now we have a new space race, it's just between companies instead of countries.
I'm very much in favour of political change to solve them, but I long ago resigned myself to accepting that there's very little benefit in individual action to try to counter them other than to feel good unless a majority is willing to commit to the necessary societal change.
Meanwhile the money spent on space is a rounding error compared to the many other places you can also choose to cut to lift people out of horrible living conditions, yet so many people focus their ire on space, which, while some of the flights are wasteful, have as a sector done immeasurable amounts of good in terms of improving our ability to e.g. feed the planet (weather forecasting and crop monitoring for example), and will continue to provide advances for a long time.
Focusing the frustrations on space exploration and technology improvement rather than on the lack of political will to solve the problems you mention solves nothing.
So sure, giving food away is not a perfect solution other than for short term crises, but it's still a problem that is entirely solvable if there was will to do so.
Because people drinking bad water are poor so it's not profitable to help them. This problem can be solved with current technology (and in fact was solved in many countries with slightly stricter environmental legislation).
> Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go up, really fast”
The problem with that is assuming that focusing on solving problem X is the way to solve problem X. In history it often turned out that problem X was only solved by people who ignored X and worked on Y instead.
For example the hard problem of 70% of kids dying before adulthood wasn't mostly solved thanks to people who worked on it (shamans, healers and priests) but by people who worked on "useless" abstract stuff like math, philosophy and writing systems. If we put everybody on it we would still devise new ways of praying or dancing to stop gods killing infants.
In general it's better not to put EVERYBODY on the same problem. Humankind is pretty good at solving many problems in parallel. Some people are better at X, others at Y. Also there might be interactions that we don't know upfront. Maybe designing space colonies gives us a cheap way to filter water on Earth as a byproduct? Would be pretty stupid to wait forever because we guessed the order wrong.
Cancer is more serious than broken bones or flu, but it doesn't mean that we should assign all doctors to only deal with cancer until it's solved.
My point is, lead by example if you want others to follow.
I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem.
Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwhile investment, even when other pressing problems exist.
A lot of people say (I have no idea how true this is) that the problem isn't growing enough food, it's getting that food too people. What if we can grow rice or wheat on the moon, or ganymeade, or a spacestation or whatnot and drop it where it needs to go a-la Moon Is A Harsh Mistress style.
R&D is looking forward. Pointing at it and saying "people are hungry" is willfully ignorant of how science has played a roll in feeding more and more people and is a defeatists attitude.
Sounds like a very good principle.
Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses, bayonets and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts and tanks and machine guns just yet - you'll just get new wars leveraging those improved means, oh wait!
But at least we are pure in our hearts that we didn't mis-allocate resources when people were starving.
That this mindset exists blows my mind.
> Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses, bayonets and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts and tanks and machine guns just yet
Aside from the practical, problem of "Great way to get killed by people with guns that you don't have".
The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like picking out of the technology bucket only things you don't like.
The same things that made those things possible also made a huge number of other things possible that would otherwise not have existed at all.
Sounds far more climate friendly. Also moving out of stone age only once we've stopped with hunger and war? Sign me in!
>The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like picking out of the technology bucket only things you don't like.
God forbid we're picky with the tecnologies we adopt!
> Sign me in!
Then we would still be in the stone age.
> God forbid we're picky with the tecnologies we adopt!
Be picky all you want. As we progressed certain things simple became viable and just ignoring the problem doesn't make them vanish.
Does it? Such a world wouldn't have increased crop production, and would regularly suffer from otherwise preventable famines.
I imagine far more people would be hungry in the world where we forego all R&D in an effort to solve hunger.
A ton of our advances in improving crop productivity came out of research that wasn't directly related to solving hunger.
The modern internal combustion engine, for example, brought together many technologies and came out of advancement of many different kinds of research and manufacturing changes. If, in the 1500s you had focused all of your R&D efforts on improving food production and distribution, there's a good chance you never invent the ICE.
That's the thing about R&D, the discoveries in some areas often overlap with uses in other areas (sometimes in complex ways that we don't discover for a long time). So if you say: "we'll only do R&D in food production", you might actual end up stifling many technologies that would have massively helped you with food production down the line.
If I were to sum it up less charitably, I'd say that OP is arguing that if he can't walk and chew gum at the same time, humanity can't either.
Though that's not really the issue anyway: the US's problems aren't caused by a lack of funding, they're caused by a lack of political will and a populace which is in part completely happy with the current state of affairs and votes accordingly. People's townwater isn't flammable because we didn't spend enough money fixing that problem: it's because the government (and voters) are in aggregate, completely happy to let it happen. Money - distinctly - will not buy a solution.
It’s also just not a resources problem. There is ample cash and manpower to make both space and clean drinking water for everybody happen. The real issue is the political will and obstructions to those who have such will. The fix for drinking water specifically is to vote out all who oppose improving public infrastructure.
If you actually look at $$$ going into space development, it's minuscule compared with say, just marketing cost of Windows Vista ($500 million whereas development of Falcon 9 rocket was in $400 million range).
Run for office on your platform and I’ll probably vote for you.