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Comment by ultramegachurch | Hacker News Reader

This is a shockingly cynical and reductive take on Mars exploration. The enthusiasm for human exploration of the solar system is earnest and valid, and I assure you, not a cog in an international conspiracy. One doesn't have to choose between space exploration and addressing resource depletion/inequality. You can care about both.

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I was a huge sci fi and science nerd 10 years ago and still am, and honestly i would love to go back and care less about how the world works, but to me the very real fascination with "actual scientists" and "actual science" has been overshadowed by the siphoning, the false promises and the cooking of statistics that happens while everyones tax dollars get channeled into a fog somewhere between "external enemies" and technooptimist drivel.

The fact is that we could use our money on something real, something tangible like saving earth instead of war machines and false promises while the gini coeffecient goes crazy and public education fails.

And i mean this is not just a perspective i've got from researching economics, but from having lots of family in academic science - i've seen how much is about grant money, towing the line and about furthering some state or corporate cause sadly.

The US military budget is ~3.5% of GDP. It makes up about 10% of all government spending. 90% of your tax money does not go to war machines.

The DoE budget is largely military in nature, too. Be sure to count the spooks' portion, as well.

Yes, we could explore the solar system much more quickly and much more cheaply, if we simply leave out the humans.

This has been explained repeatedly for decades.

There will be more humans on Mars in 100 years, if we skip sending the humans now and develop the technology to automate process first.

maybe someone can find Weinberg’s detailed explanation for others to read.

https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned...

>There will be more humans on Mars in 100 years, if we skip sending the humans now and develop the technology to automate process first.

We can't do that anytime soon. We can't even reliably automate most manual labor jobs right now. We can do some neat stuff with robots, but we always need humans supervising them and ready to step in and reset things because the reliability is poor.

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