Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa.

As we all know, Gates got on board, and now funds a lot of health research and on-the-ground initiatives.

Nevertheless, I think your worried about a scenario that for the most isn't very likely. Typical aid is not just used to buy food, but also to fund education and infrastructure investments, all of which has worked to lower the fertility rates in the past.

There are other reasons to hesitate in regards to the effectiveness of aid money, but IMHO this isn't one of them. :)

So, what should be done? I don't know. Education, a benevolent government, jobs, no drugs, secular & democratic laws... You can't have any of them without having others already in place. But, any progress is better than nothing. And in the long term, maybe

Afghanistan might be a good example. 30 years ago, a war between Soviets and US ruined the country and its (modestly functional) government. For the next 20 years they were "governed" by former US ally, the Taliban. Religious zealots who would kill girls if they wanted to go to school. Then US (thankfully) attacked the Taliban and for the last 5-6 years they've had some sort of a central government. It's (to some degree) corrupt, it's not efficient, it lacks technical knowledge, but still, it's a form of government and has some power and the desire to change the country. And they're making progress. 10 years ago Afghanistan was a forth-world country. A country from another century. But now, they've headed to the right direction. In 10 years (if the continue their progress), Afghanistan might very well become a country that people "might" consider living in (in the large cities at least - if they had the choice). It wouldn't become Norway, but it would be an average country instead of the hell it was 10 years ago.

Edit: I found a nice (read: sickeningly sad) article about Taliban and U.S. from 2001: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/23860 The rest of the site is garbage, but this article is not.

Firstly I would like to suggest that even if you can only tackle the symptom, not the cause, it would still be worthwhile - a patient with untreatable cancer should nonetheless get painkillers. You are correct that the number of people in the second generation would be higher than the number you bring out of famine. But if you do nothing the second generation would be even larger still since the fertility rate of the extremely poor is so high. Therefore simply alleviating the symptoms and not the causes of poverty (a) delays the suffering of hunger by a generation, and (b) reduces the total number people suffering in the second generation.

Of course, it would be far better to eliminate the cancer. In many cases it's difficult to know how effective the long-term treatment is, but in some cases the outcome can be measured quite well. Here's a great talk by Esther Duflo about measuring the effectiveness of aid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zvrGiPkVcs In the book she co-authored called "Poor Economics" she mentions a study of a deworming program for children in Kenya. The study concluded that an extra year of deworming costing $1.36 USD PPP lead to a lifetime income gain of $3,269 USD PPP for the child. To me that is a slam-dunk evidence that aid can be effective in the long term.

I would think that a life lifted from poverty, even temporarily through aid, has a much better chance of being one of these human++'s. Without quantifying (and denying) this possibility, calculating the value of aid seems impossible.

Countries that improve living standards usually get lower birth rates as a result. This usually results from better education for women more career opportunities for women, lower child mortality, better financial certainty, etc. This effect has been seen in almost every country to undergo a significant improvement in living standards and it is pretty much known to be true.

You have to couple it with healthcare, education, infrastructure and economy reform (because the famine was most likely caused by a failing economy) and maybe political reform. It's more or less rebooting the place.

However, you may wish to consider whether you are the gardener of Africans and whether humans should be pruned.

You then suggest that looking at the causes of population explosions should be investigated and resolved, and therefore until this is fixed then children should starve.

A cruel sort of logic indeed.

How is a nun in middle of Africa meant to have even a basic understanding of how a specific government's budgeting and economic system works?

I am willing to bet the vast majority of Americans themselves (to this day) have no idea of even the basics so simply explained by Dr Stuhlinger, yet it was a critical part of the bigger picture.

Now what if this is the next fuel source for cars? We could dramatically cut down on our use of fossil fuels. That's pretty world changing.

The automated landing represented a huge engineering challenge as well. Lots of lessons learned can likely be transferred to earthly pursuits. Imagine a rescue helicopter that can automatically fly into dangerous situations and save people. Imagine robots that are faster and more efficient at producing or harvesting food.

Then of course, every time we land on a planet, we get better at it. The earth has a finite surface area. Barring major catastrophes, we'll probably fill it up eventually. If the experiments of today can provide a place for the people of the future to move, I think that will be the biggest contribution.

2: Possibility of discovering signs of prior life on Mars.

3: Baby steps on the way to developing a more robust space presence.

I don't want to take the time to flesh these out.

You could argue with all of them. You could grant them, and argue about cost/benefit.

But ultimately, it's exploration, and there are no guarantees what will turn out, so arguing cost/benefit when benefit is unknown is not an analytical process.

When first microscope was constructed, the author did not and could not know anything about bacteria or anything other microscopic.

Your question is unanswerable yet.

Got it now?

And now it gets complicated. Money is necessary but far from sufficient, and the problem is very much not lack of resources.

I agree with TheComedian that the drawbacks mitigate the benefits a lot, though. The thing about space exploration is that the drawbacks are purely speculative (alien regard, exoplanet contamination, etc.) and are a lot easier to dismiss.

The world isn't some Hollywood movie where the good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated.

Most of our early rocket scientists were ex-German scientists taken from Nazi Germany.

The possibility of human-caused climate change did not start come to the awareness of the general public until 1988, and did not become a political issue until this millennium.

He therefore cannot legitimately be criticized for his inability to predict where science would go in future decades. However he can legitimately be praised for being prescient about the role of satellites in researching a number of environmental problems, including global warming.