Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa
launiusr.wordpress.com
launiusr.wordpress.com
While it's trivially obvious that the value of unknown knowledge is unknowable, this doesn't often occur to such people, focused as they are on the limitations of the present instead of the possibilities of the future. Even if the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake were a completely useless activity which diverted resources away from more pressing problems, societies everywhere have accepted that their tax dollars inevitably fund certain things which are unnecessary. Clean parks, public support for the arts, city fireworks on holidays, etc. Yet people generally find these latter sinks of funding less objectionable than things like space exploration and federal support for science. Perhaps it's because the enormous scientific illiteracy afflicting the populace as a whole (which can be observed simply by reading any popular journalistic account of scientific developments) places scientific developments and scientific pursuits into some mental category of "abstract, probably useless stuff".
The Higgs could have been found in Texas, around 2002. There would have been no need for the HEP community to build further hadron colliders, it would have run at 40 TeV and upgrading it would have been easy. Now we're stuck with the 27 km LEP->LHC tunnel and only this year the LHC will start running at 13 TeV... The Congress made its choice after spending $2 billion because it would cost $11 billion. The ISS has cost U.S. taxpayers $75 billion and the science there is more or less an excuse. It never was a scientific decision.
There's science and PR "science".
Also, to defend the ISS, there is a lot of science done there for private companies that is not made public. It is also a post where many nations get together and can really study how man will survive and cooperate in space for the long run.
There should be more interest and development in the quest to preserve and backup the brain in foundations such as http://www.brainpreservation.org/
The current conception of space travel as displayed in much of popular media is next to impossible and wrong. The biological factor will impede any of such fantasies.
The only way to sustain human space travel is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.
> The only way to sustain human space travel beyond our solar system is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.
It did no such thing. It proved that survival in space is not as easy as we had hoped, and gave us a list of specific problems to tackle. Perhaps it will ultimately turn out to be impossible, at least with any technology feasible in the near future, but we're still far from certain.
Come on, it's 2015. Can we please stop with this sexist rhetoric? Particularly if you're talking about survival of the species, which definitely needs both genders.
I think that might make a substantial difference.
My point was that etymology (though interesting) is largely irrelevant to whether something is exclusionary or not. And it's a bit of a non-sequitor to point to the use of a word from a heavily sexist era as some sort of argument against it being sexist.
Words have a social affect beyond the pure literal meaning of them. And really, it's not hard to not use exclusionary language.
I'm not sure I understand your first sentence. Are you saying that people continue to use those words (the second of which I don't recognize) in the same manner as they were used before, and that at the time those words were being used in a way that was not harmful?
I don't think that I am aware of that any common use of that word that matches those criteria, but I may be mistaken (I certainly have not thought this through).
I'd like to note that I wasn't necessarily claiming that using the word 'man' now for a certain purpose is not imperfect, just trying to note a difference between the compared circumstances. (This may have been influenced by a position, and perhaps the method of discussion I am using might be counterproductive, with all its qualifiers and fallbacks, but uh, hm.) Now I am mostly trying to understand what you mean by this most recent message.
When you are talking about using a word from a heavily sexist era, are you talking about using 'man' from 'mann'? Also, are you saying that the use of the word 'mann' at that time was sexist?
If that is not what you meant, I apologize, I don't mean to put words in your mouth.
Finally, I agree that connotation and other properties of words can be harmful when the denotation would not be.
Which very well may be a sufficient reason to avoid the use of the word 'man' to mean a human of any gender.
(though, due to ignorance, _successfully_ avoiding all use of exclusionary language might be difficult? Though of course, avoiding any single instance of exclusionary language likely would not be hard.)
I note that my way of approaching these sorts of things might be harmful, with all the extra qualifiers everywhere, and a few other things like that. However, I didn't really feel comfortable not responding at all, because I felt accused of saying something that I felt I had not said, and which I did not understand how it might follow from what I had said. I hope that I have not engaged in moving any goalposts, or similar harmful rhetorical-ish stuff. However, I feel I might have done so (though I am not sure exactly where), so I apologize if I have.
No need to apologise, by the way, I didn't feel like words were put in my mouth by what you said. I just didn't see the arguments you put forward as meaning it's okay to use certain language - the same arguments work for slurs.
the second of which I don't recognize
It's a racial slur against Spanish folks in British English. Doesn't have the same impact as the other word, but it's still a slur.
Also, are you saying that the use of the word 'mann' at that time was sexist?
I am saying that at the time, women were second-class citizens and largely considered to be in the social background. There aren't a lot of women in the history books, for example. Saying that 'mann' meant all humans in an era when women weren't considered as equals doesn't give the word a lot of credit as a gender-neutral word.
It's a bit like how for a long time 'the UK' and 'England' were interchangeable. The UK had a couple of other countries in it that weren't England, but people frequently referred to the group of them as 'England'.
though, due to ignorance, _successfully_ avoiding all use of exclusionary language might be difficult
Difficult sure, but at the same time, still something to strive for. 'man' and 'mankind' are, at this point, purely rhetorical devices, both of which have plenty of alternatives.
Nobody said that. The etymology was only brought up to show that 'man' being gender neutral is not a neologism that can be easily argued against.
I don't know why you brought up slurs at all. Using a term that focuses on a gender or race does not imply insulting anyone.
If you enunciate clearly you can probably use "negro" without upsetting anyone, and only getting odd looks for such an out-of-fashion term. Mentioning race is not where the social baggage is.
Both sexist terms and racial slurs are exclusionary language, which is the point I was getting at. I never said that people were being insulted by man/mankind.
The ironic thing is that people dismiss it as 'it doesn't really matter' as you've just done. If it doesn't matter that much, why persist in using it? Just change it to a more inclusive term and move on.
It is really the other way around, since "man" as meaning both genders is the more original meaning of the word. So there is nothing sexist about "mankind". However it was arguable sexist to use "a man" to mean "a male" rather than "a human".
It's unfortunate that you only chose the words you posted. You should have included all of the words, both known and unknown. It's unfortunate that prejudiced collections of subatomic particles such as yourself still do not believe in equality.
It's like me saying I have a choice between two news cars and deciding that I can afford both (by ignoring my mortgage, food, and all other expenses)
That is an exaggeration if we look at it in terms of the federal budget. If we compared the annual federal budget to say a median income, this is more a decision of if we should buy a plane ticket or two, not if we should buy a car or two.
Maybe we should be looking at the best ways we can spend our money, and not any way to spend our money that’s better than our biggest failures.
First I dislike the JSF. If there was any actual R&D, it's all seekrit and classified, in spite of China already having obtained the plans. (50 terrabytes worth of data, perhaps not enough to recreate the thing.) The JSF is its own trillion dollar expense, and didn't help with Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria.
Second, and in the spirit of the letter, R&D is one of the best things we can spend money on.
It's an old argument, but the lives and property saved by carbon monoxide detectors alone are probably worth nasa's budget.
For a more recent example, consider all the Soylent discussion last year. Research into space exploration has to pin down exactly what nutrition is required, making products like Soylent better, with the added improving food aid - literally saving starving children like in the letter. This aid doesn't need to come from the government, any aid organization could take advantage of the knowledge.
Finally, and a little closer to home, NASA has one of the very few research computer labs. If you want to argue that pair programming is effective or not, you're pretty much going to have to rely on nasa research. Even for google, it is too expensive to try to understand what programming practices actually produce good software.
Government funded research proving feasibility does pretty great things. There is 0% chance google would have a self driving car without the years spent on the darpa grand challenge. By showing it's possible the government opens up new markets for anyone to exploit.
When you look at algorithms like bandit, you see the trade off of exploration vs exploitation. I think it's very hard for any company to do much exploration. They need to make money - developing new technologies is a big honking cost center. At least some resources need to be consistently allocated to exploration.
So we really shouldn’t be asking whether or not anything good comes from a particular action, but rather whether that action is the best way to accomplish what we want. And it just doesn’t seem like manned space exploration is needed for any of the research we need - except perhaps politically.
And I suppose that’s where theoretical best options run up against reality. Theoretically, it might very well be the case that we’d get much more scientific bang for our buck if we didn’t focus on putting people in space or blowing things up (research from defense spending). But manned space flight and military spending (and of course, lots of pork for the locals) might be the only way to get these funds to go towards any research, even if 90% (made-up number) of it gets wasted.
Politically, it's hard to engage emotionally without some sort of story. I vastly prefer adventurous explorers to fierce warriors. Maybe we will do something sane without the space story, and that would be great.
I do think there are fundamental problems with defense research. The NSA did great stuff, didn't they invent RSA? but they couldn't tell anyone about it. That system has intrinsic biases about secrecy that aren't useful.
I'll agree space isn't optimal, but they broadcast their successes as widely as possible. As far as i can tell, nasa is open about technology and research. Military success is grisly, and likely secret. Space biases technology to being small, light, and versatile. These aren't bad things. The military on the other hand will throw thousands of warm bodys at solving problems. Ships can be built with a handful of crew, but that dosn't have the prestige of a supercarrier with 6k guys.
I think a space context also thinks a lot harder about failure detection and recovery.
Anywho - i don't think we disagree. Thanks for the thought provoking point of view.
But--what I just said is still the argument from utility!
As the GP pointed out, we pay for all sorts of things that have little directly measurable utility, like fireworks and parks and the arts. Yes, towns with good fireworks, parks, and arts will have an advantage in attracting good companies and employees. And I'd say the same is true of space exploration (it helps the U.S. reputation). But once again, we're into utility.
Why do those things create advantage in the first place? Because people like those things. So turn the utility argument on its head and consider: things have high utility because they allow us to do things that we like.
Now consider that exploration is itself popular. Whether it's diving to the Mariana Trench, free climbing a new route on El Cap, or flying to orbit on the Space Shuttle, these are stories that many people love to read, and kids love to dream about.
So I would argue that space exploration can skip the utility argument altogether...we do it because we like it--directly. The purpose of exploration is to explore. This is behind quite a bit of the history of science as well: people exploring places and phenomena simply because it was so interesting to do it.
Edit to add: this sort of reasoning can make fans of science uncomfortable because it's not a logical or scientific argument. But the fact is that emotions like awe, excitement, etc. are often big reasons that kids begin to pursue careers in science. Not many 18 years olds start on a physics degree because of a deep-seated desire to add 0.01% to future GDP.
Emotions are paramount, they are part of who we are, and they are what drives us to care about others. Also, pretty much no 18-year-old in their right mind starts anything because of a "deep-seated desire to add 0.01% to future GDP". They choose their careers to help themselves and/or to help others and/or because it's cool and/or because they have no other choice.
For a start, the federal funding thrown at the Space Race this article talks about - a bigger proportion of the US budget than education in the mid 1960s - wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination exclusively "the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake". The prestige of beating the Evil Empire, the serious worry that falling behind would render the US defenceless and undoubtedly juicy contracts for the regular suppliers to the military all played major parts. (Of course, NASA funding also paled in comparison with what was being wasted on the regular military at the time, including the highly targeted pursuit of knowledge for the sake of becoming more efficient at winning wars.)
Then there's the question of whether the government is any good at establishing the relative merits of scientific endeavours. The fact that we ended up with GPS and satellite television (some of it even benefiting poor people in Africa in some way) and didn't end up with an efficient way of levelling Moscow from orbit says much about the fact that scientific progress takes different directions from that those authorising the spending may have intended, but I'm not sure that necessarily weakens the case for those opposing federal science funding.
The study of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics in the 19th and early 20th centuries has resulted in an economic benefit somewhere in the range of quadrillions of dollars of value, and hundreds of billions of person-years of life/lives added which would not have been possible otherwise. And all from some nerds futzing around with things they thought were interesting.
I think that sort of RoI justifies spending a few billion here and there now and again on seemingly esoteric research.
Sending a robotic probe to collect moon rocks would have been worthwhile. But sending humans to do the same job was far more costly and provided very little additional scientific value.
Plus that wasn't the (only) goal of the missions: beating the USSR there was a stronger motivator.
Let me ask you this: Given the scientific advances made due to the first moon landing, do you think that the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth moon landings also added tremendous scientific value? Do you think there should have been a seventh?
No, because we clearly weren't willing to commit the resources to make our efforts pay off in the long run. Who knows what might be possible now, if we had used the money we spent on the Viet Nam war to successfully establish a permanent manned lunar colony?
After that, maybe not so much. But the program was designed with ~nine landings in mind, and that's what we should have done.
I think the depth and breadth of human knowledge would now be greater if the moon missions were unmanned and the money was instead spent on other areas of scientific research which were judged to be cost-effective.
Perhaps the following experiment would be a way to resolve our differences: Let's survey a random sample of 100 scientists asking whether they agree with the above statement. But not just scientists involved in space exploration - all types of geologists, climatologists, astrophysicists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, palaeontologists, etc. If less than say 25 scientists agree then I would accept that I was wrong about the wastefulness of manned moon missions. If more than 75 scientists agree would you accept that I was right?
This is a bigger problem amongst the general public then I think many inside the bubble of science and technology really understand. I remember a conversation I had some years ago with a co-worker who was adamant that space exploration was an absolute waste of money. Because "we have enough problems down here we should fix instead." I tried explaining all the advancements that the space race brought about in terms of technology and medicine. And the go to response was: "Well scientists should have just invented that stuff anyway. They didn't need NASA as an excuse to build it.". A complete lack of understanding or appreciation for what goes into scientific or technological discovery and advancement is worryingly common within the general public.
I don't know if this story is true or not. I suspect it isn't. But frankly I have the feeling there is more sincerity in this answer than in this long letter to a Nun in Africa.
If you spend some time on a spaceflight forum, you will read enthusiast posts about how cool it would be to see other words, to experience micro-gravity, or how interesting the science behind rocket engines is, but I rarely read about how space science will solve hunger, world peace and whatnot, and when I do it's precisely as an answer to someone who brought this up, and in this case someone who does not work in aerospace.
When a Kid loves space and rockets, when he spends countless time reading science-fiction books, it's because to him it's fun, fascinating and exciting, not because it's supposed to feed starving children. I doubt an adult rocket scientist or engineer is fundamentally different. Deep down he just doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa.
I submit the answer is "Why would they share yours? They aren't you.".
If I go to a video gaming forum, do people talk about how to end world hunger? For the price of one new video game, you can feed someone in Africa for two months.
Hence it is appropriate to discuss how the problems would be solved on a spaceflight forum, but not so appropriate on a video game forum.
Once you've killed the person who wanted to see the person you're feeding starve to death.
These days, starvation is political, as it is a weapon of war.
This is a pretty uncharitable reading of the article. But I agree with the assessment that scientists' main motivation doesn't tend to be altruism but probably more things like curiosity and competitiveness, and of course always needing more funds. Which I think is fine.
Applied to the microscope-argument: Even if the inventor and early users of the microscope were only interested in satisfying their curiosity, the results are immeasurably valuable many years later.
I think there's more than one way to read that statement. It seems overly cynical to interpret that anecdote as implying that children have no use (present or future); I think the implication is that while they may have no present use, they will have future use when they develop into adults.
Similarly, new branches of mathematics or space science might not be used for much today, but will develop into fields that have uses in the future. Just as humans must invest in rearing their children, so too must they invest in developing their science and math.
Not everyone is effective at solving every problem. I don't know anything about agriculture or logistics or politics or many other fields that would be needed to begin to tackle hunger in other countries, or even my own country. I solve the problems that I know how to solve, and we all cooperate as a society. The technology developed in one field like robotics or global positioning makes other fields like agriculture more effective (automated farming machinery). It would be shortsighted to suggest that everyone put their field on hold and inefficiently try to tackle world hunger. A better question is "do we have the right amount of people and resources dedicated to solving world hunger?" which gets back to the budgetary and governance matters discussed in the letter.
I don't think it's true that a rocket scientist necessarily "doesn't give a crap about starving children in Africa". It's probably more that he doesn't know anything about the issue and has no expertise with which to solve the problem, and so he focuses on problems that he can solve, like launching satellites for weather, communication, GPS, which may in turn assist people in other countries with problems like food distribution. Without the rocket scientists, satellite equipment shuts down, and everyone in every field is worse off. We should trust to the natural equilibrium and distribution of human interest, balancing that with the government we've created, to make sure that problems get solved adequately -- we should not judge people for the field that they've chosen if it contributes to society.
Even fields like computer science, as applied to building Internet forums like this one, contribute in their own way by bringing people together and allowing them to have discussions like this.
I think even this assumption is dangerous, and besides, you're just kicking the can down the street (how do you define a human's usefulness?).
The simple truth is that not everything on this planet needs to have a use, let alone a positive use. This goes for both things and matters that we have control over (science) and things we have no control over.
The point of the anecdote is that just as a single person does not have to have a 'use' to justify their existence, mathematics does not need to be useful to be studied.
With your hypothetical scientist, while she might spend her career with rockets, I am not sure that is enough to tell you whether she also does or does not give a crap, deep down or shallowly, about starving children, or what the rough geographical location might be of any she disregards.
People are a lot more varied than that. There is no neat little box marked 'rocket scientist'.
I appreciate your focus on measurable behaviors. But make no mistake, there are lots of people involved in space science because they want to improve people's lives.
There are unique opportunities to measure climate change from space, for instance, and significant numbers of people in this area have literally devoted their professional careers to finding out what's going on with climate change. They will tell you that straight out, and their decisions in other areas of their life mirror that outlook, so you can tell it's not lip service.
The people who study planetary atmospheres can be motivated by similar considerations (hello, runaway greenhouse effect), also terrestrial weather (hurricane intensification, tornado genesis, etc.), space weather (solar flares, etc.), ecological forecasting, etc. Some folks are drawn to these areas because they matter in an obvious way.
You are correct that some space scientists/engineers are motivated by pure curiosity, tenacity, novelty, etc. -- inward-looking things. But by no means all, and in some disciplines, it tilts rather the other way.
I'm an Epidemiologist. I've done work trying to address the Ebola outbreak, and prevent hospital acquired infections. And I started doing it because, when I was a kid, space was awesome.
The world is more than is dreamt of in your web forum browsing.
While I agree with the emotional motivation (hell, I'm a geek because of Star Trek, and note that includes me wanting all of humanity to have a bright future), I very much disagree with the conclusion that a rocket scientist "doesn't give a crap about starving children". Not only giving a crap is not related to being a space enthusiast, I'd wager that on average, your rocket scientist (or even space geek) has more things to say about the hunger problem than an average person.
Not only many of them care, they actually have the intellectual tools to rationally address the topic.
And RE video games, space and world hunger tangent downthread - only today I saw people debating environmental issues on a Kerbal Space Program forum. So nope, those dicussions in fact are there (usually in a subforum dedicated to off-topic discussions).
Another is that it seems odd how selectively we apply this argument. I often hear about the need to stop space exploration until everybody is fed but I don't think I've ever heard someone say we should stop making movies until we end hunger.
The reason these people don't argue that we shouldn't stop making movies until we end world hunger is that (well, most of the time), the making of movies is not funded by the government, but by the private market.
It's a one thing to to argue that we shouldn't do Y at all as a species until we accomplish X ("we shouldn't make movies when people are starving"). It's very different to argue that maybe the government should completely prioritize X over Y for the purposes of allocating tax money ("let's not spend money on space until we can feed everyone").
That aside, there will always be a better cause to which all resources should be devoted. And usually problems which would result from a solution. Would a more rapidly growing world in which everyone has food but in which nobody has a job be a better one?
Or building interstates or sports stadiums or paying inflated union benefits and salaries, or military spending, etc.
The problem is the above are all politicized and directly financially benefit some voters, thus have cheerleaders and other irrational actors holding up this spending and defending obvious corruption and abuses. Science, when done right, is non-politicized and doesn't financially enrich voters directly, so there's very little "I got mine" mentality here like there is with other programs. Many of which turn into "make work" programs (bridges to nowhere, etc), if not outright entitlements (welfare).
Not to mention the philosophical and practical problems with welfare in general. Once you establish a system where being poor is favorable to not being poor, then who will pay for all these resources. As a Chicagoan, CHA housing is a lot better than what you can rent on your own unless you make a decent wage. My wife and I used to wake up every morning in the winter and shovel snow only to watch the CHA housing across the street have city employees do this for them. Hell, if the government is going to house you, feed you, shovel your snow, etc what incentive do you have to ever leave that system? None as far as I can see. Now we have an idle class of people involved in drug abuse and gang related crime and shootings, as well as epidemic of unwanted children used to further game the system for benefits. Give up on space exploration for the sake of the insatiable welfare state which inevitably creates massive ghettos, massive taxation, angry youth mobs, and religious radicalization? No thanks. We've watched this path unfold in Europe and want none of it.
Without arguing the case, I think it's fair to say that a much smaller proportion of the people in Western societies (at least) now hold this faith as strongly. The costs of modern "progress" have become more apparent over time: cures often harbor severe side effects; machines have their wastes and their dangers; knowledge that seems sure at first often proves less sure with further study. Our confidence that the costs of science are as low as we once thought they were has weakened; our confidence that the benefits are as great or as inevitable has also declined.
His argument that reapportioning money from science to humanitarian causes is not as simple, in a democratic, bureaucratic country, as it seems it should be is still as strong as it was when he gave it, if not more so.
But the underlying assumption that, "If we just do something ambitiously scientific, vastly great goods for humanity will result," is harder to sell than it was. We no longer accept that a manned voyage to Mars (for example) will result in concrete benefits for humanity in a way that is remotely analogous to the support of a lens grinder at the dawn of optics.
Proponents of space exploration must continue to both show the rest of us the concrete benefits of investment and, at the same time, limit their expectations. It will never again be like it was in the 60s and early 70s.
FWIW, I wonder if the decentralization / popularization of access to space technology will contribute to lower costs that can iteratively enable higher research goals without needing to cajole wrist-slashing degrees of government spending?
Seems to me, cheap and effective terraforming is a prereq to any planetary migration or exploration. Even then it would just be a pick up and drop service to Mars or where-ever. Exploration, in general, should be done by robots.
You can literally put an infinite number of rovers on Mars and still not have this.
Even during the madness of spending that was the Apollo program the time spent actually doing "a bit of science" was extremely limited. The cost per minute doing science with people is a whole different league than robots.
You need robots even for colony. Farting into bubbles on LEO will not get you there.
I'm unsure of how you consider what they're doing right now immaterial to their goals.
They are starting with profit, are not sure about the middle, but know that if it all works then they are definitely going to have to collect some new underpants.
Who thinks it will? Is SpaceX planning on funding LEO bubbles?
Nobody is going to spend any serious money just on robots.
If I had a synthetic bacterium in my intestines that allowed me to digest a wider variety of foods, such as sawdust or tree leaves, that would even reduce our need to terraform Earth (via agriculture) to support larger human populations.
By the time we have acquired those capabilities from our biological research, it would be useful to already have the capability to transport live organisms to hostile environments on other planets. Those organisms should then be able to adapt to their local niche conditions.
To me, cheap and effective terraforming means designing a single-celled, self-reproducing organism that can survive in the hostile environment while also making it a tiny bit less hostile.
We cannot solve any single problem faced by humanity any faster by focusing on it to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Indeed, the solutions to some problems are often found accidentally, while working on something apparently unrelated. Such serendipitous discoveries cannot be forced; they can only be encouraged by working on as many diverse efforts as we can reasonably sustain.
How many of our problems could be solved simply by being more unified and cooperative as a species? Space exploration, by virtue of its great difficulty and its ability to refocus our perspective on something much larger than ourselves, drives us to become better as a species, and attacks in a single stroke all those problems caused mainly by our everyday selfishness and cruelty to one another.
Here is a photo that fits every human alive, except the three behind the lens, into 3% of the field of view. I hope it readjusts your perspective as it has readjusted mine.
Having read Dr. Stuhlinger’s letter, Sister Mary responded: “Thank you – from now on, I firmly believe in the profound value of the space program.”
More annoying, the political defense to try and keep the votes for it makes it all the more silly. It spreads over multiple states and locations to ensure votes, which naturally makes it more diffuse and internally fractured. But you're still arguing with the increasing conservatism of an aging country whose Reps know that voting stability and order gets them back in.
OK. It would also help if they had a goal that wasn't just "stay up." Well projected vision can set fire to a thousand hearts. (cue Superman joke)
What I find an excellent addition from this letter is the discussion of goverence of tax money in the letter.
It isn't a simple case of just deciding to redistribute funds from one department to another.
Nothing against more science, better food production and so on. Of course they help - and perhaps people are also more willing to donate if they have more (which better production would yield). But the real problem is probably political (of course science could help with that, too).
I just don't think you can justify space exploration that way, because clearly there would be more efficient ways to end hunger right now.
Assuming we wouldn't have food anyway, and every dollar for the space program would have to be to taken away from a starving child, I don't think there would be any way to justify it.
This sentence highlights the certainty a mission to Mars was during the Apollo program. Soon after this (early 70's) the NASA budget was slashed, and the mighty Saturn V mothballed.
Stuhlinger was part of similar effort, downplaying von Braun role in Nazi war effort (including use of slave labour).
Imagine being at the spear tip of something so evil as being part of the Nazi killing machine - and then, fast forward a few decades, transform into a sage statesman, arguing so passionately for the oneness of humanity and for the peaceful uses of space.
I wonder if he ever chose to explain that dichotomy to his children before he died. It blows my mind.
This article will definitely help me to explain the value of radio astronomy and science in general in a more succinct and 'useful' way.
When you say that, people are thinking "so would you let people die unnecessarily, JUST so you can know more?". What's important about knowing more? It's useful for its entertainment and curiosity-satisfying properties, but that ranks far lower than stuff like people starving.
That being said, I'd go back to explaining very carefully how everything we have around us is built on top of people doing weird stuff just to know more.
This is primarily the reason that we should explore the space and try to find new and exciting things.
Look at Zimbabwe's food output on a chart and you'll see what I mean.