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Comment by john_b | Hacker News Reader

I've found that objections to space exploration share a fundamental axiom with the more general objections to federal funding of scientific activities of any type. Namely, that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is an inherently worthless activity. If that knowledge happens to have some immediate positive impact on a problem affecting presently living people, then it may be worth pursuing if such a pursuit isn't "too expensive".

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".

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Let's talk about real science. How come the SSC got cancelled in favour of the ISS?

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".

Both the numbers are drops in the bucket as far as federal funding is concerned. Out of a $3 trillion budget, we could have easily afforded both.

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.

We know the answer to that question already. Man will not survive in space in the long run with biological limitations. The ISS had essentially proven that.

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.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but we haven't really explored the full range possibilities of canned apes in space. For example, there are no centrifugal artificial-gravity generators anywhere in space - setting some up could show us whether the various problems with free-fall environments could be mitigated.

Travelling to (e.g.) Mars isn't in the realm of fantasy. Maybe you should say:

> The only way to sustain human space travel beyond our solar system is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.

> Man will not survive in space in the long run with biological limitations. The ISS had essentially proven that.

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.

Is there an article describing all of the specific problems discovered on the ISS? I have only heard tidbits here and there.

I have a poster I made that I can put up on imgur or something by Friday, if that's not too late.

I'd be interested in seeing something like this.

That sounds great! Would love to see it

Sorry that it took so long, but I had to find where they hung it up in my school (and it was finals week). Nonetheless, this is more of a poster on general issues of sending stuff with people in it into space for long periods of time (not ISS specific issues), but it's a fairly good general big-picture idea (IMHO):

http://imgur.com/a/7om70

Man will not survive in space

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.

When "man" is used without an article it means "mankind" - that is all humans, male and female. When used with an article ("a man") it indicates a male human.

Just to add, when we use man to mean humans as a whole, it comes from the old English mann which refers to a person of either gender, with wer (hence werewolf) and wif equivalent to current man and woman.

'black' comes from an old word for 'burned', but it would be silly to say that it still means the same thing. You wouldn't say that fashionistas like to wear burned clothing, for example.

Well, people have not continued to use the word 'black' in that way, while they have continued to use the word 'man' in that way.

I think that might make a substantial difference.

So... you're effectively saying that using words like 'nigger' or 'dago' should be fine, since we all know what they mean in the modern context? Exclusionary language is fine because we all know what it means?

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.

Huh?

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.

I meant that the argument "these words have meant the same thing for a long time" doesn't mean that the word is therefore okay to use. Similarly the etymology of the word doesn't mean it's okay either - 'nigger' comes from 'negro' which just means 'black', for example, but there's a hell of a lot of social baggage that goes with it.

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.

>the argument "these words have meant the same thing for a long time" doesn't mean that the word is therefore okay to use

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.

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.

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.

'Mankind' is also a sexist term, and it's easily modifiable to 'humankind'. 'Mankind' still puts one gender ahead of the other; 'man and others' is what it means.

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.

I believe the word “woman” is also inherently sexist and should be replaced by “wohuman”?

"wohuman" is also inherently sexist, and no - replacing it with "wohuhuman" won't help; it's the "human" part that's sexist.

How on earth is "human" sexist?

In the same way "woman" is. That is, not at all. I thought it was an obvious irony in context of the comment I replied to.

> 'Mankind' still puts one gender ahead of the other;

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".

'Humankind' is also a prejudice term, and it's easily modifiable to 'animal', 'collection of biological material', 'product of genetic material', or 'matter'.

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.

Life has survived this long in space with just air and a magnetic field as protection. What we have found is that we need good shielding and to simulate gravity. So at the simplest, we need a lot of mass and we need the bit we live in to spin. Also, biology and technology are not particularly separate. Stuff like Dyson trees should not be written off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_tree

Saying we could afford both is the excuse of people who don't want to admit there are opportunity costs and the federal budget is not unlimited.

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)

>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.

Indeed! there are many other things we absolutely need to cover. Like the joint strike fighter. It catches on fire too often to actually fly much, but when it does, boy howdy. the absolute best thing for shooting down those ISIS terror-jets.

I don’t get this argument. It’s fine to make poor investments as long as they’re better than our worst investments? I mean, the joint strike fighter proponent could make this argument as well. “Hey, we wasted over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, at least the boondoggle I'm advocating won’t screw up the world and will fund some R&D that might become useful.”

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.

I agree, it's a somewhat silly argument. 2 points.

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.

While I don’t disagree with the general thrust of your post, I think the main issue is that a lot of people don’t feel that manned space exploration is the most efficient way to get these returns. Chances are we’ll at least get something out of whatever we do, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth the cost or is the best use of resources. Even with a debacle like Iraq, for instance, the injuries of service members have spurred DARPA to research advanced prosthetics and brain implants.

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.

Your point about efficient allocation is very good. I find it hard to quantify what we need without a goal.

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.

That's false economy when at the same time we wasted billions on a self propelled artillery platform that was obsolete before it was designed and building stealth bombers at $2B a copy. All to face a Soviet threat that had just vaporized.

The ISS has the benefit of more jobs and pork that Congress can farm out to various different congressional districts. The SSC would have resulted in jobs primarily in Texas, and mostly in short term construction instead of ongoing contracts.

You're right. Add there the fact that ISS serves also as a ground for international cooperation. There is therefore both an economical reason and a political one involved.

I feel like this is just another variant on the utility argument, though. You feel the SSC would have been more useful to scientific research than the ISS. But there is still the argument to be made that we don't know in advance what knowledge will be more useful. Maybe in the future, it will turn out that we really need to know how to keep humans alive in space, but the Higgs is useless for all practical purposes.

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.

the counter to this argument is that the ISS doesn't really help with exploration. We could have gone to the moon many more times with the same amount of money (and probably get really good at it too!)

Creating a sense of inspiration by science/technology is not that hard to do. The robot challenges do it for much less, for example and there are many other ways other than space.

> 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.

I'm not sure many people opposing to federal funding of science consider the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake an inherently worthless activity.

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.

Was just about to write something similar. It's absurd that the original argument characterized any opposition to the space program as born of ignorance or backwardness. Since when has science been about dogmatically supporting any endeavor?

Indeed, you can't know what you know until you know it, and you can't know the value of knowledge until perhaps decades or centuries after it was originally acquired. Thus the logical choice is to be quite promiscuous in the acquisition of knowledge and to maintain a healthy degree of curiosity towards all manner of knowledge, no matter how seemingly abstract or useless.

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.

Case in point: think about lasers. They were described as interesting but totally useless phenomena when first developed in the 50s/60s. They were called a "solution looking for a problem". Look where are we now with them, just 50 years later.

I find it disturbing that you think clean parks are a white elephant. In any case, your list has things that directly improve people's day-to-day lives. Sending men to the moon consumed a huge amount of money, but to the average person, it was just bragging rights; we beat the russkies.

s/average person/average American/

> 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".

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.

Hence the dark side of democracy - we have to listen to people's opinion about things they have absolutely no clue about.

To me is more like when people say "why are you fighting for animal rights when there are children starving to death in Africa?"

Even if your goal is to pursue knowledge for it's own sake, the manned moon missions were enormously wasteful.

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.

The manned missions added tremendous additional scientific value, especially for the time period. They didn't have rovers with the ability to determine which rocks would be of value. The humans were trained to do just that.

Plus that wasn't the (only) goal of the missions: beating the USSR there was a stronger motivator.

'We feel the need to beat the USSR' wasn't mentioned in the letter to the nun - perhaps because being able to boast about winning a race might appear to be less important than people suffering in Africa.

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?

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?

The sixth, certainly; it was the first that had become routine enough to send a professional geologist along. I'd go so far as to say that most of the scientific value in 12-16 was in making 17 possible. There absolutely should have been a seventh, eighth and probably ninth; scientific targets had already been picked for the next three IIRC.

After that, maybe not so much. But the program was designed with ~nine landings in mind, and that's what we should have done.

Manned spaceflight saved the Hubble telescope from being space junk, it's not difficult to imagine further situations where manned spaceflight can solve problems with unmanned objects.

Manned maintenance of Hubble proved to be unfeasible from an economical point of view. It would have been cheaper to just crash command to the old and broken telescope satellite and then send another one instead.

Enormously wasteful? This is just ridiculous. You think the world in 2015 would have been better off than if humans had never set foot on any other celestial body? How can you seriously argue that? Also, as far as the scientific value, I think many of the scientists involved in that exploration would very much disagree with you.

If the goal is pursuing knowledge for its own sake, then yes:

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?

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