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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

Maybe better to solve global warming before we chart out every square inch of our solar system. It's pretty clear that there is way more life on Earth than the other planets. Too bad because the life here is under extreme threat. You don't need to look far. Species going extinct. Rain forests converted into palm oil plantations. coral reefs bleached. And now the possibility of runaway climate change.

There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on these more immediate problems at hand.

Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing problems of the day.

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We hardly spend anything on space exploration. Not to mention it has a lot of benefits and carryover to the rest of the economy. If we have to make cuts, there are many other places we can target instead of the .5% of the federal budget to NASA.

If the benefits and carryover paid for it, fine. But I doubt it, not now anyway. If it wasn't borrowed money, I'd say throw .5% at at it. But no way when it's borrowed, unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the outcome is net positive.

I really wish we could retire the word "borrowed" to describe the nature of sovereign debt. It makes it sound like we're borrowing dollars from the Chinese to pay NASA. That's not how it works. (United States currency is one of the few things that isn't made in China these days.)

Are you suggesting there are no adverse consequences to the "borrowing", similar to borrowing?

>But I doubt it, not now anyway.

NASA's contributions are estimated to have a 2-3 to 1 fold revenue generation for NASA spending.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/no_20100827_1798.php

That's why I said not now anyway. In the past, sure, it drove innovation to a great degree. But at this point we've wrung out the biggest gains. Almost anything NASA develops nowadays has little benefit to the public at large. It's entertainment mostly.

It can have huge consequences for us down the line. For example when Theodore Roosevelt decided to preserve national parks, it wasn't as big of a benefit to the public, mainly recreation. But in Yellowstone's hot springs a bacteria was discovered which now helps major biological processes through a technique called PCR.

Investments in science can have huge payoffs.

We should consider the alternatives. We're borrowing $trillions annually, so we have to pick our battles carefully. Why spend $billions to maybe possibly discover something like that, when the same $$$ can definitely pay back on some other crucial item? For example, most NASA funding should already have been diverted to solving the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; that's a more critical need that's currently being ignored. And that's only one of many giant cleanup tasks left to be done.

There will always be more pressing problems than space exploration.

Or maybe the only possibility for the earth in the far future is to be destroyed naturally, and hopefully the only humans in the universe aren't stuck here when that happens.

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