Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost? | Hacker News Reader

Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

9 pointsgarbowza16 comments

If we're going to have government spending, we might as well spend it on something interesting and beneficial, rather than finding new ways to ruin countries and kill people.

Space exploration is expensive. Colonization is an existential necessity, and should be funded with an order of magnitude more than NASA receives.

Tossing humans into low earth orbit to do rings around the earth isn't demonstrably advancing us to avoid certain death as a species.

[edit: everything done today in space should be done by robots. Everything.]

I agree with the second half of what you say, and I'll let Charlie Stross break the bad news to you about the first half:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

I've read that wonderful essay. But he is wrong.

I'm confident that on a long enough time scale, human death wont be necessary and we'll be able to backup and fork our intelligence in machines.

On that time scale, colonization is entirely possible, even without the inevitable expansion of knowledge of physics that might enable faster than light information transfer. Information is all that is necessary to transfer if you upload your intelligence.

That said, the steps to get into space for scientific purposes and for eventual colonization are identical and largely divergent from the current approach.

Scrap the shuttle and all human missions. Focus on telepresence and robotic intelligence. Build the infrastructure to make it easy to get humans into orbit.

So maybe we should invest all the money in AI before space becomes worthwhile?

An excellent approach would be to develop robots smart enough to build habitats that humans could use. This would expand knowledge on space hardened environments, autonomy, perception, and just enough launch vehicle tech to make avoiding all humans dieing withing the next century possible.

The investment in AI can be towards a relevant goal.

Indeed. Who says we have to transmit our DNA directly? Just get the robots there and have them make the people or whatever we want in our image.

Get the robots there, then send the pattern of one of my intelligences to let the robot be my avatar. :-D

Again and again, the question comes up, but no one ever asks "Might space exploration be a BETTER use of all of the money that we waste on all of the other crap in this country?"

What if we as a society could just get together and call off the NFL and britney spears for a year or two and use all of that money for more worthwhile endevors. And yes, of course, "the war" (whichever one we are in at the moment) goes without saying.

Recently, I crossed this:

Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed Skunkworks, said at a UCLA Alumni Speech in 1993, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do."

Who knows if its really truth and what has been achieved already...

"It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit."

Hmm?!?!

Money multipliers are a pretty well understood idea. US gov spends a dollar, it gets used to buy something, the seller uses it to buy something else, etc. GDP is the value of goods created, and a single dollar used multiple times can be counted many times.

It's a bit naive to make things are so simple. A great example is a huge toy doll, 100 stories tall. Imagine the engineering milestones that would be reached by such a project. Imagine the huge number of people employed!

Those are distracting from the fact we don't need huge toy doll.

Also, you'll never hear a politician point out that the dollar spent has been taxed, and would have not incurred the dead weight loss of the taxation process had it just been spent and re-spent.

Well said.

Reminds me of the broken window fallacy (http://jim.com/econ/chap02p1.html).

There's also the human profits. I think there is no better image for 21st century humanity than the view of Earth from space. There are no borders, cultures, skin colors, or religious differences. There's just one big blue rock in the middle of pitch darkness. We call it home.

Think of NASA as one huge tech VC firm. Technologies that are much less likely without NASA and the space race of the 60's:

1. GPS 2. Advanced robotics (Martian rovers) 3. Tang!

Can anyone name more?

Sadly, it's much harder to name the technologies that would have been developed with that talent and wealth instead.

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