Spaceflight? but why tho theres ...... on earth!!!

[YNM]

3 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

That's probably because no 'leader' is ever motivated by the will to serve, but rather the will to rule.

Yeah. This is why I doubt humans would remain for a very long future, unless we somehow rectified this.

[kerbiloid]

On 7/3/2021 at 5:50 AM, tater said:

I'd bet money the bulk of the people making this argument are not spending their own money, since they don't pay meaningful taxes. The US tax code is extremely progressive, the bottom 80% could pay nothing and it would make no difference (and the bottom almost 50% already pay nothing).

The taxes are secondary. They appear from the whole nation produced value, on its redistribution.

Unless the 0.5% of high league gets that money from anywhere else on their own. But they don't.
Even when they do, they do this by paying to the countries with cheaper labour, instead of their compatriots.

So, that plays not a big role, who paid how much.
The ordinary persons of those 80% are agreed that somebody else decides how to spend the money - when they still get something significant as a compensation in return.

But they hate when the money gets spent with no visible profit for themselves. They start feel that the totl value is redistributed wrong way.

Edited July 6, 2021 by kerbiloid

[MKI]

On 7/2/2021 at 5:42 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

So instead of spending money on something that I might go as far as to call glorified propaganda, why not spend it on solving actual issues on Earth?

I would like to clarify this counter doesn't necessarily target the existence of space exploration at all, but is instead targeting expansion of space exploration and human space exploration.

This is a misconception of at least NASA, and even directly addressed in the private sector (SpaceX) Namely the #1 place NASA spends its money on  is Earth. The #1 planet it studies is Earth and even the most external/distant missions have taught humans about things on Earth. I bring up SpaceX because not only is it building to make humans multi-planetary (which IMO is completely crazy, but I digress) but they are trying to at least fund that mission with providing global internet coverage. Which would directly support your idea that a "modern human" can learn more today than they did a few thousand years ago. Part of that is shared knowledge, and the core of that is connectivity to the internet. 

I personally don't believe much in large scale human exploration at this time, robots do just fine. Until there is significant enough human space infrastructure (or Elon get's his wishes) I can't see it happening anytime soon.

I don't believe we need to take anyone into space, nor do I believe we need to make everyone "believe" in some grand scheme that is the universe. I also don't believe we need to convince everyone, only those necessary to keep the march of progress going over time. 

 

If I remember correctly the original post was on spaceflight in general, and not manned space flight. 

[YNM]

1 hour ago, MKI said:

If I remember correctly the original post was on spaceflight in general, and not manned space flight. 

It said "aerospace industry and space travel". I don't think sending robots and machines count as "space travel".

[TheGuyNamedAlan]

12 hours ago, YNM said:

It said "aerospace industry and space travel". I don't think sending robots and machines count as "space travel".

i mean robotic space travel does get debated although i feel like most of the concern from the general public stems from the money that it takes to run the industry, where most people have the misconception that way more money is getting spent on space related projects as it feels so distant and so big.

[YNM]

9 minutes ago, TheGuyNamedAlan said:

i feel like most of the concern from the general public stems from the money that it takes to run the industry, where most people have the misconception that way more money is getting spent on space related projects as it feels so distant and so big.

In that case there are enough signs to indicate that it might be valid, ie. SLS and the likes.

Still however that's not where most of the money and most of the benefit is. Like, think about weather satellites, they help us predict weather events and reduce casualties (and a bit of damages). Or positioning satellites, they help us know where we are and such. Telco is commercial so the benefit goes right back to those who paid for it.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, TheGuyNamedAlan said:

i mean robotic space travel does get debated although i feel like most of the concern from the general public stems from the money that it takes to run the industry, where most people have the misconception that way more money is getting spent on space related projects as it feels so distant and so big.

...while way overestimating what said money can do elsewhere, since it's a large sum of money if they personally had it.

[SunlitZelkova]

On 7/6/2021 at 8:42 AM, MKI said:

This is a misconception of at least NASA, and even directly addressed in the private sector (SpaceX) Namely the #1 place NASA spends its money on  is Earth. The #1 planet it studies is Earth and even the most external/distant missions have taught humans about things on Earth. I bring up SpaceX because not only is it building to make humans multi-planetary (which IMO is completely crazy, but I digress) but they are trying to at least fund that mission with providing global internet coverage. Which would directly support your idea that a "modern human" can learn more today than they did a few thousand years ago. Part of that is shared knowledge, and the core of that is connectivity to the internet. 

I personally don't believe much in large scale human exploration at this time, robots do just fine. Until there is significant enough human space infrastructure (or Elon get's his wishes) I can't see it happening anytime soon.

I don't believe we need to take anyone into space, nor do I believe we need to make everyone "believe" in some grand scheme that is the universe. I also don't believe we need to convince everyone, only those necessary to keep the march of progress going over time. 

 

If I remember correctly the original post was on spaceflight in general, and not manned space flight. 

Oh yes. Even the harshest of my counters were aimed at human spaceflight. There are plenty of good reasons for other space missions, at least in LEO. Rather than "completely end all NASA space exploration programs" the counters were something more like "spend a little less on NASA, make efficient cuts, and just doing so basic thinking will yield the result that human spaceflight and deep space exploration is the best target".

All of my counters were intended to be towards specific government space exploration programs, mainly human ones. SpaceX can do whatever SpaceX wants to because it is a private company.

And of course, I would like to clarify again I don't actually hold such opinions. I wrote it for the purpose of discussion on the best way to explain to someone why space exploration is necessary. Whether it actually helped achieve the goal of the discussion is another question of course lol.

16 hours ago, TheGuyNamedAlan said:

i mean robotic space travel does get debated although i feel like most of the concern from the general public stems from the money that it takes to run the industry, where most people have the misconception that way more money is getting spent on space related projects as it feels so distant and so big.

 

14 hours ago, DDE said:

...while way overestimating what said money can do elsewhere, since it's a large sum of money if they personally had it.

While this is partially true, there is also an emotional factor at work even once those people get the logic. Even if the money spent on SLS isn't going to end hunger or poverty or whatever, due to the disturbing nature of hunger and poverty, these people cannot tolerate any spending on (in their view) unneeded endeavors, no matter how little 18.6 billion dollars is in the grand scheme of government spending.

[Hannu2]

On 7/2/2021 at 9:30 AM, TheGuyNamedAlan said:

I've had the pleasent surprise of going on twitter for the first time in ages and finding out the ammount of people that reckons space exploration is total hot garbage, with reasons ranging from the "pollution" to literally anything you could think of. 

This got me thinking, how would you provide a comprehensive explanation of the importance of investing in the aerospace industry and space travel in general?

There is no way. Most of those people are generally against lifestyle and culture of western civilization. It is futile to tell that expansion to space is the only way to maintain development in long periods if someone wants to shut down industrial production and return couple of hundreds of years backwards (usually without understanding that they would not be counts or princes but practically serfs without human rights in extreme poverty if they survived through some miracle when food production drop 90 % without modern machinery, chemicals and highly productive plant varieties).  Religious people who think that their god want humans to stay on Earth are probably even harder to convince benefits of space technology. Third group are just nitwits who can not understand complex processes and long timescales. Pretty hopeless too.

[kerbiloid]

Most of humans aren't able to realize that the space in a telescope is huge and terribly real, while the "real world" around them is just ephemeral.

And that by "touching" the "things" with their "hands" they just receive a portion of photons, exactly like when watching the stars on the sky, but by "fingers".

Also I often notice that many people don't understand that they are physically just blurry clouds of elementary particles.

Edited July 8, 2021 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

On 7/8/2021 at 4:48 PM, Hannu2 said:

Religious people who think that their god want humans to stay on Earth are probably even harder to convince benefits of space technology.

The cooler religious people:

Spoiler

Tsiolkovsky was a confirmed Tolstoyan in his youth, not just faking faith to get a teaching job in Imperial Russia

 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Tsiolkovsky was a confirmed Tolstoyan in his youth

and getting rather... improved getting older...

You know...

Tolstoy would be completely... amused by his follower.

Edited July 9, 2021 by kerbiloid