Why should we have a space program?

[Synapse]

I'm sure a lot of you believe that even our space program should have more funding. The question is why?

On Earth we have starvation, war and conflict, artificial poverty, HIV/malaria, nuclear proliferation, deforestation, global warming ETC.

Why put money into launching rockets, looking at rocks and stuff when we need to solve these real problems first?

[maltesh]

If your civilization cannot do more than one thing at once, it's not a civilization, it's a single-threaded program.

[astropapi1]

If you ask that here, you're gonna have a bad time... *Flies away.

[Diche Bach]

A _very_ interesting question and one that I have pondered myself rather often. As a social/behavioral scientist I am in fact quite sympathetic to the perspective from which the question arises. However, I think that ultimately the question is fallacious as it poses a "False Dilemma." The question itself is nonetheless interesting philosophically in that it reflects on the shortcomings of humanism or the 'incomplete' status of human 'ascendance' for lack of a better term.

Most all the problems you describe are 99.99% preventable. Take for example, death by rabies. This terrible disease (and terrible way to die) takes the lives of (IIRC) several tens-of-thousands of humans every year, most of whom are residents of less-advantaged nations, and moreover remote area dwelers where proper health care infrastructure is lacking. A simple post-exposure treatment after an exposure (animal bite or whatever) is in 99.99% of cases sufficient to 'cure' rabies before the irreversible onset of the fatal symptoms. It is simply the lack of availability or knowledge of the fairly inexpensive and easy to administer post-exposure treatment that is the ultimate cause of these peoples deaths every year. In theory, if a couple billion were spent to setup proper health care / communications infrastructure to under-served regions of the planet, these deaths (and a lot of other preventable deaths too) could be avoided. However, this theory is quite faulty in that it assumes that all that is needed is to spend the money and *poof* a perfect solution is then permanently in place. In fact, health care even in the most advantaged nations is exceedingly problematic and plenty of people still 'slip through the cracks' even when the systems put in place are impeccable. Not to mention the operating and upkeep costs. Not to mention the vulnerability of such systems to corruption, etc., etc.

In reality, if you wanted to save those people from dying of rabies, you'd probably need to 'take over' all those nations where those deaths occur at a high rate and manage them yourself so that you could avoid these issues: yeah right! We all know that, even in the most 'advanced' nations, corruption, in-fighting, partisanism, etc. make 'solving' these kinds of complex problems seemingly impossible. Not to mention that many of these issues that we could label as 'Failures to Advance Toward Utopia" are in large part reflections of nothing more than arbitrary cultural values and not even a result of malfeasance per se.

For example, North American automobile fatalities. Working just from memory here, but . . . they peaked at about 80,000 per annum back in the late 1980s prior to the advent of seat-belt laws and Federal imposition of a speed limit system. I'm sure that changes in vehicle design played part too. Over the past ~30 years this rate of death (and morbidity too) has dropped pretty steadily, but with some very clear plummets immediately following imposition of various regulations (such as the seat belt laws). In recent years, this rate of mortality has hovered in the 50K ballpark, and if memory serves it took another major drop a year or two ago, down to less than 40k. There are obviously many things that go into this drop in preventable traffic fatalities, but what I'm really getting at with this example is as follows:

1. Most people don't really care about automobile fatality rates even though they are in fact one of the most salient risks to which we are all exposed to varying degrees.

2. The ~59,000 sum total of U.S. military service personnel who were killed in action during the total duration of U.S. involvement in the "Vietnam Conflict" has probably received 10,000 times as much social commentary as the millions of automobile deaths in the U.S. alone. I figure an average of 60k over the course of 50 years? what is that ~3 million killed in the "North American Automobile War?"

3. Despite problems like automobile fatalities being largely unacknowledged, the change in rates demonstrate that the problem is largely preventable. If a few policy changes and enforcement practices can snowball societal changes leading to reductions of ~50% over the course of ~30 years, then it would seem logical to conclude that: with the right policy changes and enforcement it should be possible to reduce automobile fatalities down to the absolute minimum, reflecting _ONLY_ that rate of deaths which is completely unpreventable (random mechanical failures, freak weather events, etc.)

All of this to say: putting a man on the moon is easy relative to actually creating "Utopia."

Moreover, it is not really a matter of either (a) putting a man on the moon, or ( creating Utopia.

As I hope my ramblings above show, creating Utopia is exceedingly complicated and cutting space programs would be unlikely to drive advances toward Utopia any more than promoting space programs deters such advances. In fact, because things like the International Space Station necessitate more and better international cooperation, one could argue that, in general space programs contribute indirectly to the sorts of cultural and social changes that ultimately make advance toward utopia _more_ likely. Thus, as I said above, I believe this question is a false dilemma. It is not a matter of EITHER we advance space exploration OR we advance utopia.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Diche Bach

[deadshot462]

Exploration leads to innovation. Space exploration is an investment to ensure we continue to push our technology and knowledge beyond our current capabilities.

A lot of space technology has been used on the ground in everyday life. Who's to say the cure for cancer isn't discovered in a micro-gravity environment? What if studying Mars' atmosphere gives us a better understanding of how Global Warming works?

[Synapse]

And what if it doesn't? It's as easy to conjecturise that we would find those cures in the Amazon rainforest, if we de-industrialised our societies.

Most of our developments have been made through war, rather than space travel. But nevertheless that doesn't mean that I should condone war OR space travel, if those things are accidental side effects of it, and ones that aren't possible to predict.

Consider that the average salary in Bangladesh is somewhere in the range of a few dollars a year - take your space program funding and you can double the salary of millions of people.

So I do think in a way it's a simple choice between which is more important. Not to say I don't love the idea of space travel, but it's not up there with our greatest priorities right now.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

Reason why: If we don't fund space programs, what happens when there is a catostrophic event on earth? such as nuclear war. If we have a space station/planetary base we can have the human race live on for millions of years.

Now you will say why not a base in the ground, well, radiation can penetrate the ground and earth quakes can aswell

[voleurinconnu]

I think this letter by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger puts it far better than I ever could.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

[Vaebn]

I have probably been sniped by Dr. Ernst, but to copy paste an answer from a different thread: Because it is cool.

This sort of coolness serves to inspire tons of scientists and engineers, that in turn end up going in all kinds of other fields, which in turn might end up helping with those problems.

There's also a wildcard excuse in the form of asteroid defence.

Sure, we might have gotten used to the idea that extinction events don't happen, BUT, if it is the sort of thing that if it does happen all the starvation, all the war, all the poverty, all the HIV, all the nuclear proliferation, all the deforestation are suddenly going to look pretty insignificant.

[Moon Goddess]

There is of course the obvious.

Asteroids...are nature's way of asking: "How's that space program coming along?"

But I always loved

No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.

But then there is this.....

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.â€Â

It's the space program that gives us that perspective. Sure we can simply realise how small we are and why we should work together but that image is much more moving than a thought experiment.

[jwenting]

Maybe we should never have left the oceans and explored that weird dry stuff above the floodline. Nothing but trouble can come from it...

[Synapse]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that exploring space doesn't have value/allure. But can you not be humbled by looking at the Milky Way from the ground level? What did we discover from the Moon or Mars? Nothing except that they are largely dry rocks. No great inventions came of them, no political revolutions.

Since the space industry began in the 50's, it hasn't as far as I'm aware given us anything of value. Physicists on the ground have. Even the Manhattan project had nothing to do with space. The only thing it has helped us do is make better rockets - what do we use those for? Sidewinders and cruise missiles.

Please tell me what we have achieved through space programs to date.

[MalletFace]

Just to give a few examples of things that exist because of space flight that have saved lives since they came about; ionization smoke detectors, safety grooves on pavement, improved pacemakers, viable artificial limbs, dialysis machines, CAT scanners, MRI, remote robotic surgery, satellite weather monitoring, and water filters. Many American and European farmers also pay to use satellites to help them to plan and produce as much as they can. I would argue that this preserves lives, since a large portion of the world relies on the crops grown in these areas, especially the corn and wheat.

There are also countless inventions that are a result of space exploration that benefit society without directly saving lives, such as cochlear implants, insulin pumps, ear thermometers, long distance communications (I would argue this has saved lives, too), microchips, LEDs used in joint therapy, and aircraft that don't have to be "fly by wire".

Space exploration is also doing many things that are not helping us right now, but will later, like studying climate change (It really makes me worried that NASA, JAXA, and the RFSA, have very few climate monitoring satellites still up, due to their small budgets), studying solar activity, using satellites to monitor extreme deforestation, and many others.

Outside of what they have developed, space agencies are actually working to make space a frontier for not only scientific research, but peace. For example, despite being America's biggest "enemy" during the space race, Russian ships were ready to grab the Apollo crews from the ocean if they went too far off course, and American ships would have been ready to do the same for any Russian crews on a similar mission.

All countries capable of orbital spaceflight have signed the Outer Space Treaty. Included in this treaty are ideas like "...the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes...", "...the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind...", and "...outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States...". It also says that "...States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner...", which is a major statement about nuclear proliferation, and how most people feel about it.

In my opinion, the space agencies of all nations should actually get more support, and more funding in order to promote the advances in all areas that they are actually creating. I could reasonably argue that this should come from other areas of a nation's budget, but that could be seen as me being a hypocrite. If you want to see how extremely small NASA's budget is compared to other organizations in America, though, you could go here.

On the note of suggesting cutting the budget of a space agency, telling a person who's job it is to study and explore space that their job is worthless compared to the work of a humanitarian is the same as telling a humanitarian their work is worthless compared to the work of a person who's job is researching space. It really isn't nice, as they both benefit society so much more than most of us can imagine.

Edit: A space agency isn't like what we see in KSP. It isn't launching rockets just because we can (anymore). Space exploration has advanced every type of natural science, and you probably use things every day that are existent as a result of advances in spaceflight.

Edited August 2, 2013 by MalletFace
Three edits: One to add a point, one to add a space between my edit and the rest of the writing, and one to add this. OCD

[Synapse]

Malletface it would be difficult to prove that inventions like long-distance communicatons, wireless aircraft, satellites and even the wheat have SAVED lives. Haven't they also taken them? How many lives have been killed by military aircraft since they were invented? Or through the use of long-distance military communications via satellites etc?

Climate change I agree is very important. But we don't need to send probes to other planets to fix that.

despite being America's biggest "enemy" during the space race, Russian ships were ready to grab the Apollo crews from the ocean if they went too far off course, and American ships would have been ready to do the same for any Russian crews on a similar mission.

Of course, but ther's nothing noble about that. They wanted more intelligence on each other's rocket capabilities.

You forgot to mention things like; drones, bunker busters, napalm, jet fighters, strafing, apache gunships, ICBM's, air-to-ground missiles, cluster bombs, Tomahawk missiles, MiGs which are all quite direct descendants of space-race technology

[Levelord]

Exploration leads to innovation.

Nope. Wars lead to innovation. It's an unfortunate truth though.

[MalletFace]

That is why I used the statement "I could argue" so much. There are positives and negatives to everything that has and will be done by humans. Who is to say the man who received a cochlear implant won't kill a man for something he says about his wife(Happened before in my area, and really saddened me)? Who says the person who receives food from humanitarian aid won't go on to fight in a war?

Fly-by-wire doesn't mean wireless, it actually means the control surfaces of an aircraft are not directly attached to the controls in the cockpit, and are controlled through an electronic interface.

There is no way either side would get much information from any captured astronauts. Even if they captured personnel directly from the other agency they couldn't learn enough to be worth it. The agencies themselves don't actually make the rockets. For example, Grumman built the LEM for the Apollo mission. Something they could easily get is the method they took to reach the moon (Lunar Orbit Rendezvous). If they had done so, they would have discovered that our method was exactly the same as their own.

On climate change, most of NASA's current missions are actually studying the things that affect Earth's climate, such as pollution, clouds, ocean salinity, and even things like plankton. You can find a relatively accurate list of their ongoing missions here.

Unmanned drones are actually not a result of any space research. They actually began major changes during WWII, and later became the aerial drones we know today. Bunker busters have existed since WWII. Military napalm was invented by a man by the name of Louis Fieser at Harvard University, during WWII. Frank Whittle invented the jet engine during WWII. Strafing has existed since aerial warfare, which was mostly WWI. The Apache could be argued to be descendant of space technology, but that is mostly because the company that makes it also makes most of NASA's rockets. ICBMs would have come about anyway, especially if the Germans had won WWII and continued military research. Surface-to-air-missiles began during WWII, as flak was getting hard to use against American and English bombers (I guess those are what you meant, as ATGs would just be dropping a missile from a plane, which came from WWII, also). Cluster bombs have existed since WWII, and are technically not allowed by the Geneva Convention. The Tomahawk is mostly the product of Boeing, who, again, is the company who make's most of NASA's rockets. The MiG line of aircraft has existed since WWII, also.

[Synapse]

And what has NASA done so far to affect climate change or do they just monitor it? What if that money went into renewable energy and planting forests?

What if the money spent developing satellites so that we can all sit around on the internet (let's not even discuss that all our computers are made from tin mines in the Congo) was spent on earthly things like protecting our ocean biodiversity?

I'm not disagreeing entirely, just playing Devil's advocate. I'm interested to hear your justifications. I will post my answer later.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Synapse

[MalletFace]

Without having a way to monitor what is going on, there is absolutely no way to do anything about it. Without satellites, we would be reduced to using scattered weather monitoring stations, ocean buoys, and manned weather stations. NASA delivers massive amounts of data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, along with several others.

NASA, also, is the top educator on climate change in America (I would assume this the same for the RFSA, JAXA, and the like), and one of the biggest forces of change in alternative energy. Solar energy was invented as a result of space exploration, and advances in the aerodynamics of wind turbines was actually made by NASA at a point.

Most of our tin actually comes from China, and Indonesia, and America even has a very large supply of cassiterite ore in Alaska, by the way. Most of what we import from The Congo are pharmaceuticals, poultry, and machinery, anyway.

Edit: I hope I don't look like l am trying to argue. I am just trying to provide answers from the perspective of one side. I won't even talk to somebody who I don't think is trying to listen, and I never try to force anybody to believe what I do. I apologize if I seemed rude in any way.

I also got thinking about the satellite question. Companies pay to have their satellites brought into space, and anyone who is doing space exploration will normally be eager to get this money. If you look at where these companies get their satellites built, the materials normally come from "clean" sources. I look at these satellites as a nice benefit of space flight, and a way to get a little more money to space agencies doing important work.

There also isn't much you can do about these satellites, even if you do happen to want the money used on them to go elsewhere. The satellites you mentioned are built with private money, and space agencies are payed to put them up.

Edited August 2, 2013 by MalletFace
Three edits again... I may have OCD...

[Synapse]

Okay, but I'm not just talking about NASA. I'm talking about the whole industry created by our demand to explore space. That might include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and private companies who supply the satellites.

The industry, as a whole, driven by our desire to explore beyond our atmosphere, is what is being questioned here.

Don't worry, I'm not offended at all. Hit me with whatever you've got.

[MalletFace]

I really don't know what to say about private companies that provide the equipment.

The companies that provide the equipment make weapons of terror, and they make instruments of advancement. They make ingenious devices to keep people alive, and they come up with ingenious ways to take lives. I really don't want to say anything bad about the company that made the Saturn V, even though they make the Apache.

All I can honestly say is that they do what is required of them. There is, has, and will likely always be war, so I suppose making your own kinsmen safer while increasing the danger for this "other" you are fighting is fine, but this is getting into psychological stuff way beyond what I usually worry about, as it is something that will probably always be on Earth.

Normally, though, if you focus on the space-related technologies these companies develop, I don't see any more harm than good coming from it. Everything we do will always have a bad side if you look hard enough, like I said before. Research into how diseases actually work helped develop vaccines and medicines, but you could also point to the biological warfare it helped create. Nuclear power helps keep pollution low and produces many times more energy than other methods, but if you can't control the material, it can cause damage to organisms around it.

It really depends on how you see the good and bad, and if you can actually see one or the other, and as far as I can see, the farther along we come in almost any field, the better life gets for all, and the poor get fewer(Relative to population at the time, not to the poor years before. Population changes).

[Diche Bach]

As a social scientist, I'm aware that many (if not most) efforts to do good for humanity by focusing on 'solving' a specific problem lead to questionable outcomes. Very few diseases have actually been 'eradicated' by direct efforts to do so. Indeed, some historians of medicine argue that indirect effects such as improved sanitation, nutrition, changes in housing and the like had much more to do with the decline in mortality from infectious disease than did direct medical interventions such as vaccinations.

Currently, the wealthy nations of the world give away quite large sums of money to the disadvantaged nations of the world. Many of these nations also have extensive social welfare systems for their citizens. While I'm not some cold-hearted hardcore anti-socialist who would suggest these should be abandoned (they should NOT in my opinion) I do believe that the Devil's Advocate question being cast at space programs can just as easily be cast at any 'humanitarian' endeavor that pays lip-service to the idea of directly helping humanity through any direct intervention.

If one cannot point specifically to a clearly and empirically "better" use for a given dollar of expenditure in space programs, and moreover show that, spending that dollar on space and not on 'humanisms' is clearly undermining the humanistic goal, then it is pointless IMO to ask why have a space program.

The same question can be applied to any social practice or institution that does not frame itself as being directly focused on solving humanistic problems (e.g., saving lives): why have rock music? why have libraries? why have a national park system? why have a foreign student exchange system? why allow unhealthy high-caloric foods to be produced and sold? why have computer games? why have an internet? why have professional sports? why have organized competitive sports at all? why have celebrities? etc., etc.

There are innumerable social practices and institutions on which countless billions of dollars are expended by governments and citizens from which money could be extracted for putatively 'better' purposes. If those putatively better purposes cannot demonstrate that they really are better then what business do they have posing the pious question of "why?"

ADDIT: not to say the OP or any other advocate of the question is being "pious" or in any way less than ideal in their forum conduct. Just to say that: if one can, from a 'humanistic' standpoint ask: "why space" a viable retort to such a philosophical question is to ask from an 'empirical' standpoint: "why anything," but especially things like "why peace initiatives, why poverty alleviation programs, why disease eradication efforts, why nuclear de-proliferation, why environmentalism, why efforts to curb global warming?"

On Earth we have starvation, war and conflict, artificial poverty, HIV/malaria, nuclear proliferation, deforestation, global warming ETC.

I guess the simple point I'm getting at is: what proof is there that any dollar spent on any given specific effort to address such problems has actually had some sort of clear and unquestionable net positive effect, much less the intended effect and only the intended effect?

Edited August 2, 2013 by Diche Bach

[Motokid600]

People ask this question alot...too many people ask this question far too much. And it concerns me. So without a drawn out explanation I will say this. The solutions to the problems down here are up there.

[Spartwo]

Earth is overcrowded as it is no matter what is done there WILL be poverty,there's simply not enough resorces to sustain a population of 8 billion.But what if we had 2 earths each with 4 billion nobody would go hungry.I know I'm thinking in the long term but it's a choice of putting your eggs in two baskets of breaking half the eggs(ie.mass genocide)We wouldn't even need to go far Alpha centuri has an earth sized planet.Sure it may take 700'000 years at the most but were talking about a sustainable future.and these problems are being solved constant change and innovation over the last 10 years has halved poverty,Clean water is much easier to get and they have much better conditions than the average american during the early 1800s these problems will fix themselves although gradually it's just a matter of perspective.Global warming has occured many times in the past we help a bit but not enough to be the cause the planet has been changing since the end of the last ice age,But even that is being sorted the only country .And war well human nature dictates we need something to fight the last time humanity was without war was well.. never.

The rich get richer and the poor get richer.

[Themohawkninja]

Science really. It's not terribly difficult to figure out. The pursuit of science will always occur whether there is war, poverty or otherwise.

Also, there will always be war and poverty, and other worldly problems, so trying to stop a national program to solve an unsolvable problem is just a waste of money.

[Flixxbeatz]

We should have a space program so that we can have a program to send spacecrafts in space that is made through the space program which is then created to facilitate building spacecrafts to be sent to space.