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Why do people always respond this way to space exploration but not other stuff? I seldom hear "Maybe we should stop making movies until we get our shit together" even though Hollywood has a budget about the same size as NASA's or slightly larger.



I used to say the same about the NFL vs cancer research. As in: "Perhaps we should divert all of the money we spend on football each year into cancer research until we cure it."

The fallacy is that even though both are ostensibly valued in "dollars", at the scale they operate at (society wide), they are not necessarily fungible. You might spend 1 football and get only 0.09 cancer researches. Or they might not be interchangeable at all. I don't have the numbers even to start to make that judgment.

Space is probably just an extreme example of this as it feels "expensive" and seems to directly effect the life of most people very little.


> I used to say the same about the NFL vs cancer research.

As someone who works in a cancer research-related role, it's nice to not think about work when I leave the office. I would also hazard to guess that many cancer patients enjoy the distraction of various types of entertainment.

Now we can certainly do some refocusing, but I would generally hope that as a civilization and species we can talk and chew gum at the same time.


While I disagree with any sort of binary "we should do X and not Y" arguments, it is worth considering that once mankind has off-planet opportunities this planet will become significantly more dangerous.

One of the benefits of nuclear weapons is that they make everyone have a significant risk, including the belligerents who traditionally got to hide away, protected and immune. If the people who push the button, so to speak, have options beyond Earth, it makes the prospects much more dim.


Much like how bunker-buster nukes allowed for penetrating nuclear bunkers to stop that from happening (being able to "push the button" and hide away), the militaries of the world will most definitely create something that will restore Mutually Assured Destruction in that scenario.


I think you might be reading this as a different objection than it was meant as. People specifically respond this way about Mars because the context is that Mars is seen as the most viable colonization target, and colonizing Mars is the same kind of challenge as saving life on Earth from climate change, but a much higher level of difficulty. The effort spent to make movies could not possibly be spent fighting climate change, but the effort spent trying to make Mars habitable absolutely could be spent trying to keep Earth habitable. That's why it's brought up in the context of Mars specifically.


That makes sense if we imagine we have some fixed pool of climate fighting energy we can spend in one case or the other but I'm not at all sure why you would want to adopt that model? Climate change on Earth is more a political matter than a technological one and so the PR resources used by Hollywood seem to me to be more applicable to fighting climate change than the engineering resources space exploration uses.

But more to the point, we're not actually spending any money on terraforming Mars right now. It's just something people talk about. What we are doing is sending robots to Mars to explore. And hopefully at some point we'll be sending better robots or even human scientists who'll want a pre-assembled base put together by robots. Worrying that the terraforming efforts people might get up to in 50 or 100 years will take away from the steps we need to be making now for climate change is premature.


Colonizing Mars is a stupid, fundamentally impossible idea.

> I seldom hear "Maybe we should stop making movies until we get our shit together" even though Hollywood has a budget about the same size as NASA's or slightly larger.

People are somewhat free to spend their money on what they choose. Taxes, not so much.


Wait, fundamentally impossible? If you were to say it were technologically impossible or economically impossible I think I might be inclined to agree with you, we're a long way from a self-sustaining Mars colony being feasible. But what fundamental limits are there that couldn't be fixed with a proper application of technology? We know how to build centrifuges to simulate gravity and radiation shielding. We know all the elements necessary for life are present on Mars and I'm not seeing any fundamental problems with keeping people alive, though there are certainly a lot of things that need to be figured out.

I don't think colonizing other planets in the solar system is a good strategy for giving the human race a second chance because its only a very narrow range of disasters that could wipe out all humans on Earth but spare a colony on Mars.

But there's an incredible amount of science to be gained through more exploration of the solar system. Comparing the atmosphere of Earth to that of Mars and Venus has helped a lot in understanding the details of global warming and ozone depletion. We don't know exactly how fundamental science research is going to pay off but it has before and I'd argue that there is actually something of fundamental value in understanding the universe better.


> Comparing the atmosphere of Earth to that of Mars and Venus has helped a lot in understanding the details of global warming and ozone depletion.

Research for the purposes of improving life on Earth may be a good use of tax payer dollars.

Establishing a colony is a whole other thing, which implies sustained human existence in a location for the purposes of either species propagation/continuation or resource extraction.

Mining things in space and sending them home to Earth is science fiction nonsense. The energy required means it's fundamentally impossible to have a profitable operation resource extraction from a colony.


Nobody is proposing that tax dollars be used to fund a colony. Elon is says he's planning on doing that using profits from SpaceX's other business.

I'm not aware of anyone every proposing that people mine minerals on Mars for shipment back to Earth. I have heard people talk about using propellant made on Mars to fuel voyages further out, Zubrin is big on that idea, but that's another kettle of fish - energy and mass can cost different amounts in different places.

People sometimes talk about mining asteroids and bringing the resulting minerals to Earth. I'm not sure that that is economically feasible, at least right now, but it avoids the big problem of having to launch stuff out of Mars's gravity well. Technically speaking the energy involved in getting an asteroid from the main belt to Earth is steeply negative so I don't think you could say that it's impossible on a strictly energy accounting basis, especially since there's no fixed rule establishing the relative value of energy and matter across different technological regimes.

But right now we spend huge amount of energy lofting satellites into orbit around the Earth. If we could use material that was already in space to build satellites in orbit that would be much cheaper from a strictly energy accounting standpoint. That would, of course, require some technological advances but makes a lot of sense if you just look at it in terms of energy.


>Mining things in space and sending them home to Earth is science fiction nonsense.

hold tight to this while it is still true, might not be for much longer :)




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