Rodatose posted:

e: the simple point i'm trying to say is that, in counter to the specific argument that we NEED to go somewhere new: if we don't solve the cultural problems that led us to have to need somewhere new in the first place, we will probably repeat the same cultural problems and have to find somewhere else new ad nauseum

Rigged Death Trap posted:

As for ultra-tree research: Mars is quite inhospitable, pretty much a model of end stage desertification. Finding or modifying species from earth that can have a chance of surviving and even thriving in the environment of mars can help us here on earth.

Chokes McGee posted:

First Mars is colonized

then Jupiter and Saturn

then ur anus

Rodatose posted:

also I don't agree with supply a luxury to your people as always being the means of crowd control, plenty of traditional agrarian empires relied on sheer military force to keep the peasants in check as they ran out of room to expand (and therefore have more produce to tax to fund. Of course as taxes dwindled then troops wouldn't get paid and end up starting a coup)

Tezzor posted:

It's perfectly relevant, as your accusation of my faulty logic was "why are you criticizing this unnecessary thing when you yourself are made of carbon do unnecessary things," which is not an argument that deserves anything other than mockery.

rudatron posted:

Look look, all you negative nancies talking about cultural problems, here's the thing, environment informs cultural problems. For all you know, space exploration would speed up the solving of those cultural problems, in would bring in entirely new perspectives. And unless you've got a plan to solve them today (you don't), you do the best with what you have. There's no reason you can't push for both, to create better understanding between people while also pushing for exploration and space colonization, there's no need for a false dichotomy. It's not space exploration nerds stopping helping everyone else on this planet, it's the people actively stopping helping everyone else on this planet, because they have something to gain.

rudatron posted:

Look look, all you negative nancies talking about cultural problems, here's the thing, environment informs cultural problems. For all you know, space exploration would speed up the solving of those cultural problems, in would bring in entirely new perspectives. And unless you've got a plan to solve them today (you don't), you do the best with what you have. There's no reason you can't push for both, to create better understanding between people while also pushing for exploration and space colonization, there's no need for a false dichotomy. It's not space exploration nerds stopping helping everyone else on this planet, it's the people actively stopping helping everyone else on this planet, because they have something to gain.

Salt Fish posted:

If there is beneficial scientific research that would benefit the earth then I feel we should go ahead and do the research. The idea that we need some crazy scheme that the research "falls out of" is a fallacy because directly researching super trees or whatever is a lot easier here on Earth where our scientists can breath and live.

Tezzor posted:

I always enjoy when space fetishists attempt to justify their predictions and fantasies as inevitable teleology while of course forgetting that virtually every single major prediction they made about space travel or most anything else after about 1970 was either laughably wrong or so far in the future it might as well have fairies in it. Internet? What's that? Computers? Aren't they those giant things with all the blinking lights and paper reams? They promised us a million people on the Moon by 1990, failed at that but in the interim got some incidental technologies vaguely helped by space travel but completely out of left field to their ideology, then claimed victory.

Salt Fish posted:

If there is beneficial scientific research that would benefit the earth then I feel we should go ahead and do the research. The idea that we need some crazy scheme that the research "falls out of" is a fallacy because directly researching super trees or whatever is a lot easier here on Earth where our scientists can breath and live.

blowfish posted:

if you do research with a limited and entirely applied scope such as "genetically engineer a super tree that hoovers up 10% more co2" then guess whether scientists will a) completely understand how a plant functions from the cellular to the organismic level (expecting this to actually work out Soon^TM is about as crazy as a mars colony) in a way that allows us to custom-build organisms for a wide range of cool applications plus not-yet-known extra benefits or b) do the minimum amount of work necessary to make it hoover up slightly more co2 because who gives a poo poo the grant only paid for three years of research and we're done here (protip it's b scientists are people too)

Shbobdb posted:

This is so hopelessly and hilariously naive that I don't even know what to say. Science is all about what is sexy. Hell, funding is all about what is sexy. Space exploration as an excuse for ICBMs is a hell of a lot better than hilariously terrible fighter jets as an excuse for a jobs program.

Salt Fish posted:

This barely parses as English. What are you trying to say? I'm making a point that colonizing space because technology falls out of it is inefficient compared to simply doing the research on Earth.

quote:

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be saying that it's easier to get science funding for a trip to mars than for vanilla earth research. You might be right about that, but I am not arguing that people want terrestrial science research more than they want space colonization. I'm arguing that it's more efficient to do research here on earth.

blowfish posted:

I am making a point that setting limited beep boop efficient research objective is short sighted because it will be targeted at already-obvious goals, will result in the minimum research/engineering effort necessary, and therefore will be less likely to lead to actual groundbreaking advances which primarily happen through luck and scientists being sidetracked.

Beep boop efficient research does not work outside of short term r&d. You need to convince smart people to become scientists and engineers and do cool stuff rather than rake in money as investment bankers. You need to push for ambitious pie-in-the-sky goals to make sure those engineers and scientists actually get to keep pushing forward in their field instead of hunting for different grants every three years. You need to be aware that there isn't a straight path from questions to goals, but rather that a shockingly large proportion of interesting results comes about simply because scientists and engineers have to think about a new hard problem and because they get sidetracked during the process.

quote:

It is alleged that "spinoff" will transpire—huge technological benefits that would otherwise
fail to come about—thereby improving our international competitiveness and the domestic
economy. But this is an old argument: Spend $80 billion (in contemporary money) to send
Apollo astronauts to the Moon, and we'll throw in a free stickless frying pan. Plainly, if we're
after frying pans, we can invest the money directly and save almost all of that $80 billion.
The argument is specious for other reasons as well, one of which is that DuPont's Teflon
technology long antedated Apollo. The same is true of cardiac pacemakers, ballpoint pens,
Velcro, and other purported spinoffs of the Apollo program. (I once had the opportunity to talk
with the inventor of the cardiac pacemaker, who himself nearly had a coronary accident
describing the injustice of what he perceived as NASA taking credit for his device.) If there are
technologies we urgently need, then spend the money and develop them. Why go to Mars to do
it?

Of course it would be impossible for so much new technology as NASA requires to be
developed and not have some spillover into the general economy, some inventions useful down
here. For example, the powdered orange juice substitute Tang was a product of the manned
space program, and spinoffs have occurred in cordless tools, implanted cardiac defibrillators,
liquid-cooled garments, and digital imaging—to name a few. But they hardly justify human
voyages to Mars or the existence of NASA.

We could see the old spinoff engine wheezing and puffing in the waning days of the
Reagan-era Star Wars office. Hydrogen bomb-driven X-ray lasers on orbiting battle stations will
help perfect laser surgery, they told us. But if we need laser surgery, if it's a high national
priority, by all means let's allocate the funds to develop it. just leave Star Wars out of it. Spinoff
justifications constitute an admission that the program can't stand on its own two feet, cannot be
justified by the purpose for which it was originally sold.

Salt Fish posted:

You really are selling scientists short. That somehow they won't strive to solve problems are gain a deep understanding unless they are forced to by the vacuum of space.

quote:

An analogy to doing research on Mars would be to do it standing on your head. Or underwater. Perhaps scientists could labor with heavy weights strapped to them. There is nothing beneficial to scientific research on mars except actual information about mars; of course, we can get that information with robots much easier than with humans.

quote:

I'd like to share an excerpt from Pale Blue Dot relevent to this discussion:

blowfish posted:

lol at confusing "direct spinoffs which we put on a list to shut the tezzors of the world up" with "the only indirect benefit of space exploration that exists"

Salt Fish posted:

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be saying that it's easier to get science funding for a trip to mars than for vanilla earth research. You might be right about that, but I am not arguing that people want terrestrial science research more than they want space colonization. I'm arguing that it's more efficient to do research here on earth.

-Troika- posted:

imo, the best reason to go to mars is because it's there

-Troika- posted:

imo, the best reason to go to mars is because it's there

quote:

In 2014, Islamic leaders in the United Arab Emirates issued a fatwa against Mars One, arguing that taking the trip would be a form of suicide, which is forbidden in Islam.

Bubbacub posted:

Bubbacub posted:

Fizzil posted:

Its actually one guy, and isnt a leading authority, just a pretty popular imam. Think something like Pat Robertson.

Effectronica posted:

So in other words, your argument has no reasoning behind it, because you are not willing to argue from its propositions, namely that we should not do unnecessary things, and you are still a culture warrior, bravely pounding away at those loving nerdlingers, desperately trying to pretend that you don't deserve to get stuffed into a locker yourself.

Tezzor posted:

In other words you can't actually justify your ideology on its own merits and are engaging in water-muddying and deflection so nakedly absurd it's difficult to believe.

blowfish posted:

you are aware that "incidental technologies" is the whole point of scientific research

like, you start doing research and your plan is "i want to go from a to b" and the actual thing that happens is "let's go from a to b, oh poo poo this doesn't work let's try again, oh poo poo this still doesn't work let's try again, oooooooh shiny let's forget about b"

this is how every groundbreaking bit of research ever has been done and you get more groundbreaking (or in any way interesting) research done if you tell more scientists to do hard things and let them get sidetracked into random poo poo

Effectronica posted:

What is the ideology in question here?

Tezzor posted:

Space Fetishism.

Tezzor posted:

This is accurate and it also destroys the argument for space colonization specifically as having any value by its incidental development of technologies. Instead of Mars colonies, you could direct scientists to resolving any arbitrary "hard problem" and have incidental technological development as a result, from eradicating AIDS to covering the entire continent of Australia in 10 feet of green gelatin.

Tezzor posted:

This is accurate and it also destroys the argument for space colonization specifically as having any value by its incidental development of technologies. Instead of Mars colonies, you could direct scientists to resolving any arbitrary "hard problem" and have incidental technological development as a result, from eradicating AIDS to covering the entire continent of Australia in 10 feet of green gelatin.

Tezzor posted:

In other words you can't actually justify your ideology on its own merits and are engaging in water-muddying and deflection so nakedly absurd it's difficult to believe.

echopraxia posted:

Hollow out asteroids rotated for centrifugal gravity and develop a self-sustaining biosphere to keep a specific population level. Mine and trade the different volatiles on their surfaces, stick engines on them and go on our long slow caravan journeys out of the solar system.

iFederico posted:

Because it's there.

DrSunshine posted:

Wait, how did we get from "Manned mission to Mars, someday" to "Literal colonization/terraforming of Mars"?

Also, rather than some absurd goal like "Cover entire continent of Australia in 10 m of green gelatin", how about setting something really hard, like "Manned survey mission to Gliese 581"?

AlexanderCA posted:

This

Also, we can get there.

JonathonSpectre posted:

Welp, I'm convinced, it might be expensive to get off this planet so let's just huddle here and wait for the comet/asteroid/plague/climate/any of the other ten trillion strange deaths of the cosmos to wipe us out as if we've never been. Far better than >gasp< spending money.