Planetary Exploration - a question?

Question

All very well to spend billions on gaining knowledge of our place in the Universe. (On the western spiral arm of our "local" galaxy, apparantly)
And I'm fascinated by it all, being something of a scientific bod.
But. Should we not be looking first on our own doorstep, to hopefully resolve conflicts etc. ?
I'm not a great activist in this area of thought, yet it seems to me that we should look after planet Earth first.
Where else do we go to live ?
Sounds a bit hippy profound, I guess, and I still play guitar & keyboard, and although they won't work on our moon, apparantly guns do.

Just a thought - replies, humourous or upright appreciated.

Answer 1

I play guitar, and my electric's heavy, but it would only be one-sixth it's normal weight on the moon. If we went to the Red Planet we could perform a follow up to Bowie's classic: "Whoa - ho! Now there's life on Mars..."

But we couldn't play Pluto now it's only a mere planetoid...

Answer 2

You (and others) make an attractive argument. However - and you knew there'd be a "however", didn't you? - that's not the way things work.
By that, I mean - if we stopped spending every cent on "gaining knowledge of our place in the Universe", do you suppose that the ones who control the purse-strings would then, automatically, transfer all funds to "looking first on our own doorstep?"
Sure - we'd better "look after planet Earth", but how much evidence do you see today that the ones in power have this up really high on their list of priorities?
We had the same "question" during Vietnam - there we were, spending about a billion a day on a useless tragedy, and people used to say:
"Wouldn't it be better to spend all that money on fixing up the things that are wrong in the States - health care, education, etc?
Well, the war stopped, and guess what? That billion dollars a day didn't go into any of those areas, as you can see from their current states, as bad or worse now than they were back then.

So, yes - we SHOULD be looking first on our own doorstep, but
cutting off the billions spent on gaining knowledge isn't going to make that happen.
It's really a false "either/or" choice.

Answer 3

You may have fallen victim to what is probably the most common sort of faulty reasoning there is - at least it's very common these days.

I refer to (what I call) The Either/Or Error - a.k.a. False Dilemma. This is the mistake of thinking you or 'we' have to choose one of two things when in fact other alternatives are available.

The relevant alternative here is that there is no good reason why we can't do both things - in fact we are doing both and we need to do both.

Okay, your argument is that doing stuff in space should be abandoned in favor of doing stuff on Earth, getting ourselves 'in order' first before we try to go anywhere else. But the fact is that we don't know we can afford the time we would lose by doing that.

We live in a dangerous universe. Life has almost been wiped out out on this planet at least 20 times in its history. We need to get our eggs into several baskets a.s.a.p. because we just don't know when this planet will become uninhabitable to us - either because of our own actions or some external cause.

There are good reasons for doing both, there are no good reasons for abandoning either. The terrible thing is that we don't know we can succeed in either project, but we do know we have to undertake both.

Answer 4

It's a good point, and the other side is that is also possible to spend even more, much more, on the space program, but we don't. So there is a balance.

In the end, eventually, the earth will either die, or the sun will blow up. And if we don't make progress and have a plan what to do in that future, then everything we've done, all the struggle and accomplishment, will just poof out of existance.

Answer 5

99% of human resources are going toward resolving (or perpetuating) conflicts here on Earth. Would another few billion dollars really matter too much, I think not. Should we really wait until all disease is gone, and we can stop hurricanes and we have attained world peace before we start to look toward the stars. A successful space program could solve those problems itself but nobody sees this.

Answer 6

I think you are right but its part of the human condition. We dont even sort our own lives out but want to push outwards all the time. Even within our own homes, streets we live on, towns, villages or cities there is plenty to be done, but we look further afield constantly.

I would love to see us all try to concentrate on our immediate surrondings - people and environment - as I dont think we can manage to get along with those further afield till we have worked out how to do this at home.

And thats all to be done before we look even further to Planetary Exploration. Its just my own thoughts on the matter of course. We just seem to act like children in a sweety shop - running amok creating havoc but never really stopping to learn very much about anything.

Answer 7

We are looking on our own doorstep. There are many groups/organizations dedicated to fostering peaceful resolution to conflict and to ending many of the humanitarian crises that plague our world. Throwing money at the problem is not the only answer, so even if we used the money spent on space exploration to fund humanitarian efforts on earth, it is unlikely that we would solve all of the world's problems. But it is a nice thought.

Answer 8

The people searching really far with telescopes and radio astronomy may find keys to matter and time that will unlock limitless, safe power, or even time travel.
They are far enough out now they can tell some things about the period before stars ignited, and this reveals basic secrets of matter, impossible to tell where it leads, everywhere, nowhere, somewhere.
I think that we should redirect resources from war. I am a vet.

Answer 9

This has been a common suggestion since the first satellites went up, and I was there and saw them going past in 1957 when we slept in the back yard on hot summer nights.

But, this presumes that stopping space exploration will automatically eliminate or reduce war and poverty. That is not likely since neither can be reduced or eliminated by spending money.

Demanding ignorance about our universe would only achieve, um, ignorance about our universe.

Answer 10

Yeah, I agree with what you think. I think that our world has a lot of problems right now, mainly unnecessary violence and global warming-which I think is a lot worse than what they say. So yeah, if there was anything else out in other planets, they probably would've shown up on Earth by now.