[Closed] Space Exploration...... Is it really worth the cost?

The money would only end up going into offshore trust funds and the like anyway

That aside, it's the same principle as renaissance countries funding exploration of the new world or Victorian expeditions to the poles or Australia etc

Humans migrate and colonise, we've been doing it since we left the rift valley

It might not benefit you directly but it will benefit humanity and your genes

It pushes technology forward in many area and ultimately.

“Either we’re a multi-planet species and out there exploring the stars, or we are a single-planet species waiting around for some eventual extinction event.”
- Elon Musk

No. Lots of useful stuff done remotely/automatically but putting humans in space is a hugely extravagant ego-trip.

I'd say the opposite... It's vital to procure new sources for minerals and potentially build off planet outposts.

Just look at the global energy crisis or population issues if you need inspiration!

Lots of useful stuff done remotely/automatically but putting humans in space is a hugely extravagant ego-trip

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

Beyond the benefits at home as a result of technologies developed for space exploration, it's also about learning about our own existence, which is more than just curiosity. It helps in understanding physics we don't understand which can benefit mankind.

Then there's the urge to explore. We could have just not bothered finding the Americas, though many would argue we'd have a safer world if we hadn't 😉

It's massive way off when we'll actually benefit from moving out into space, and short of developing warp drive it's going to be generational trips and even the nearest stars likely have nowhere to support life. However if we don't consider it, we could be extinct just living on this planet within a few thousand years. If we have a plan to try to colonise places some day then when that fatal asteroid strike occurs, we might find someone survives out there.

Then again, does it really matter? We're infinitesimally small and insignificant on the scale of the universe and a pinprick on the lifespan of the Earth so why should we survive for long?

Wot TheBrick said

It is hard to quantify, who knows if the research being done with something from missions like "lisa pathfinder" which was launched a couple of weeks ago, might form the bedrock of understanding that creates new energy technologies for future generations.

Missions like Rosetta and the philae lander may provide less technological advancement in the same way, but should we as a society spend less on scientific "awe and inspiration" than we do on sports or movies?

Rosseta cost around 1 billion, The 2014 world cup cost around 15 times that much, sky's new deal for the premierships tv rights is around 1.6 billion a year, even as a football fan I know which I find greater value and more amazing.

I just don't get the whole 'colonising new planets' thing.
So, we find a planet a million miles away whose atmosphere we could possibly survive in.
Who gets to chose who goes, and isn't it a bit of a large operation basically starting human existence all over again?
You can't transport a million people there, so surely it would be a few who would be in charge of populating it? How long would this then take, another couple of hundred thousand years? I'm not talking about the ISS being a waste of money as it doesn't take long to get there and they obviously do some important experiments which will benefit humans on this earth right now, its the explorations into galaxies far far away.

Am I missing something really obvious?

I'm not talking about the launching of satellites which are obviously essential for the world today

and

Am I missing something really obvious?

erm...How d'you think the technology for satellites was developed?

Here's one though; the universe is filled* with an energy source we can't measure, or identify. Given that we're burning our planet to charge our mobile phones, it might be useful to know what that is.

* literally, most of it.

This question keeps coming up, and though some of the replies above cover my views, this wouldn't be STW if people didn't pile on their own opinions.
Science if freekin cool. Though the cutting edge of space travel may not benefit us today, as a species we need to look to the stars. As a planet we need to understand our place in the cosmos. This is what makes us human, we look beyond our basic needs and act on curiosity. This curiosity and need to be more than we are today is what makes us special as a species, otherwise we are just monkeys with clothes on.

Exactly.. There's no unified vision or effort.. Even our own government (all parties it seems) can only think in 4 year blocks.. We need to be thinking in 4 million year blocks.

Space, the Final Frontier.

Earthlings are inherent explorers, It's in our genes (or even your jeans if you carry a map in your pocket)
We have to do it, It's natural. I just wish the world wasn't hell bent on destroying itself/ourselves with pointless wars & poisonous emissions then we'd have more money to explore!

It's worth it up to a point, I think it's way too early to start actually spending money researching and planning a manned mission to Mars though - plenty of things closer to home that the money should be prioritised for.

It compels us to look up. Especially in these inexplicably negative days when we seem to be dedicating all our efforts to not being [i]too[/i] awful and to telling our kids they can't have things we had. If you don't believe humans can be something bigger and better than why even bother getting out of bed? We decide where the rising ape meets the falling angel. And especially now that the angels have fallen it's good to have something to draw the eyes up.

Also, **** it, we can afford it. We can afford anything, all the numbers are made up bullshit. We're not foregoing anything else in order to have space tech, we're foregoing those things because we choose to

choppersquad - Member
So, we find a planet a million miles away

A million miles is not very far away, and we've got a satellite out there anyway.

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/noaas-dscovr-going-to-a-far-out-orbit/#.VnhPio_XJaQ

The moon is about a quarter of that distance. Nearest planet is more like 40 million miles, depending where planets are in their orbits around the sun at the time. Nearest habitable planet in another system is god knows in miles. Talking hundreds or thousands of light years away.

It's basically a case of if we don't think about it now, the human race is doomed if this planet becomes uninhabitable. Even then we may not have enough time as it could take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to get to a habitable planet.

Yes.

It's basically a case of if we don't think about it now, the human race is doomed if this planet becomes inhabitable.

yes

"I'm not talking about the launching of satellites which are obviously essential for the world today, but more about sending probes to Mars and other far flung planets."

You have this the wrong way round, as do many governments and private enterprise.

There is way too much junk in near earth orbit telling us nothing but costing billions and very little fired off into deep space which would give us a lot more bang for our buck.

I completely fail to see the need to consider the future. Some/most here would see the value in considering the future for their children or grandchildren but do we really care/worry/know about what will happen in 200 years or more?
Actually I suspect that we won't be around to benefit from any new worlds etc.
I can see that some things have come from space exploration but I am not aware of anything that's really made a significant difference to our lives.
Please enlighten me though.

I can see that some things have come from space exploration but I am not aware of anything that's really made a significant difference to our lives.

New ways to preserve food?

Do you ever use google maps? Sat nav?

Do you care if your plane gets lost, or the national grid goes down because of an undetected solar flare?

The weather forecast?

Looking toward the near future...autonomous cars? Automated inspection of hazardous areas?

CAT scan in a hospital?

i assume someones referenced it but the Elon Musk articles on Wait But Why are very good

http://waitbutwhy.com

A million miles is not far at all.. There's a million mile club within a club on the Volvo owners forum!

Some/most here would see the value in considering the future for their children or grandchildren but do we really care/worry/know about what will happen in 200 years or more?

“Either we’re a multi-planet species and out there exploring the stars, or we are a single-planet species waiting around for some eventual extinction event.”
- Elon Musk

^ thebrick's post sums it up for me...find it all rather sad & pointless if i thought human life was going to start and end on this rock. I like to think the human race has potential: we've evolved a long way from the primordial ooze and, although we've along way to go, I'd hate for all that progress to be wasted 🙁

yes

I'm all for space exploration and the technology and knowledge that results from it but there's no way we should be colonising other planets until we learn to look after our own.

Edit: To answer your question directly: Yes, it is worth the cost. The day we stop exploring and discovering new things is the day the human race officially becomes a waste of a good opportunity.

Also, "worth the cost" begs the question of "what is the cost?" and how does that compare to other things....

I remember doing the maths a couple years ago, and roughly 3 months of iPhone profits = 1 mars rover....

We tend to learn quite a lot about our planet by looking at others. We tend to learn an awful lot about ourselves by having humans in space.

it's also really good cost-wise too: when you look at all of the spinoff technologies that were either given a major boost or resulted from it ( eg. computers, communications, medicine, materials tech etc) , the Apollo programme had a return on investment of 8 dollars for every dollar spent for a ten year long project. That's why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Richard Branson etc. are getting into developing and building rockets and putting people into space...it's not a vanity project, there's money in it.

The Elon Musk quote above is right , but doesn't go far enough.

All life, Gaia, exists to reproduce, multiply and increase the land which it can colonise, from the Arctic to the equator to the oceans. Man is Gaia's chance to leave this world and move onwards. We are the earth's one chance to spread its life to other places in the universe. Space exploration is the m ost important thing we can do.
(Signed, several glasses of wine)

The waitbutwhy link has it, mainly [url= http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html ]this[/url] one. See page 2 for the 'why', but frankly it's all good.

There's a very good chance that the lifetime cost of four ballistic missile submarines for the Royal Navy will exceed £100bn.

Those subs will never, ever be used for their intended purpose.

The lifetime cost of the International Space Station is £100bn...it's a no-brainer really.

I think most of the posts are missing my point (but I'm not sure?).
I do agree with the knowledge gained from satellites/experiments on ISS etc, but how much do we learn from far flung unmanned missions that is of actual use to us today or in the near future?
The sums spent are massive, and as for the idea that we've got it so why not spend it, I'm not sure I agree with that?
I think the thing I find most hard to swallow is countries like India spending $600 million on sending a man to the moon when they have far more urgent problems that could be addressed with that kind of funding. We're going to give them another half a billion in the next five years in aid so I can't help thinking they're rather getting their priorities a bit skewed?
It is interesting reading everyone's views though.

Nearest habitable planet in another system is god knows in miles.

I'm going with 76,420,000,000,000 miles. Life at destination not guaranteed 😀

The sums spent are massive

According to that fella on the telly the other day, they've spent £100 billion on ISS. (I'm guessing that's not including development costs launch vehicles and a bunch of other stuff.

Which is less than we are likely to spend renewing the ability to nuke a medium sized country.

Am I the only one who doesn't think it's necessarily a good idea for the human race to spread to other planets? To do what exactly - mess them up like we have this one, then spread to the next, and the next? And the reasons people have given in this thread so far like "because we can", "because we can afford it", and "because it's in our nature to expand" sends a shiver down my spine honestly.

I'm reminded of this quote from the Matrix,

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I try to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively creates a natural equilibrium with it's surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

If there was some higher being looking down on us at the moment I think it'd do well to keep us quarantined on this planet, at least until we've learned to be a good universal citizen by clearing up the mess we've made of the earth, social inequity, greed, wars and all our other unpleasant traits.

Am I the only one who doesn't think it's necessarily a good idea for the human race to spread to other planets?

There is a fairly vigorous strain of utilitarianism amongst the guys who think about this stuff (Yudkowsky especially, but certainly including Musk). They apply a [i]very[/i] small discount to future people's utility, and because they believe that near-light-speed travel is theoretically feasible and that the heat death of the universe is a [i]very[/i] long way off, they see the possibility of a vast spread of humanity across a vast span of the reachable universe, what is referred to as the "cosmic endowment", (everything that you can travel to, limited by the fact that it isn't static but rather receding from us).

So they think of uncountable billions of people, over the next 200 billion years or so, doing human (or successor advanced intelligence) stuff. Taking that stuff as a good (which it is, in the only terms of reference that we have) and applying very minor discounts to it for the fact that it takes place millions and billions of years into the future, the upside to an expansion throughout the "cosmic endowment" is colossal. Once you've settled on a fairly low discount rate on future utility, anything that facilitates that expansion is more-or-less a moral imperative.

I do agree with the knowledge gained from satellites/experiments on ISS etc, but how much do we learn from far flung unmanned missions that is of actual use to us today or in the near future?
The sums spent are massive, and as for the idea that we've got it so why not spend it, I'm not sure I agree with that?

55 years ago no human had left the atmosphere
In 1900 the wright brothers made their first flight
The first car came about in 1886

So if the technological advances of the last 150 years are repeated then who knows what will be possible.

The Elon Musk quote is nicked as well.

If there was some higher being looking down on us at the moment I think it'd do well to keep us quarantined on this planet, at least until we've learned to be a good universal citizen by clearing up the mess we've made of the earth, social inequity, greed, wars and all our other unpleasant traits.

I do agree but we're way off venturing off to colonolise other planets certainly outside of our system; we got some time to evolve to be better...i really hope when we are we've lost the traits you mention. As i said in my previous post, we've evolved a long way so its a shame to right us off just yet.

a large part of it is studying the effect of spaceflight on humans !

Thats such a ridiculous argument its funny. Just think how much we could learn about humans standing on their heads in buckets of sewage, if we spent billions studying humans standing on their heads in buckets of sewage.

^^^^^ Very good point.