The value of manned space flight?

[Umbran]

Have you compared it to other types of research?

Its not uncommon for science universities to have an economical boost of 5 times or higher. I just looked up the university I studied at. They have abudget of 1.5 billion and an economical boost factor of 5.4, so 80% higher than NASA.

Your source, please?

 

[Kichwas]

Spun off from the "Project: Hail Mary" thread.

Is there value in manned space flight, or is it some sort of expensive vanity project? Should we be spending that money "at home" instead?

Yes on two very different grounds:

1. It leads to a lot of technological advances 'ground side'.
2. Sooner or later we gotta get out of this place. We're hitting a growing list of places planetside that are no longer safely habitable. Climate change is accelerating. Energy demand is going up and resources are going down.

- There's a loop there. Solving for number 2 will always certainly deliver a lot of number 1.

Human potential will greatly expand the moment we have our first civilian occupied permanent settlement in space. Not on Mars, Venus, or whatever, but on a station.

The solar system is littered with all the materials we need to cover the gap between a scarcity civilization and a post scarcity one. Also for building habitats. We're very close to figuring out what we need to build at a theoretical level, and the practical will come once we have a manufacturing plant up there (it's most likely an O'Neal cylinder built inside an asteroid, or otherwise inside a rock layer, to stop radiation).

Our current population in the low billions could go into the 1000s of trillions with ease once we're permanently in space. The utopian argument is that distance, post scarcity, and many micro colonies will end wars and the need for oppressive societies as people can just go to the station that suits them. Any intelligent person knows that's a silly notion - humans will always find an excuse to bicker and fight. But it's still worth it to be somewhere where one nutcase can't end the species or spiral all of humanity down the drain in order to distract from a scandal.

We don't need to be looking at this from the POV of wanting Star Trek warp engines and a galaxy spanning single government. We might never get there. We might suddenly get there. But the solar system itself is something we can benefit from greatly by moving into.

 

[Clint_L]

I have heard the tired argument that we can use that money to fix things on Earth for my entire life. The western economies have massively spent more money.

Things have gotten worse.

What things? Worse for whom? Compared to when? In many measurable ways (lifespan, infant mortality, comfort, nutrition, education, individual rights, especially for women, violence, medicine, communication, sanitation, etc.) "things" are vastly better for most people than they were 100, 200, 400 years ago.

We absolutely should spent money on manned space flight.

There are enormous resources in space and the key to clean energy. Factories and data centers can be moved.

There are unquestionably enormous resources in "space", given that "space" encompasses the rest of the universe. It's a question of access. Blithely asserting that "factories and data centres can be moved" hand waves the ENORMOUS barriers to doing so.

We can build O’Neal type colonies at the Lagrange points to have full gravity.

Why? This would be shatteringly expensive and resource intensive, requiring constant upkeep. What's the upside?

Manned space travel and colonization is key to building a post scarcity future.

Again, you aren't addressing the really enormous barriers. If these things were as simple as just saying them, I would agree with you. No one yet has come up with a remotely feasible plan.

Spending that money here will never fix things. The planet has finite resources and room and it is clear that the massive amounts of social spending has not moved the needle at all.

See first point, above. Massive amounts of social spending have, in fact, "moved the needle" in many, many measurable ways. For example, most women no longer need to be terrified of eventually dying in childbirth. They can even go to school, have jobs and get paid. Your risk of dying vilently is a fraction of what it was in Shakespeare's time. You aren't nearly as likely to be trapped in your social class from birth. etc.

But let's assume that you are right, and "spending that money here will never fix things." What makes you think spending it on astronomically more expensive things in space will help?

Like, if I can't afford health care right now, why would I want untold trillions of tax dollars spent building and then maintaining "O’Neal type colonies at the Lagrange points"?

I agree that science for its own sake is worth investment, within reason. But many of the ideas being floated strike me as distinctly pollyanna-ish.

 

[The Firebird]

2. Sooner or later we gotta get out of this place. We're hitting a growing list of places planetside that are no longer safely habitable. Climate change is accelerating. Energy demand is going up and resources are going down.

I have bad news about the habitability of space

 

[Clint_L]

The danger I see in a lot of arguments for, essentially, abandoning earth is that they seem to be giving up on solving our self-made problems and opting for escape, like the humans in Wall-E. I see three problems here:

1. It is basically giving up on the vast majority of humanity, not to mention the rest of nature.
2. It's an excuse.
3. It relies on magical thinking. If we can't solve these problems, how are we going to solve the massively more complex ones presented by space travel and colonization? Conversely, if we can solve those problems, then surely we can solve these ones first.

Edit: Like, we already know how to fix climate change. There are plenty of perfectly viable plans that involve far less expense than space colonization, for which we don't even have the beginning of a plan. And yet we lack the will to deal with our self-created issue - a substantial number of people refuse to even accept that it is a problem. But space travel will fix things?

 

[Kichwas]

I have bad news about the habitability of space

Part of why it's a worthwhile endeavor.

Solving that gives us solutions to planetside issues. But it will eventually also hit a crossing point where it becomes an easier issue to solve as you have a contained system. This is one among several reasons why most futurists advocate for space stations over settling planets (some of the others being not having to deal with escape velocities, moving resources around, not having to terraform, spread out scale, and so on).

Space is harder to settle than present day Earth, easier to settle than another planet, and in time could be easier to settle than staying on a dying planet - as scaling of the tech advances.

 

[Dire Bare]

I have heard the tired argument that we can use that money to fix things on Earth for my entire life. The western economies have massively spent more money.

Things have gotten worse.

We absolutely should spent money on manned space flight.

There are enormous resources in space and the key to clean energy. Factories and data centers can be moved.

We can build O’Neal type colonies at the Lagrange points to have full gravity.

Manned space travel and colonization is key to building a post scarcity future.

Spending that money here will never fix things. The planet has finite resources and room and it is clear that the massive amounts of social spending has not moved the needle at all.

I'm not arguing against funding crewed and robotic space flight, but . . .

Yes, we spend plenty of money on our problems here on Earth. But enough? It's not really about the amount of money spent (money is fiction), but HOW that money is spent. There's a lot of corruption and incompetence in human governments, reducing the effectiveness of the money we spend.

That is also true of our space programs, although at least there the folks doing the work tend to be pretty smart, passionate, and motivated. But politics, corruption, and incompetence definitely play a role here also. Wherever you find humans . . .

The pushback is against techbros like Musk and Zuckerberg who are "futurists" pushing for colonization of Mars . . . when that will never be a viable prospect. At least not before we bake our own planet and make the whole problem moot.

You do point out some of the very real possibilities of our space programs that can benefit life here on Earth.

But none of it is as important as changing how we care for the environment itself. I'm not sure we have the time to develop Lagrange point colonies or asteroid mining before we deplete necessary resources here, flood the coasts, and bake our brains in the heat . . .

But I do want NASA and other space agencies to keep on doing what they are doing. We can do both. Well, not Mars, but all that other stuff.

 

[Belen]

What things? Worse for whom? Compared to when? In many measurable ways (lifespan, infant mortality, comfort, nutrition, education, individual rights, especially for women, violence, medicine, communication, sanitation, etc.) "things" are vastly better for most people than they were 100, 200, 400 years ago.

See first point, above. Massive amounts of social spending have, in fact, "moved the needle" in many, many measurable ways. For example, most women no longer need to be terrified of eventually dying in childbirth. They can even go to school, have jobs and get paid. Your risk of dying vilently is a fraction of what it was in Shakespeare's time. You aren't nearly as likely to be trapped in your social class from birth. etc.

But let's assume that you are right, and "spending that money here will never fix things." What makes you think spending it on astronomically more expensive things in space will help?

Wait, you think social spending made that happen?

War, largely caused desire for resources, pushed a chunk of our technological process.

Women, in western countries, have seen improvements because they do not suffer as much from scarcity.

It is precisely because spending focused on frontier expansion that things improved for those who controlled resources.

We spend more now on fixing problems than we have ever spent yet we have not solved hunger. We have not provided homes for the homeless.

Space offers the next frontier that might get us to a post scarcity society.

 

[Belen]

I'm not arguing against funding crewed and robotic space flight, but . . .

Yes, we spend plenty of money on our problems here on Earth. But enough? It's not really about the amount of money spent (money is fiction), but HOW that money is spent. There's a lot of corruption and incompetence in human governments, reducing the effectiveness of the money we spend.

That is also true of our space programs, although at least there the folks doing the work tend to be pretty smart, passionate, and motivated. But politics, corruption, and incompetence definitely play a role here also. Wherever you find humans . . .

The pushback is against techbros like Musk and Zuckerberg who are "futurists" pushing for colonization of Mars . . . when that will never be a viable prospect. At least not before we bake our own planet and make the whole problem moot.

You do point out some of the very real possibilities of our space programs that can benefit life here on Earth.

But none of it is as important as changing how we care for the environment itself. I'm not sure we have the time to develop Lagrange point colonies or asteroid mining before we deplete necessary resources here, flood the coasts, and bake our brains in the heat . . .

But I do want NASA and other space agencies to keep on doing what they are doing. We can do both. Well, not Mars, but all that other stuff.

I avoided saying this because most of the “solve the problems on Earth” crowd magically forget about all the corruption and graft that prevent the money we are spending from working. The solution is always to spend more and never to fix the graft and corruption.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I avoided saying this because most of the “solve the problems on Earth” crowd magically forget about all the corruption and graft that prevent the money we are spending from working. The solution is always to spend more and never to fix the graft and corruption.

You're not wrong, but how to do that? Corruption and graft have been with us forever, and they'll continue to do long as resources are limited and some people have more than others.