Manned space travel is a wate of money and the ISS is a political stunt. Having said that, I work in astrophysics, but I keep my butt firmly situated on the ground studying subatomic particles which come from the sun (and various other places). Things like the Hubble Telescope, the COBE satelite (which just won the Nobel prize), and other unmanned space probes are doing teriffic science and every penny on these has been well spent.
Some people seem to think that the worls resources are going to dry up and everything will end ala Thomas Malthus when the population reaches a certain level. Going into space is a completely worthless way of solving this problem. What we need to do is work to control our population and use our resources more wisely. If you have some bugs that live in a bottle and they double in population every day, even if you move half of them to a new bottle when the first is halfway full they'll still only last two days before both bottles are full instead of one. That's hardly a solution.
Is manned space exploration a waste of money?
by free2beme 22 Replies latest jw friends
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apfergus
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free2beme
If we truly were going to run out of our planets resources by 2050, which I think is twisted eviro talk. I would hate to tell you, but we would not have enough time to make it to another planet to get resouces. We are so far from any form of travel that could make it there, in a human life form, let alone the idea that we have not even found another planet that could house human life. So far the only planet that can, is ours. So perhaps when the resources are gone, we will see a tragic form of population control.
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Anony-Mouse
Resources cannot be "lost". They just turn into a simpler state. That's entropy.
We just use some energy, and tada, more resources. And we happen to have a super furnace relatively near us that is pumping out some massive energy (2, if you count the earth's core).
We just need to find a renewable fuel. Something with more kick than ethanol though.