Quote:
Originally Posted by joy_division
why? What's the point? It's just a pathetic waste of money when you have thousands of people dying and starving on THIS planet, not to mention the carbon emmissions Space launches produces.
Shouldn't we worry about our own world first before exploring others?
for thought
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Exploring space IS learning how to care for our world better. We learn by doing.
Learning how to live in space teaches us about closed ecosystems, our very earth IS a spacecraft afterall, do you understand that?
The benefits of human spaceflight enhance humanity beyond measure in thousands of ways.
Google "NASA spinoffs".
There are people that would not be alive today without NASA doing what it does.
Why Space, Why Explore?
Astronaut Story Musgrave...........
"We have no choice, Sir. It is the Nature of Humanity, it is the Nature of Life
The Globe was created and Life Evolved, and you look at every single cubic millimeter on this Earth, You can go 30,000 feet down below the Earth surface, You can go 40,000 feet up in the air and Life is There. When you look at the globe down there, you see Teeming Life Everywhere
It is the Power of Life, And maybe I am not just a Human up here, you know. Now Life is Leaping off the Planet. It is heading to other parts of the Solar System, other parts of the Universe
There are those kinds of Pressures. It isn't simply politics, it is not simply technology, it is really not just the essence of humanity, but it is sort of also, you could look at it as maybe the Essence of Life. I think Teilhard de Chardin, in Phenomenon of Man, I believe he put that incredibly well. So those kind of Forces are at Work. It is the nature of humans to be exploratory and to Push On
Yes, it costs resources and it does cost a lot, and there is a risk, there is a penalty, there is a down side, but Exploration and Pioneering, I think those are the critical things, it is the Essence of what Human Beings are, and that is to try to understand their Universe and to try to participate in the entire Universe and not just their little Neighborhood" -Story Musgrave
"We must not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began, and to know it for the first time."
T.S. Eliot
"You have to keep pushing the frontier not
just because it's there, but because that's how we find things that end up changing humanity," -Paul Hill, Mission Control
Can you understand that?
It's no different from those that pressed out of Africa into the rest of the world.
It's fundamental to our success as species that we explore with human presence.
Stephen Hawking.......................
"The discovery of the New World made a profound difference on the old...
"Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect," he added. "It will completely change the future of the human race,
and maybe determine whether we have any future at all."
You and the world you know would not even exist, if not for the human pioneering spirit.
Your very existance is owed to those that went beyond the horizon. It was dangerous, it was expensive, and often deadly, and the payoff sometimes does not come for centuries. But YOU exist because they had the courage and understanding to explore the unknowns of this world.
And it is also chump change compared to how we spend our tax dollars. It is not why we have other problems on earth.
Note how incredibly small NASA spending is compard to health and human services.....
http://www.federalbudget.com/chart.gif