At the end of the video, Margaret says that space exploration was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s. People wondered why the government was spending time and money exploring the solar system when critical problems existed here on Earth. What do you think? Should the government resolve Earthly issues before exploring space? Or is a scientific investigation of distant worlds a fundamentally human endeavor of exploration? Explain your argument.
The pessimist within me wants to immediately answer with a retort along the lines of “because we’ve doomed this earth and need to move elsewhere”. But in all honesty, I think giving more money to groups like NASA will ultimately be beneficial for us beyond just ‘exploring the stars’ as the development of their technology and other works give back to the overall scientific community as well as providing jobs. Just like military endeavors led to thing such as microwaves, scientific accomplishments are never truly limited.
It’s all important. Like how here in the United States, the arts are deeply underfunded when compared to the sciences – especially of the military (and just the military budget overall) variety. The government has issues spending, overwhelmingly giving to one aspect rather than the innumerable social issues or other scientific avenues.
It’s all tied to the issues of resources – are we using what we have readily available properly? Are we doing something to harvest what we don’t easily produce? This is what times into that earlier pessimism about environmental concerns. If we’ve depleted certain necessary resources from this planet, it may become crucial in the distant generations that we need to be able to venture off world and explore what the rest of our solar system has to offer.
Also, space exploration being a “fundamental human endeavor of exploration” is the easiest response, given that it’s in the question itself. The fact that mankind made it to space at all – we love to explore the unknown. On Earth, we continue deep sea exploration to know what lies beneath our waves, out there we now know what a black hole actually looks like. Whether these endeavors are properly funded or not, I’m not privy to the specifics just a general feeling, they persevere and continue to explore.
So while it’s important to know what’s happening on our earth, there’s nothing wrong with our innate sense of wonder and exploration and wanting to better understand the universe in which we reside because we’ll just continue to be here and why not learn all we can to better benefit us.
Klaw's Lair 