[enraged_camel]

There are about a thousand things you use and benefit from everyday that were side effects of other research and spending (primarily military). But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.

[SiempreViernes]

Eh, the military invents very few things, they mostly spend money on custom development of existing tech to make it better at killing things or facilitating the killing of things.

The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.

[gls2ro]

I might be very wrong (as I don’t have right now time to research more) but I think _the calculating machine_ and _the radar_ are things actually created as usable products because the military needed them in the first place. I am not in favor of spending (more) money on military.

[SiempreViernes]

Not really, their further development certainly benefitted from military money, but the basics came from civilian need for navigation, in general and in mist.

[mattkrause]

I'm fairly certain this is not true. Marconi and Hülsmeyer had some early ideas about using radar to find ships, but they weren't really developed and didn't use the pulsed approach that subsequent systems used.

This wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar) suggests a huge military involvement from the 1930s onwards

[SiempreViernes]

If you count nothing but the earliest version of military radars, then of course nothing but the military has funded it.

I will, however, not count pulsing as more than an improvement to the basic invention of distant object detection with radio waves.

As you can read on the page you linked Hülsmeyer made a working system, clunky as it was, for detecting ships in mist. Taking a system from prototype to mass produced, worthy as this investment might be, is not inventing it.

[wilsonnb2]

> But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.

It's rude to make such assumptions about me. I do not take the positive side effects from research for granted.

You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.

All research will have side effects that can't be anticipated. It's stupid to perform research with "random, unknowable" side positive side effects as a primary justification.

[enraged_camel]

>>You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.

You made the original claim that spending that money on cancer research would be more beneficial. The burden of proof is on you, not me.

[pc86]

Eventually the Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid or cooked by the sun. It's an eventuality that on cosmic timescales is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.

More cancer research is not going to stop an asteroid.

[xvector]

> Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.

And yet perhaps one of the blocks with modern science is people hitting the grave before they can finish innovative research. It takes at least 26 years to train a human from scratch to advance to basic research level in a field. You can add another 10, 20 years before proficiency. At least half the human life until total proficiency (as it stands) is reached and perhaps a quarter of the human life for which researchers can make meaningful contributions.

Arguably, focusing on problems on Earth - like eliminating mortality, solving longevity, curing cancer and dealing with death - will do more for our species long-term than exploring space right now. When your scientists live longer, more discoveries, contributions, and innovations can be made.

Spending $400B on dealing with the greatest tragedies and sources of sorrow known to mankind today - death, disease, illness - would be far preferable to most people than investing in space.

[pixelbash]

So far our legacy as a species on earth is one of destruction. Only by taking on the challenge a place that is already dead can we be certain of creating something new. Maybe we will learn some perspective in the process.

Going to Mars will have myriad discoveries & side effects, if we knew what they were what would be the point of going?

Also, what if curing cancer is harder than going to mars? One is by now a fairly quantifiable objective, the other is debugging a mind bogglingly complex system with no version control.

[ptero]

I think it is the other way around. Somewhere up the thread someone made the that instead of spending 400B on space travel we should have spent it on cancer research.

There was little, if any, explanation of why this should be done; and the posters arguing the opposite are, in my view, suggesting some of the "why not" arguments. The burden of proof is still on the fellow who made that "we should" claim. My 2c.