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by throwaway290 1068 days ago
I think the point is there would probably be many positive side effects and discoveries on the way somewhere that we should be going anyway. Some consider space and becoming interplanetary not just worth doing but completely imperative.

Sadly it would be such a long way no politician is incentivized to get behind it. Also people can be jerks so while you're busy with this someone could just start a war with you.
1 comments
bumby 1068 days ago
>I think the point is there would probably be many positive side effects and discoveries on the way

My issue with this is that it's so nebulous it can be used for practically anything. And that, in turn, makes it an argument of limited value.

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throwaway290 1067 days ago
Read the sentence to the end?
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bumby 1067 days ago
>I think the point is there would probably be many positive side effects and discoveries on the way somewhere that we should be going anyway

“Doing it for side effects” misses the whole point. Like I already said, if you can state the desired side effects, it’s better just to focus on developing them directly. If you can’t specify the desired side effects, it’s not a good goal. It’s just wishful, optimistic thinking and a bad strategy in a resource constrained environment.

Would you take a medication, not for its prescribed goal, but rather for its “potential” (yet undefined) side effects? Wouldn’t you rather just take a different medication that targets the desired outcome directly?

If you’re alluding to the idea of becoming an interplanetary species, I think the counter argument is that any risk that would mitigate would be more easily mitigated by other means. E.g., it would be much, much easier to “fix” the earth climate than terraform Mars. Redirecting an asteroid is potentially a good case, but the nature of the space program is mostly focused on human rated programs which aren’t needed for that.

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throwaway290 1067 days ago
Its not for side effects it's for direct effects. Side effects are bonuses. If you disagree that direct effects are useful and think we should never leave the planet then that's a different discussion.
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bumby 1067 days ago
That's exactly the discussion, though. The OP was saying the photovoltaic industry wouldn't be at where's it is today without the space program and it could be even further along if we dedicated more resources to space. Their value of the space program was explicitly defined by it's side effects. They made no claim that the space program was implicitly good for it's own sake. They never claimed we "should be going to outer space anyway," they claimed if we had dedicated more effort to fiddling around in space we'd be closer to replacing coal plants with PV.
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throwaway290 1067 days ago
> Their value of the space program was explicitly defined by it's side effects

where did it imply so? that's your conjecture

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