[eru]

If we wanted to do this properly, we would have to look at opportunity costs, and see what that money / resources could have done otherwise.

To give a related example: war often leads to innovation. In our current universe, the second world war lead to digital computers.

However, IBM (and others) were already hard at work improving their computing devices and would have landed at electronic, digital computers sooner or later, too. Without spending something like ~50% of world GDP nor killings tens of millions of people.

For another really egregious example: have a look at manned space exploration. Specifically the International Space Station. Google said its total costs were about 150 billion USD. Compare '20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years of Science aboard the International Space Station' https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/iss...

That least is pretty meagre. They even have to cite spending money by itself as a 'breakthrough'. Almost all of their 'breakthroughs' could have been done for cheaper with unmanned space flight (and most of them are useless and irrelevant anyway.)

They could have left those 150 billion USD with the taxpayer, and private industry would have surely used them better.

[albertop]

Space X is proving without any doubt that the space exploration can be done significantly cheaper by private company.

[eru]

Yes. I didn't bring them up, because most of their customer base is still governments, and that would have muddied the argument.

(I think that (most of) space exploration should be left completely to the private sector, not just the execution, but also the financing.

Even if you think that the government should be involved in the sciences, manned space flight is pretty much a more expensive version of unmanned space flight.

It's useful as entertainment only, so far. Eg the moon landing was great entertainment, better than a Marvel movie. But also more expensive. I don't think the government should be involved in providing entertainment.

But in any case, after the moon landing, the amount of inspiration coming out of manned space flight has dropped dramatically.)

[ffhhttt]

> space exploration should be left completely to the private sector, not just the execution,

If you’re fine with there being no space exploration whatsoever. Which is a reasonable view, it’s very expensive and highly unprofitable.

Why would a (rational) private corporation ever send a rover to mars or a drone to titan? It would be an absurd thing to do..

[eru]

There's more to the private sector than profit seeking corporations. Basically, everything that's not the government 'lives' there: clubs, charities, churches, foundations, etc.

If there's enough will in the population to vote for spending tax payer money on space exploration, surely there's enough willingness to crowdfund the whole thing?

And if people only want space exploration if they can vote other people's money to finance it, but don't want to put their own money where their mouth is, I'm not sure that would be a ringing endorsement?

> If you’re fine with there being no space exploration whatsoever. Which is a reasonable view, it’s very expensive and highly unprofitable.

I like space exploration, but I wouldn't want to force other people to pay for my aberrant preferences.

[ffhhttt]

Yeah, it’s a perfectly reasonable view. We just shouldn’t pretend that space exploration would still be a thing if governments couldn’t finance it (which your previous comment sort of implied)

[eru]

Yes.

Manned space exploration would probably not have been (much of) a thing. At least not until much later when the technology has improved.

Unmanned space exploration would probably still have happened to some degree. SpaceX has a lot of private customers.

(And I'm much less against governments financing unmanned space exploration than against them financing manned space exploration. That's just such a money sink.)