[bennyg]

What other arbitrary aims would you rather scientists work on, since all aims are arbitrary anyways? I don't think you really understand how scientific research works at all.

The engineering effort of NASA took a bunch of disparate scientific discoveries and pieced them together to land humans on the moon. Don't tell me you don't think that sparked major economic development in this country for decades. One of the largest reasons America is an international economic powerhouse is the space race and the need for technological innovation during the cold war.

The entirety of humanity has been involved with exploring our curiosities. Exploring our curiosities tends to lead towards societal/scientific progress. Space is one of those.

[tedks]

Well, presumably if NASA is good because it produces things that can be spun off, you could just put the money into directly producing the spinoffs (somehow) and be more efficient.

>The entirety of humanity has been involved with exploring our curiosities. Exploring our curiosities tends to lead towards societal/scientific progress. Space is one of those.

I think this is almost certainly false. Very little of humanity has been involved with exploring any curiosity. Go to a third-world village and see how much curiosity is being explored.

It's also disingenuous to claim that NASA is some grand scientific curiosity mission. NASA is part of the military-industrial complex and operates as a slightly more palatable alternative to designing ICBM's directly. This is sort of like how mathematicians work for the NSA studying problems that are sanitized to be unrelated to the actual problem the NSA is trying to solve. It's a modern, scientific equivalent of a blank round in the firing squad.

Personally, I think that space exploration is a good thing because having all your species-level eggs in one planetary basket is a bad idea, but these are not compelling arguments in favor of space exploration, and they don't stand up to very easy to form arguments.

[adrianN]

> I think this is almost certainly false. Very little of humanity has been involved with exploring any curiosity. Go to a third-world village and see how much curiosity is being explored.

Throughout human history the vast majority of the population did nothing to contribute to the progress of society, except doing their job to keep their current society running. Eventually we figured out how to produce enough food without having everyone work all the time. The new free time could be used for arts and science; progress became possible.

But I think it's wrong to dismiss all the people who produce neither art nor knowledge. Without them, humanity couldn't afford to feed poets and scientists.