[nicboobees]

Well, agree to disagree. The average person doesn't really care if there is or isn't water on mars, or if someone spent millions of their dollars taking a photo of pluto.

Year after year the news reports another big experiement which cost millions to setup, and which claims to "give us answers as to how the universe was created". I just couldn't be less interested. It's rich people (Or taxpayer funded people) playing with their toys.

It must be great fun if space exploration is your hobby, like explorers of days gone by, but for most people it won't have any impact at all on their lives (Apart from wasting their taxes).

[pc86]

Space travel and exploration have directly resulting in many commercial products, which themselves have generated billions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs (if not more).

Not only is your statement disappointing to hear from anyone presuming to be technically literate, it is objectively wrong.

[jessriedel]

Actually, I think you're wrong here. Space travel is a very inefficient method of R&D. Almost any other basic research has more practical benefit.

[nicboobees]

As a fellow reply states, using "Space travel" as a means for general R&D is pretty damn inefficient.

You would have a similar result if you poured money into alchemy research - lots of side products etc.

[jessriedel]

That's actually exactly my philosophy [1]. I agree with each of your examples (water on mars, photos of Pluto, early-universe cosmology). Nonetheless, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is in a completely different league. The random guys on the street will not only care about this tremendously, he will care for the same correct reasons that scientists care.

[1] Minus the part about it being a waste of taxes; just because people aren't interested doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, because people can be wrong.

[nicboobees]

So we find out there's some creatures on Pluto that are roughly the same as frogs. How does that impact anyones life? It'd be an interesting fact, and maybe fun if we could move some over here as pets, but beyond that, it's a colossal waste of energy and money.

[jessriedel]

Do you mean impacting their life materially? Why would it have to impact their life materially to be valuable? Sharing a joke with a friend at a bar doesn't have material benefit, but it's one of the valuable things in life.

[nicboobees]

If you're going to force people to pay money, through taxes, grants etc, to explore space, then it should have some material benefit.

[jessriedel]

That's a pretty unusual axiom that most people don't subscribe to, and it's orthogonal to disagreements over justifications for involuntary taxes.

[mratzloff]

Well, presumably any civilization advanced enough to communicate with us wouldn't be interested in being our pets. Civilization being sort of a prerequisite of communicating with us?

If you can't see how that would be one of the most impactful things in human history, I don't think there's any more to discuss.