Space Exploration

[superstarr]

This topic is always important when dealing with science. Some think that we should stop it. Why? It can prove useful sometime in the future if we are in danger of extinction. What do you guys think? I think that we need to explore more, and if it wasn't for exploration, we wouldn't have known about all of these dangers that could inpact the Earth and we will still believe that god sent down an asteroid that hit us.

[Minimalist]

Right now we can't afford it.

Maybe if we stopped a couple of wars we could.



The religious types will always ascribe anything that happens to their sky-daddy. Nothing science can do about that bit of human stupidity. Psychology, maybe....or heavy duty drugs.

[ARMS]

I believe in expand or die it's the nature of life, we have all our eggs in one basket here and asteroids, gamma ray bursts etc could steralise the Earth all the diversity of life would be gone forever. We could afford to spread life if we stopped killing each other, but no fundamentalist faiths east and west would rather spend money contradicting their modern angelic beliefs, with the brutal core beliefs their religions are based on.

[bozo]

I agree with Minimalist.

[Caecilian]

The costs of space exploration are very real, especially if you're talking about manned space.

However, the possible benefits in terms of the future of our species are incalculable.

By contrast, wars are considerably more expensive than space exploration and result in death and destruction.

We have our priorities wrong.

[Watson]

Space and sea exploration has always fascinated me deeply. there are so many mysteries out there, so much to learn by simply examining the universe we live in...it's insane that we've grown smart enough as a species to put men on the moon and fly probes deep not space...but we've accomplished it. I've always wondered what amazing things we could learn if we found a planet which actually had life on it. Imagine what we could learn about the universe and our own planet if we found an entire eco-system on some planet, somewhere.

Holy shit, I think my brain just kicked out an awesome idea...LOL

[Paul the Human]

The problem is that we aren't to that point technologically yet. The most we can hope to accomplish at this point are cursory explorations of neighboring planets and our own moon... which is child's play in the grand scheme of things. The kind of money that child's play consumes is far better used for other things at this point. I am all for space exploration, but I think we should sit our asses on earth for now and spend our time inventing forms of propulsion that can take us further. We need to stop trying to make everything a manned flight and create robotic exploration vessels, sending them out in our stead... while we continue to work on how to send actual people. The focus on manned exploration has slowed progress, in my opinion. We simply are not ready for that yet.

[Watson]

I concur. It's good that we are thinking ahead, coming up with newer and better ways to get people into space, but do we really need a test run of every damn new thing we happen to create? We need to be patient and wait to use our advancements, until they are significantly advanced enough to actually get us places.

[Xyster]

Heres an Idea .. Stop fighting these dumb wars and then combine that money with the space program money for this year and the next 10 years use all that for education then after that, dump that money in to research for the next 10 years. Then we can go back to war.... err I mean the space program

[superstarr]

There are still great things to discover within our own Solar System. Like the soon arival of New Horizons at Pluto, further studying Mars, studying the moons of Jupiter like Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, and even the moons Ennceladus and Titan from Saturn. Though, I still think that we should first investigate the oceans a bit further, since we haven't seen the deepest ends of it.