You are the th to read these arguments
| Philosophical | difficult to substantiate or even to explain, but important, none the less; |
| Practical | good reasons of why money, time and resources should be invested, plus proof that not that much money is spent in this field. |
| Scientific | the possibility of gaining knowledge that may, apparently, have no practical use |
You are the th to read these arguments
This has happened to many societies along the ages: the Romans collapsed not because of the barbarians, but because of internal corruption and stagnation; the Chinese Empire of the 15th/16th century was, in many ways, more advanced than Europe but allowed itself to be overtaken...
The opposite is also true: 18th century Japan was centuries behind Europe and America but, when forced with the choice of developing or virtually becoming a colony, it developed itself at great speed, outpacing the rest of Asia and even some Old World countries; when Peter the Great took over the throne of Russia, the country was a backwater kingdom, big but backward, but by the time of his death, reform and change had turned Russia into a European Power.
The idea behind all this is a simple one: develop, find new objectives, new horizons or pay the penalty.
What does this has to do with Space Exploration? SE is the new horizon; we have run out of horizons on Earth: the Sea Monsters are after all our distant cousins, the Wild West has been tamed, Darkest Africa is full of light bulbs, the Mysterious East is not that mysterious... Space has become not so much "The Final Frontier" but the next one. Ever since man (and woman!) has been able to think (and stop worrying about tigers for a few hours), someone has looked up into the night sky and asked the shaman, "What that?" "It Gods house" "Me want go" then the tigers would show up and that would be that. It's only now (ie, last few of generations) that we have the time and the means to do it (and the tiger is safely locked up) and have ran out of Great Challenges, that Space has turned into something that can actually be, if not conquered, at least explored first and used after.
Ever since satellite systems have been in service, these have contributed enormously to the betterment of human life. Navigation systems like GPS have saved thousands from becoming lost and possibly dead, weather sats like GOES, and Tiros N are used to understand weather patterns so as to be able to better control agriculture, as well as monitoring present weather conditions (such as hurricanes!), GMS, while systems like Geosat, Radarsat, Landsat, AEM, San Marco have greatly improved our knowledge of Earth, as well helping in the management of resources.
Communication sats, starting with Echo and it's descendents, like Telstar, Intelsat, Eurosat 1000 and Spacebus/Eutelsat have turned Earth into a global village, making it possible not only to see sights and news from the other side of the world but also to speak with (almost) anyone, anywhere. This has, in turn, led to improvements in the way people see, not only our planet, but also each other.
More tangible, money making benefits: WD-40. They've been selling the stuff for some thirty years now, and that's a lot of little blue and yellow cans. Several billion dollars worth so far.
Composite materials, of which graphite/carbon is only the most obvious.
Remote medical monitoring. Had any relatives in the hospital with severe health problems? If so, they owe some part of their chances of surviving to heart/vital function monitoring that was developed to keep an eye on astronauts while they were in space. This probably saves a billion or so a year all by itself. You can also add in implanted devices like insulin pumps, for that matter.
The number of applications and technologies derived from the space programs of the various nations are too numerous to put here; same goes for the scope of those applications. Best to leave this for the professionals:
In the long term... eventually we will need more living space. The population is climbing non-stop and everyone wants a higher standard of living comparable, if not culturally at least financially, the same as the USA or Europe and Japan. There won't be enough land or mineral resources for a typical middle class life style in the no-so-distant future. Mining asteroids or the moon is a far safer environmental way to do it than our present practices. Also we can get all of the dirty, dangerous industrial processes outside the biosphere, and use the cheap energy (such as orbital solar energy "farms") and materials available out there to make everybody comfortable. Another reason to colonize space is the fact that, by staying in only one planet, the Human race is extremely vulnerable to large-scale disasters, such as decease, war or meteor strike: and yes, that's not just a movie script, it can happen, in fact it has already happened once (remember the dinosaurs?); in 1994, a very large meteor, by the name of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, causing explosions big enough to obliterate Earth (and Jupiter is, astronomically, a close neighbor...).
An "practical" argument used against SE concerns the "huge" amounts of money spent on it, money that could be best used elsewhere. Let's see how much money is really spent on this:
| ESA's budget for 1995 / 2004 | 2.651 Billion ECU (3.100 Billion $US) | ESA - Budget and Participating States |
| NASA's budget for 1999 | 14 Billion $US | Budget of the United States Government 1999 |
| USAF Northrop B-2A cost per unit | Approx 1.3 Billion $US | USAF - B-2A Spirit Fact Sheet |
| USN CVN-75 Harry S. Truman | 3.897 Billion $US | Department of the Navy |
| French Navy CVN Charles de Gaulle | 2.85 Billion $US | Science et Vie, September 1998 |
This is, to say the least, wrong, for a very simple reason: there is no such thing as pure science, there is only knowledge that we, at present, don't yet know how to use. History is full of examples of this: what could the use be, in the late 1800's, of finding out about the smallest elements of matter? Few, if any (even the original scientists) could see any real applications for poking around with atoms and such. And yet, this purely scientific research was the base for x-rays (can you think of medicine without them?) and nuclear power. The very first US satellite, a science craft, Explorer 1, discovered the Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. Comm satellites began as nothing more than drawings on a black board near the end of WWII.
Above all, remember this: just because we don't know how to apply some bit of knowledge just discovered, it doesn't mean someone, somewhere, sometime, won't be able to come up with some use for it.