this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
484 points (97.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43340 readers
2067 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My "anti space" stance has nothing to do with Elon. I simply don't understand what value it gives when we have so much on earth to fix first.
Folks like you say there are things but won't actually give examples. If you want to provide some I'll wholeheartedly listen, for sure.
I'm on board with some space stuff like building JWST or the dart mission. However, sending humans up with rockets just to plant a flag or whatever is totally hedonistic and ridiculous to me.
This reflects a lack of understanding of the good that comes out of space research. SpaceX exists because Republicans defunded NASA. Space experiments help us solve problems on earth. Not to mention we depend on satellites for everything in our daily lives from weather predictions to communications. Not all of space is "hurr durr I'm Elon musk let's go to Mars!" In fact most of it isn't.
No, it doesn't. It speaks directly to it when it mentions the things it supports about space research. It then goes on to say what it doesn't like, which is space imperialism, space warfare, and space privatization for profits. Learn to read.
For one thing, satellites are necessary for monitoring the health of the earth and ecosystems
For another thing, if all the rich people got in rockets and blasted off to go die on Mars, the world would be much better off
For these reasons I 100% support all space-related research
There is never going to be a time when Earth is perfect and there are no problems anywhere. There is an argument to be made that we should prioritize nonhuman spaceflight but unfortunately robotic missions are not capable of doing a lot of the stuff people can. eg. anything requiring that decisions be made rapidly without the need for mission control to puppet the instruments from Earth. Manned spaceflight also forces the development of technologies like life support, hydroponics, advanced materials science research and the like that would be useful here on Earth as well as medical advances that can be useful for treating osteoporosis, muscle wasting and eye diseases like glaucoma which is the leading cause of blindness. Much of this cant easily be done on Earth due to the need for a microgravity environment. And again, you cant do this with just robots. People have to be exposed to these environments to result in the physiological changes that microgravity causes.
So you do like that JWST went up and that its a benefit.
JWST is childsplay compared to the kind of telescopes we can put up in space with a rocket like starship at a fraction of the cost.
Instead of a complicated unfolding structure, Starship will be the housing for the mirror, so we'll have a 9m mirror in space with a vastly simpler setup. JWST was 6.5m and will cost more than I believe the entire starship development budget will ever cost.
Next, put a complicated mirror like jwst in starship, and we could probably get it past 20m!
We also get things like starlink or others constellations that provide global internet with a dish, and soon, because of large rockets like starship, global cell coverage.
Global cellular coverage will be incredibly helpful and even save lives.
We can get so much from it, and the cheaper and more reusable it is to get up there, the more we'll be be able to do and learn to do