joshsreditaccount t1_ixc1dff wrote on November 22, 2022 at 8:48 AM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in From Apollo to Artemis: 50 years on, is it time to go back to the moon? | Space by Ok_Copy5217

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/iss-20-years-20-breakthroughs

this is just a hand picked selection of 20, now imagine the discoveries a moon base would bring

simcoder t1_ixc217o wrote on November 22, 2022 at 8:57 AM

That's all true but won't that also be true for anything that you throw billions of dollars at? Like imagine a Manhattan project except to build out a renewable grid...

Don't you think that sort of thing would generate a similar list of of items that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

I agree that if we had infinite money, definitely go for the space stuff too and use the extreme environment to force innovation.

But we don't have infinite money. And with the end of globalization, every nation is going to have to take a hard look at the things they throw money at. We are entering a new world and no one knows what it's going to look like in 20 years. But making ourselves more resilient would seem to be a better investment than learning how to live on the moon.

joshsreditaccount t1_ixc2y4e wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:10 AM

space is a totally different environment and can provide countless unique benefits you wouldn’t get on earth, and nasa is only half a percent of the total us budget

please don’t reply i don’t wanna be in a 20 comment rdeditd argument, i’m just saying your mind set is archaic and you could say the same thing about anything that isn’t instantly beneficial to humanity, like the military which gets over half of the us budget and is literally a department working on better ways to make us go extinct

simcoder t1_ixc4ctk wrote on November 22, 2022 at 9:31 AM

I agree that space is different than down here and the technology generated provides unique benefits.

I'm just not convinced it's the best investment given everything going on down here on Earth right now and in the next decades.

I get the fact that people don't really want to acknowledge the hardships and tough choices that are ahead of us. In fact, the functioning of the economy and everything else sort of requires that we take on some level of cognitive dissonance to keep on going to work everyday and keep on going with our lives. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else.

But when we're making long term plans, we do need to account for the actual reality and not the dissonant one we're all trying to pretend still exists. And even beyond the money, I'm not convinced the world is going to be geopolitically stable enough to support a long term occupation of the moon.