Comment by bluGill
4 days ago
sending people to the moon was never useful. We can get more done with robots, both cheaper and safer. There are plenty of more useful things we can do instead.
okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it
I've never understood this hyper-utilitarian perspective. It just seems divorced from what emotionally inspires most people.
Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.
Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.
I also don't understand why people get their whole identity wrapped up in watching people play a kids game. (football, baseball...). Sure playing is fun, but watching someone else play
Getting people to the moon is plentry useful for getting an objective you can hang all kinds of useful advancements off.
Then you are wrong (and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that). An estimated three orders of magnitude of more science was done in the 12 days astronauts were on the moon than if robots had done those missions. HSF costs about, but it returns a lot of results as well.
>(and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that)
What an odd thing to bring up out of nowhere.
We didn't have robots in 1969, and the Apollo missions resulted in many of the technologies that make modern robotics (and robotic space missions) possible.
It may not be useful but we'll do it anyway. And then it may come to have utility.
> then it may come to have utility.
Maybe, but at what cost? What are we not getting/doing because we are doing this instead? This is of course an unanswerable question, but it is the correct response here - you are getting so focused on what this might gain that you forget that other things also have gains. Time is not unlimited, people who are working on space could work on something different instead, but they cannot do both.
That’s fair but the amount of interest in this crewed mission vs. prior uncrewed and robotic moon missions shows that many people find manned missions more compelling.