I grew up admiring the Apollo mission and the likes.

Nowadays, I recognise that it is heavy engineering, but I am not so impressed by the fact that we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do. In fact, we have had humans surviving in space for decades now. It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.

But more than that: we have much more important problems to solve, starting with our survival. Sure, sending robots to Mars is interesting, for science. Sending people to Mars is useless. Hoping to become an "interplanetary species" is preposterous. Thinking that Mars is "just a next step, but we'll go further" is absolutely insane.

Life is literally, measurably dying on Earth (the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs). We have a huge energy problem, and more and more global instability.

Sure, watching four humans happily travelling to the Moon in a spaceship that literally does not need them is fun, like watching the Superbowl. And like for the Superbowl, there are big fans for whom it is the most important event of the year. However, most people don't care. We're not in 1969 anymore, now it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.

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outworlder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.

That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.

Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.

Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.

I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.

	▲	palata 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun. Don't get me wrong: I would totally love to be in their shoes, I completely understand why they want to do it. > Nowadays, they are crucial This is the typical "we need to do it because it's hard, and we don't know what we will learn from it, and BTW there are things we developed for the space program that got into civilian use" argument. But it is flawed. For one, we know a lot more today than we did in the 50s. It would be like saying "in the past, they thought that the Earth was flat, so who knows, maybe tomorrow we will realise that humans are capable of telekinesis". The truth is... "most likely not". > we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time. Let's play a game: you're not allowed to read about it. Off the top of your head, what technological advancements did the different space programs bring? Gemini? Apollo? Soyuz? The space shuttle? Mir? The ISS? And if you manage to give more than one correct answer to that, do you genuinely believe that it wouldn't have been possible to develop that technology without the corresponding space program? I doubt it. It's like saying that we needed to spend billions developing a race car in order to improve the stability of a skateboard. Technically, that is wrong, so the only argument I heard to defend the idea was something like "because brilliant people would be interested in developing a race car, but if it wasn't possible, instead of improving skateboards, they would be bureaucrats or financiers". Not very convincing. > I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier. Agreed. But that's not a justification for spending billions sending humans in space for their own pleasure (and not without risk) and for the pleasure of all the nerds who enjoy working on that (and I count myself as part of those nerds).

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majkinetor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do.

No, "we" knew how to do it with 10x more money and people on the board, in a very unsafely manner. It was a few times muscle flex and thats why it stopped.

Making entire thing routine, cheap and safe is something else, and "we" don't know yet how to do that, or we would have at least few scientists constantly on the Moon.

It's a difference between running a marathon and dropping dead, and doing it all the time.

> we have ...[other]... problems

This kind of thinking is nonsensical. With so many people around, there can be arbitrary group of people working on any kind of problem, without them needing to point to other groups as doing imaginary problems. You talk like unless everybody works on solving specific problem, its not going to get solved. Life simply doesn't work that way, mythical man month explained it well why for one, and then, you can't know what unexplored spaces bring (maybe game changing discoveries).

	▲	palata 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am not sure what you are trying to say. So people should be ecstatic about it because "it's almost the same thing, but this time the people having fun onboard are not taking remotely as much risk (other than NASA sending them knowing that the heat shield is unsafe), and the whole thing is a lot cheaper"? And then should we invest billions do go there in 3 days instead of 6, and expect that people will be impressed? > With so many people around, there can be arbitrary group of people working on any kind of problem Sure. It's just that this particular group of people does it with taxpayer money, and it's measurably not very useful. That money could go to... I don't know... feed people? Just one example. > You talk like unless everybody works on solving specific problem, its not going to get solved. Actually, if you read a bit about the problem that I am mentioning (i.e. our survival), I think it's relatively clear that "solving it properly" is impossible (that ship has sailed), and "solving it badly" will require sacrifices from pretty much everybody alive. We literally need everybody to change their lifestyle in order to have more chances of survival. And even that will not prevent very bad things from happening to most people. And I am saying that being pretty optimistic about it. A shortcut is simply "we're pretty much screwed". And if you don't realise it, it's probably because you don't really understand the problem.

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Gagarin1917 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not sure I’m following. Do most people not care because of the environment? Because that’s certainly not the case. Most people don’t care about the environment either.

Plus, do you not have any other interests besides the state of the world? No interest in entertainment or sports or tech news at all? I doubt that if you’re on HN.

My bet is that you wouldn’t care even if the world was objectively better than ever. You’re just coming up with excuses for why you don’t care. It’s fine if you don’t care, but it’s certainly not because of the state of the world. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any interests at all, including HackerNews.

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scubbo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs

Fascinating. My naive perception of the extinction event was that it was relatively sudden, on a personal rather than geological timescale - decades or maybe generations. But it looks like it might be "_rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years_" [0]. Goes to show how unintuitive geological and evolutionary timelines are!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...

	▲	palata 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. We all know that "the dinosaurs disappeared", but very few know how long it took. The dinosaurs were not witnessing the climate warming year after year, by a long shot... What we are witnessing right now is happening exceedingly fast.