I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…
Why not. Not like that money would be put to better use elsewhere.
How else will we be able to someday mass travel through space to find another planet once we inevitably kill this one?
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Yes
Space exploration is weight lifting for science.
Literally and figuratively
“Necessary”, no. We’re all fine here on Earth, where we evolved, and all that. We’ve gotten along just fine without leaving the planet.
Desirable? Yes. But, I think we should do it with robots, because humans are too expensive due to being so fragile. Also, what should we do with what we find? Exploiting the resources of the Moon and Mars should not be allowed. Setting up human colonies there seems extravagant at this time.
Necessary? No. Not much except eating, drinking and breathing is. Even reproduction is optional from the view of a single individual.
A good idea? Absolutely:
- Exploring space tells us a lot about earth. We currently assume that the moon formed when something big collided with earth and threw lots of material into a stable orbit. This means moon is probably made of the same materials as earth and because there is no erosion nor tectonic activity on the moon, it lets us study what earth may have looked like billions of years ago.
- Lots and lots of things that were originally developed for space are very useful on earth: teflon coating, memory foam matresses, efficient solar panels and many more. Sure, they could have been developed without space exploration but the pressure to get something exactly right helped a lot. And of course we directly use satellites for a lot of earth stuff, too. Think tv, weather prediction, monitoring of climate change, communication, GPS, accurate maps and many more.
- It gives humanity something to unite behind. Even during the cold war, the USA and the Soviet Union ignored their feud for a bit to make Apollo-Soyuz happen. These days, the ISS is one of the biggest multinational projects and I dread the day it gets decommissioned because Russia will have one less reason to talk to the rest of the world.
We had problems on earth before space exploration, and we’ll have problems on earth after space exploration. And if we colonize other planets we’ll have problems there.
Because every time humans solve a problem they create more, bigger, harder to solve problems.
Space exploration doesn’t affect this.
There’s a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn’t matter what the puzzle is so long as it’s a challenge to solve. They’ll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is.
Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D.
Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting.
We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they’re just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.
Imagine if we had a centrally planned economy. We could throw the puzzle demons at logistics
China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.
The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.
Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.
edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.
We puzzle demons want that too
It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.
It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.
Of course not, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. We go to space because it’s cool and we can, and that’s a beautifully human thing to do. As for the money, it’s a baseline fact of this world that enormous sums will be spent on things that don’t fix our problems, and space is as good a use as any for that wasted cash. If it were space or solving hunger, solving hunger is the obvious priority, but practically speaking it’s “don’t solve hunger and go to space” or “don’t solve hunger.”
Setting aside all the intangible benefits such as answering why we are here and providing inspiration to generations there are tons of short and long term benefits.
In the short/medium term, research is so much about solving problems and your solutions having unexpected applications in other areas. A lot of our minituarization in tech happened because we needed things smaller and lighter to lift into space, think things like your smart phone camera or laptops. Also things like cordless tools and even memory foam were originally developed for their application in space travel.
In the long term, let’s take a look back, what if we had the same stance when we looked at the ocean, and thought why its even necessary to figure out how to navigate the waters. For our species to propagate or even survive, we need to expand. Right now we are one decently sized asteroid from extinction, but if one day we figured out how to expand to multiple worlds, then we become a heck of a lot of more resilient.
Yes
It is a virtual certainty that at some point a meteor large enough to wipe out all multicellular life on the planet will strike the Earth. It is an absolute certainty that the Sun will eventually burn out leaving the planet uninhabitable. Something else might wipe out our species long before either of these things happen, but it’s not a bad idea to have another inhabited planet or two as a backups.
I am of the opinion that space exploration and settlement is the single most important thing humanity should be doing. Currently humanity exists only on this planet, which through the course of its existence has had numerous mass extinction events. It is hubris to believe that we will never be affected by one. Right now all of humanity’s eggs are in this single basket, and if that basket gets kicked over, humanity could cease to exist.
Now I will grant you that there are lots of things down here on earth that we should be spending money on to better the lives of humans generally, but these things are not mutually exclusive. Right now we’re spending orders of magnitude more money and resources waging war on one another than space exploration. In the US in 2025, the US military budget was around $920b, whereas NASA’s was $25b. The military budget was 36 times higher than the space budget. It’s not even close. Space is not where dollars are being wasted.
Studies have also shown that NASA’s impact is a net positive on the economy, consistently generating more economic impact than is put into it. It creates well paying jobs that employees find fulfilling and satisfying, generates public interest in the sciences, and benefits society as a whole as new technologies are developed that we all get to enjoy.
I would argue that what we NEED to do is stop needlessly murdering each other over religious and social disagreements, and spend our resources on feeding, clothing and taking care of one another such that we all have the time, security and ability to watch humans go out into space with wonder in our hearts.
There have been over 1800 “spin-off” technologies that came from the world’s various space agencies. Some of those inventions are life saving and there’s people alive today thanks to the pioneering spirit of man and the funding of countries. I don’t see the benefit of stopping now.
