Forgive me for jumping in and ineffectually responding to both of you, especially as responding to your individual posts rather than the unfolding discussion, doesn't do it justice. I've tried to parse down the couple salient posts into something I can respond to.
So in no particularly coherent order:
The asteroid detection seems like the best justification so far, though I'm still not convinced that money shouldn't be better spent on things like urban farming.
As for the side effect of beneficial technology, I'm not convinced this is a real point. We know the technologies or programs that might help more people so why not study that stuff directly?
Regarding the comparison to military spending, that only seems like an argument if your only goal is cutting out "wasteful" spending. There's also the moral argument as to whether or not progressives can justify spending money to learning varied factoids about space given the opportunity cost of where NASA funding could've gone. Saying Y is worse does not make X better.
Recap
- 1. Asteroid detection (which isn't necessarily NASA specific) is the only worthwhile aim of spending tax-dollars (which is "crowd-funding," by the way, people shouldn't have to trust in cheap imitations of what is essentially supposed to be "crowd-funding" writ social funding large).
- 1a. NASA's interdisciplinary context inherently manifests secondary (rather than purpose of research) knowledge and technology (which may or may not have been discovered contemporaneously with directed and intended research).
- 2. Military funding is necessitated by threats, rather than promises, and non-essential to the discussion of funding NASA.
Momentary reflection
- 2. I will withdraw my points about military spending and focus on what we should alternatively do with NASA's 1/100th of the tax-paying pie; however, I think this constraints the discussion in a manner that leaves Wilshire and I, inherently, unable to respond. For this post, I'll continue writing under the assumption that re-purposing the whole pie is up for debate.
Look if you stuck a bunch of thermodynamic engineers in a room and told them to make the best oven they could think of, they might make an oven thats 10% more efficient. Great. But no matter how long those people sat and thought, they'd never get to microwave ovens, becuase it has almost nothing to do with that field.
Recap and additive
- 1. Successful directed research only accounts for a small percentage of discoveries. If we reframe this conversation in terms of ignoring all the accidental or secondary discoveries (and ignoring even how the lack of those secondary discoveries allow purposeful research to build upon it), the history of scientific discovery would not be as prodigious as it is.
Maybe I'm not understanding this argument, but it seems to me companies with R&D divisions would likely disagree.
The argument seems to be, "Well learning about factoids relating to space is worth spending public money on because we'll get all these other technologies indirectly."
It is actually difficult for me to take you seriously, sci, because I just can't imagine why you'd get so up in arms about NASA's 1/100th of the pie. Is that really the only piece of public spending up to debate by informed citizens?
I've already given an argument about opportunity cost and the only good refutation for IMO is the asteroid detection.
What's the moral justification for learning about space when you can put that money into terrestrial research projects that can directly benefit people?
Can't we ask this about any, but especially, military spending? Isn't that far more relevant?
Also, I feel your argument is predicated on the idea that NASA isn't successful enough. Well, this is obviously the case when their contemporaries who share public expenditure get 50 times more funding. For instance, should NASA ever experience proportionate spending, I feel, by the nature of their organization's interdisciplinary context, which Wilshire succintly describes, they would experience exponentially more advancements than other directed R&D departments, neh?
I mean, there's nothing stopping people from crowdfunding space research.
sci, really? For serious?
You
are crowdfunding the military over space research. Tax-dollars is crowdfunding...
Well alright then the real issue here is that you believe the government could take NASA's budget, and put it somewhere else, and get results more relevant to life here on earth. Right?
I hazard so, though I'm still hoping the conversation can extend to justifying any and all publically funded research...
Because to me, its a massive collaboration of nearly every conceivable scientific discipline bent towards a specific goal. Its not a bunch of astrophysicists sitting in a room looking at a telescope. I am not aware of any endeavors that require such integration of different disciplines, other than the Manhattan project.
This is why there are so many "spin-off" technologies. Not because there is some oblique connection between looking at stars and having good ideas, but because through NASA, these things ARE directly funded. The space research is looking at hundreds of problems, thousands, and funding research to solve them all. To me, NASA is basically the government agency responsible for funding every sector of research. The thing that most people get hung up on is that they don't realize what this whole space thing is about.
...
Maybe if you could convince me that this isn't what space research is, then you could more easily show me why defunding it is a great idea.
Again, this seems like such a minute discussion to be having if it really is about what we should do with one penny out of a dollar...