re: Mars Here We Come!

quote:

---

But, back to the topic of Mars.

We're wasting our time, money, and effort focusing on Mars. Instead, we need to focus our time, money, and effort to colonize the Moon before China and Russia does. The moon is rich in resources which will be necessary to one day send humans to Mars.

Passing up the Moon is like having an empty tank of gas and ignoring the road sign which says, "Last Gas Station for 100 miles."

---

See...THIS is actually reasonable, so it's not like you're COMPLETELY insane, so what gives?

quote:

---

I don't think there's any way you could reasonably tell me that $19.5 Billion spent on something within the planet (let's use some crazy example like the hyper loop) wouldn't result in some serious breakthroughs. The only way to make that case is if your argument is that space presents uniquely difficult challenges that require the most outside the box thinking ever that basically creates some sort of breeding ground for intellectual breakthroughs. There are plenty of very difficult problems here that we could use some incredible funding and creative thinking to solve and likely generate some awesome new technologies.

---

That's not really the issue...it's one of PR. During the Cold War and Space Race the entire nation was wound up in the fervor of the enterprise. That's how and why we were able to marshall that amount of resources into it.

It's not that you couldn't potentially reap similar tech rewards if you'd invest it other ways, it's that you almost certainly could not get and continue to receive public support for that type of funding without the goal of something vastly larger than ourselves.

quote:

---

I don't think there's any way you could reasonably tell me that $19.5 Billion spent on something within the planet (let's use some crazy example like the hyper loop) wouldn't result in some serious breakthroughs. The only way to make that case is if your argument is that space presents uniquely difficult challenges that require the most outside the box thinking ever that basically creates some sort of breeding ground for intellectual breakthroughs. There are plenty of very difficult problems here that we could use some incredible funding and creative thinking to solve and likely generate some awesome new technologies

---

This is the mentality of a cave man. "Hey if we spend more time hunting, we'll get more food". Sorry, but this excuse will last forever for us not to go to space and advance ourselves as a species until it's too late. I fricking hate this mentality so much, and if we just stay within our comfort zone, then we'll go back to the cave.

The biggest enemy is the status quo, which is what we're content in living. What most people don't realize is that no company or civilization that has been content with the status quo has continued to be the power they once were.

And NASA has .3% of the national budget. To put it in perspective, the national ink budget is higher than that. Not to mention the welfare, the overblown military budget, and other stupid bullshite we spend over half of our national budget on. The thought that "we can't do it because we can spend the money helping people in the short term" is bullshite.

So we're gonna get to Mars around 72 years after landing on the moon. Wow! That's pathetic.

quote:

---

This is the mentality of a cave man. "Hey if we spend more time hunting, we'll get more food".

---

Right. If you spend all your time worrying about staying afloat, that's all you'll do is stay afloat. If you set bigger goals, bigger things will happen.

quote:

---

You do realize all that money isn't actually going to Mars, right? It will all be spent right here on planet Earth

---

Nope, nope. They are actually loading up a rocket with the money and sending it to the Mars delegation as a peace offering.