US To Return To Moon ... and Beyond

There is a lot to be said about atheists/christians, but that's for other threads.

OK Bill, what is fact? And what is opinion? How do we differentiate between the two?

Ans. We use our brains. Our God given power to reason and think critcally. To analyse, to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I agree most with Au1929 so far. I have a bioscience background and am in favor of serious space exploration over time, but with qualms.

The apparent scientific consensus against establishing a station base on the moon right now makes sense to me. I am not particularly interested in man walking on Mars as a dream, though I can envision sending probes. Man would be quite likely to mess it up with any colonizing efforts, given our present behavior on planet earth. The expense of probes to Mars is incredible to me, and to do something like colonize is inconceivable in a time of massive funding cuts for basic survival needs in the US. I would like to see a lot of changes in our taking care of our present world habitat and populations given primary consideration. There are places where I would put a trillion dollars long before colonizing moon/planets.

There will ALWAYS be such places, Ossobuco.

Think like that and humans will never get anyplace.

I'd rather have the earth maintain than have a few folks in a village on Mars.

I'd rather that humans explore the universe. Ya never know what you will find -- and perhaps you may even find a shortcut to maintaining the Earth!

We are exploring the universe. There is at least one still active probe beyond Pluto right now. The point is that now and for the forseable future, robotic probes will do it better, cheaper, and safer than sending humans.

Perhaps you would. I am not entirely against it, but I think priorities are skewed. The glamour part, the man exploring part, is pie in the sky to me given problems on the ground.

I think the ridicule the proposal has come in for from scientific quarters suggests that the issue is not so much that we shouldnt put billions of $$ into space/exploration, per se -- but that, of all space/exploration options to spend those millions on, a "man to the moon" mission is estimated to make the least sense and be the most wasteful.

"Reach for the stars", sure - but why not go on what the scientists consider most useful in that context, instead of on what appeals most to our child-time fantasies?

I'm not opposed to probes, though there is expense there too; it's the drive to colonize that doesn't interest me.

I know a moon station isn't a colony per se, or is it? I rejected that on the say so of the science community as described previously on the thread. But aiming to colonize Mars - hey wait, fix the earth.

Because catering to those fantasies will bring votes. Why else would Rove have brought the subject up?

I know why BUSH&C came up with it ... I was asking Frank and the others here who ALSO favour the proposal.

The wasted money is in the military and subsidized (welfare for the rich) industry. It is mainly in the human selfish mode of thought that keeps the poor in dire want, not lack of resources. People spout arguments for rugged individualism and the public grunts: "Yeah!" and the safety net shrinks proportionately. We could go into space and take care of the people's need if that's what we desire to do. Right now we seem to prefer to blow all our money on military adventurism and gross profits for the big wigs.

Well, the proposed moon and mars adventures would certainly provide boons to the aerospace industry. Think of how many factories in China and other places Boeing and Grumman could build with the government funding!

No what they would do is move their regular production to China and put the space work in the US plants. When the funding ran out they could shut them down with an iron clad excuse...no work.

The thing is, I can smell the obscenity, but I don't have industry savvy to pinpoint item totals in juxtaposition. I just see people flailiing around me, and this is in the rich country, the US, which should anyone doubt, I love at core. The distress on earth is horrendous, and not everybody else on earth's fault. What, colonize Mars?

I am rather more keen than most I meet in daily life on and about science, but I am shrieking for human concerns and underlying those, earth environment concerns.

Really, the arrow is in the wrong direction.

You don't see me on every picturesque environmental plea, though I agree with those and I wish I clicked for all of them, but I stake a claim here for funds in the direction of earth instead of Mars. Or, in addition to in great numbers.

I point to Antarctica as an example of how life would be on initial colonies. I'm sorry; I don't think human nature is such that we will ever solve our social ills - for at least another 4-6 hundred years. That's not the fault of a space program.

I don't think human nature is such that we will ever solve our social ills - for at least another 4-6 hundred years.

Agree Edgar, maybe Mars is the safest option.

I would bet huge sums of money that the only reason the scientists feel as they do is because they don't expect to get anywhere enough money to do the kinds of science they want to do in the first place.

They, like those of us who are dreamers indulging ourselves in child-time fantasies, are every bit as interested as we are in getting humans out into those areas of our world that we can see but have not yet visited.

Until humans actually make that move -- the kinds of science that can be done by the robots currently available is limited. By the time we finally develop robots capable of doing what a human can do -- we probably will have spent as much money as we would by putting humans out there.

We have the advanced robots needed for real explorations. They are called humans.

In any case, all this is nothing but useless arguing on our part, because neither this administration nor the next is going to "waste" money doing this kind of thing -- we need that money in order to build bombs so we can destroy enemies.

Eventually humans will truly reach for the stars -- and they will not be doing so by sending hardware into space.