Asklemmy

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Let me rewrite your question, and correct me if I'm misrepresenting it:

"Why should we spend resources on X instead of Y?"

Well, for this kind of question, I would prefer to choose a "high value" X and an "important" Y.

Space exploration, and science as a whole, is extremely cheap and good for humanity.

Let's talk about other expensive "X" first:

• Unnecessary war efforts.
• ICE (if we are taking about US)
• Saving banks when they screw up on their bets.
• Incentives to coal and gas when solar is already more viable ...

Maybe you started to think about it because that's an amazing subject, and it is. That alone should be reason enough for us to want to do it. But it is not the only reason. Space exploration already gave us a lot of tech we rely on today. And still, is a very difficult field that will require more tech advancements, that will benefit us in the future.

Space exploration is weight lifting for science.

The word necessary has a lot of wiggle room here. What are necessities? Going by the bare minimum:

• food
• water
• protection from the elements
• protection from illness/infection
• continuation of the species

That's about everything we truly 'need' to die of old age and not go extinct. Nearly everything people currently do is a subset of those needs. Space exploration can be marked under both protection from the elements and continuation of the species.

The impact to society from space exploration is immense if not immeasurable.

• Weather forecasting
• GPS navigation
• Earth sciences
• Robotics
• Medical imaging

NASA has a website dedicated to the topic, as do other agencies around the world.

• https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/benefits-to-humanity/
• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/about/everyday-benefits-of-space-exploration/
• https://www.space.gov.au/why-space-matters
• https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Benefits_of_space_science

There's also a Wikipedia page on the topic:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_of_space_exploration

Firstly, people have such a massive misconception about the cost of space exploration. It is such a miniscule part of our overall expenditure it is a drop in the ocean. (It's important now to distinguish between overall Space budgets and the exploration budgets since we spend a lot of money in space that's not for scientific development nowadays).

The Artemis program for example was 93 billion over 13 years, ~7 billion per year (2012-2025).

The Iraq war cost ~5 trillion over 8 years. Or 625 billion per year.

The entire Artemis program could have been funded by winding down the Iraq war a couple of months earlier.

The annual cost of the NHS is 275 billion per year.

The extra knowledge, research and development in everything from materials, human biology, life support systems, to just engineering management improvements yield absolutely massive benefits to life on earth, greatly outweighing the alternative.

Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits. Hell, even just making people excited about science and technology instead of so distrustful of it is so so important and intangible.

Even if you extend the budgets to the entire space industry, it's still a drop in the ocean, and most of the space industry budgets go directly to economic or defence benefits. Supply chain resilience, climate change policing, communications services, wildfire detection, industrial efficiency gains (e.g. data driven farming). As well as existential threats from space like solar storms and asteroids (although that's an admittedly tiny portion of funding).

This is coming from a space engineer and senior manager who has mostly fallen out of love with the industry because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus. But it's still one of the best bang for buck industries that exists.

All attempts to discover how the universe works benefits us. Even a lot of really esoteric stuff has proven useful in fields like medicine and civil engineering.

Honestly if we can pivot our high tech innovation efforts from being mainly driven by military needs to being driven by basic research (basic in this case meaning researching the natural world directly without any particular goal other than learning), we'd be a lot better off.

Yes, but capitalists should not do it. And actually space exploration on today's scale cost literal pennies compared to military or shareholders loot.

yes. space exploration advanced technological progress in breakneck speed and gave us more tools to make our home a better place.

humans want to break new boundaries, crossing the oceans used to be an unprecedented endeavour and after mastering it the whole world the gained ability to interact.

the amount of resources needed to collectively reach for the stars is there and if done properly we can explore space without worsening people's lives. to put it into perspective: a falcon 9 launch costs about 70 million us $, that's already cheaper than one f35 or 20 tomahawk missiles.

the space race led to the apollo-soyuz program which invited rivals to work together, there`s a beauty in the fact that the need to explore the unknown and work together can transcend even rivalries. The ISS is a monument to that.

imo we (as in humanity) should continue space exploration, but we should ideally not exploit it for capital gain. we should use the useful technology that comes out of it to make life better on our planet. (e.g. GPS, geostationary satellites and and and....)

sure, this field is currently dominated by a circle of pedophiles and nazis (that nazi part has always been part of space flight history for americans >.> ) but the world is currently changing and i see some hope in chinas rapid advancement in this field. they built the tianggong space station and they invited everyone to collectively conduct research in the future. The Artemis Program has been good so far, only now it's held back due to private contractors not delivering on the moon landing craft.

Ironically, luddites against space exploration in this era call for the dismantling of a titanic field of science that is both directly and indirectly responsible for the very device from which they shart out their oh-so-learned opinions to the rest of the world.

Cutting founding for space wouldn't mean that the founding goes to a good thing on earth.

Why is this argument always brought up?

Theoretically we have enough resources to give everyone a home food, education, healthcare and go to space.

Yes. Space exploration pushes science and technology forward, which benefits humanity as a whole.

Yes. For those who consider it wasteful spending, consider that a lot of problems are not fixable by just throwing more money at them. There’s a saying that “9 women can’t make a baby in one month” even though 1 woman can in 9. Many ills of society are as much about political/social motivation, entrenched opponents/regulatory capture, NIMBYism, etc and not problems that you can fix just by spending more. There’s also the concept of a “marginal dollar” - spending one more dollar in an important area that already has a lot of money (and has problems that aren’t really addressed by just having more money) may not be as impactful as a less important area where that dollar would go a lot further.

The point is the advancement of science, not simply the travel itself. Space science is integral to many advances we take for granted these days.

Yes, we need to do things like space exploration because these are the endeavours that advance humanity. Even in practical terms, plenty of discoveries that are useful here come from technologies developed for space exploration. If you're really worried about unproductive use of resouces, maybe worry about how we deal with the pedo elites that rule over us and hoard resources on unimaginable scale.

yes. there's two branching discussions here:

• Space as a scientific topic, it needs to be understood. Our observation of reality is very local, and although we can prove that some of our assumptions about physics, life and civilization work on our neighborhood, it doesn't mean that they're the same everywhere. That alone is sufficient reason for me, to explore.
• Space as the new frontier. Many if not all exploration done on planet Earth has been, in some shape or form, resource-motivated. Lands, food, medicine, minerals, routes, are all found through exploration and normally through people spending money looking for a return over investment. Space is no different.

I think the interesting part is where this two branches touch: If we ever plan on capturing an asteroid for mining, the technology needs to be there to do it, and hopefully the technology is about the benefit of all humankind. This kind of development is showing us the way to move forward and solve problems. Imagine a world when we don't need to destroy ecosystems in order to get iron because all iron comes from off-world.

Necessary, yes. Furthering our knowledge of the cosmos is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake. That being said, the sudden focus on NASA is pure political distraction, a clumsy attempt to foment nationalism that isn't going to be as effective as its architects were hoping.

Yes

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.

The military industry is unnecessary, not space exploration. If saving money is the goal, look elsewhere first. There's so much unnecessary spending and hoarding of wealth for and by dumb shits respectively.

Yes. Even if you don't think the goals of space exploration are important, we've made huge developments in medicine, engineering, solar panels, telecommunications, and road safety based on NASA technology. You're probably reading this on a phone that wouldn't exist with space exploration research. Scientific research is never a linear set of goals or inventions, and the ancillary benefits of our pursuit of space have already changed the world.

Absolutely and unequivocally yes. Nothing should constrain the boundaries of scientific study in space, especially now that our years are numbered due to climate change and dumbass fascists and dictators with launch codes. Whities on the moon, while a noble and valuable sentiment, should be altered to whities on patrol or something.

I’m so sick and tired of seeing Americans bitch about space exploration colonialism and remain silent on the colonialism that continues to kill and exploit Innocent people across the world.

Yes, we need better social infrastructure desperately, but that should come at the cost of terrestrial imperialism, not space exploration.

One day, we're going to outgrow ourselves. One day, we're going to set aside our stupid petty squabbles, and we're going to hope for something more.

I want to see us reach the stars, because I think one day we'll be able to handle what the galaxy throws at us.

Yes.

Looking at the list of government expenditures, I don't see space exploration as problematic as other things we are spending money on.

Well… short term no it’s not necessary (although as other folks have said on the thread it does give some technology advancements, and gives humanity a warm fuzzy sense of achievement)

Long term, it depends on the eval criteria

1. If we want the human race to live as long as possible, then I would say yes - to diversify, distribute and minimise the risk of planetary (Earth) failure
2. If we don’t give a toss about the human race then no, the Universe will be just fine without us

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.

Yes, but I think the efforts right now should go into solving the climate crisis rather than going to the moon.

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.

I think it's human nature to push boundaries and it's how we progress as a society and as species. The resources used also really pale in comparison to what is spent on stuff that is clearly more useless, like mega yachts for the super rich and bombs that get dropped on children.

Few things are more important than Exploration. In all avenues exploration leads to discovery which leads to growth. What else should we be working on? Cos atm the western world (which I inhabit) focuses most human effort on making 'line go up' and it feels entirely wasted and pointless.

Yes, realizing that Earth is the only home we have really makes you think twice.There is no other planet for us to conquer. Mess this one up, and we’re a doomed species.

How else will we be able to someday mass travel through space to find another planet once we inevitably kill this one?

Yes

1. The amount of money spent on NASA is negligible compared to the MIC
2. Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor. The basis for your ability to securely do online banking is a quirky little number theory equation that was useless for centuries. Or think about the reactionary complaints about “they’re paying scientists to study cat urine” or whatever. Those studies typically have a practical reason for getting some and practical implications once they’re finished. Even the stuff that is practical looks impractical to the layperson. Space travel is very similar in that the technology it enables can have other uses.
3. Whoever figures out asteroid mining first is going to make a lot of fucking money

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.

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.