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We certainly have derived benefits from space exploration by diverting resources away from problems on our own planet. It isn’t clear to me that the American public would abide any decision by the federal government to go as far as manned exploration of Mars. As far as China goes public opinion doesn’t matter.
Off topic warning:
This has been a debate since the 60s. Reminds me of this video. I think we had a topic about this in the history forum:
As for the US, yeah I think it's fair to say that with this new administration space exploration will slow down dramatically if even exist at all, sadly. So we will give China those two decades. Sadly because alot of our modern technology we use today is attributed to the space race. It will give China that high tech advantage.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the space plans of this admin, although they may take a small backseat. Jen Psaki said that space exploration is still on the table. NASA did delay its choices for a lander, but that will likely get resolved in the near future.
The bad thing? China isn't interested in science, mankind, exploration for the sake of knowledge. They don't care about an article in "National Geographic". They will be there to exploit - extracting minerals, gasses, whatever they can use.
That’s usually the case with government sponsored space programs unfortunately. Even the Apollo program was created to ensure American superiority at the time. Once it became clear that the Soviets couldn’t compete with that, the Nixon administration decided to focus elsewhere. This came as a disappointment to those expecting a manned mission to Mars by the late 70’s.
The Chinese wish to get there in order to show the world their resolve.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the space plans of this admin, although they may take a small backseat. Jen Psaki said that space exploration is still on the table. NASA did delay its choices for a lander, but that will likely get resolved in the near future.
That’s usually the case with government sponsored space programs unfortunately. Even the Apollo program was created to ensure American superiority at the time. Once it became clear that the Soviets couldn’t compete with that, the Nixon administration decided to focus elsewhere. This came as a disappointment to those expecting a manned mission to Mars by the late 70’s.
The Chinese wish to get there in order to show the world their resolve.
All good points! Psaki made some crack about the "space force" very early however. Let's see what happens.
So Mars is millions of miles from Earth. Does either the US or China have the financial or technological resources to mine or colonize a distant planet. And then there are those pesky problems on Mother Earth like pandemics, world hunger and climate change that must be addressed.
We definitely have the resources and technology to do so, but I doubt it's something that would be prioritized in the near future.
I will say though, part of space research and exploration is about pandemics, world hunger and climate change in multiple ways. The one that people gravitate towards is just sheer resource mining or population expansion into space in order to just have more of what it is we use on Earth. That's still a while away before economically reasonable.
However, the greater and often more immediate benefits are those derived from such research tackling complex engineering and science issues that may not seem to immediately relate to issues on Earth, but are. Climate change is maybe the one that most evidently and directly benefited from space research as it's that satellite view and complex instruments for atmospheric instruments and modeling that came out of space exploration programs, and that's something that has greatly informed our ability to understand the issue off climate change. Similar satellite data also helps with agricultural planning and for monitoring soil conditions, precipitation, drought, snow cover, etc. these advances were all derived from the rather minuscule amount of the federal budget spent on space exploration. It's also not just monitoring, but also potentially solutions like usable solar photovoltaic cells for generating electricity saw their initial large steps towards usefulness via space exploration programs and are now seen as a potentially important part of tackling climate change.
I think people often aren't taught about the process of how pure scientific and mathematic exploration and discovery and engineering for difficult problems often result in incredible advances that are realized later on and would not have been so easily reached without having that kind of pursuit lateral to the problems they end up solving. For example, fractals as a branch of mathematics was originally considered pretty abstract and a bit frivolous, but its ramifications for many things have been indispensable such as in efficient antenna designs which all of your modern wireless devices and much of the world's communication network makes much use of. Or another example is deep sea exploration where explorers found that there were extremophile bacteria that lived off of the deep sea thermal vents which were a great curiosity and interesting to know, but what's not so generally known is that discovery of those deep sea bacteria are what lead to the discovery heat-tolerant enzymes that are usable in the PCR process that we use both to identify things like the presence of the coronavirus in a blood sample and in the process of helping develop the caccine. Similarly, the list of NASA spinoffs in products and processes (processes especially, because these are components of creating an incredible variety of products and services in fields that range from the trivial toy to life-changing medical and agricultural advances) is absurdly long and so will that of trying to make a manned mission to Mars and establishing an outpost.
UAE just landed there in any case I prefer 100 times more Chinese colonization in the distant future who will spread communism and atheism rather than UAE or US who spread multiculturalism, religion, hate against eastern europe and just random culturally-marxist bs.
UAE just landed there in any case I prefer 100 times more Chinese colonization in the distant future who will spread communism and atheism rather than UAE or US who spread multiculturalism, religion, hate against eastern europe and just random culturally-marxist bs.
It won't work for the Chinese in the spread of communism and atheism- I heard Martians are steadfast capitalist and they worship Ray Walston as a God. On the other hand - give a Martian some good Polish Vodka and you have a friend for life.
^ Keyword "distant". It won't happen tomorrow but in 100 years I'd hope for future generations to live in a world dominated by Chinese culture and not UAE culture and Sharia law.
^ Keyword "distant". It won't happen tomorrow but in 100 years I'd hope for future generations to live in a world dominated by Chinese culture and not UAE culture and Sharia law.
I seriously thought you were joking, no problem with Chinese culture and no one want Sharia law but you seriously want to spread a failed outdated political system from a previous century? What's next, bring back feudalism?
If that's the way you feel, I got a tshirt I can sell you:
If communism is "outdated" then why is America so concerned with "outdated" China? If USSR was a self-proclaimed communist state, so is China, we can't pretend as if it's NK only.
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