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Philae has landed

bbc.com

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Re: Philae has landed

#171

Post by ameister14 »

innguest wrote: post #153
cmc31 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(stolen money should not be spent in more or less important things, it should be returned to their rightful owner so they can choose what to do with what they've earned) Just to be clear.. Your issue is not that money from taxes is spent on scientific research and space exploration, but really that you have to pay taxes?

My issue is, whoever wants to accomplish something that takes a lot of money to make happen, should do like ARKYD and make a kickstarter or any other peaceful alternative, that allows for every individual to choose whether they'd like to participate. My issue is that running to the government, just because it already has guns in place pointing to every individual's head in case they don't pay, and saying "we'll steal…

We live in a Republic, in the United States at least. As a result, you have elected certain people to represent you. Basically, you have given your proxy to someone. NASA, or any other organization, then goes to the person you've given your proxy vote to, and convinces them and leads by example, asking for money peacefully.

The person votes for it, and by extension YOU vote for it. Nobody's stealing anything; you voted to give it to them.

Re: Philae has landed

#172

Post by lentil_soup »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #127
throwit99 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health, welfare, lowering taxes, employment.... y'know, things that enrich real peoples lives. Space toys and exploration are fun for those working on them, but will this event transform civilisation? Nope. Did the moon landing really transform civilisation? Nope.

How do you know the moon landing didn't transform civilization? Did you try living in an alternate timeline where it did not happen and find things to be the same? What about all those scientists who learned to build rockets, who would later go on to help NASA launch the first weather satellites? What about the work done that led to the formation of the global positioning system? Are you sure it would have happened i…

WOW! the best answer by far in here, thanks for your comment it really proves all the benefits the ENTIRE human race gets from this (relative) small investment.

Re: Philae has landed

#173

Post by mikeash »

icebraining wrote: post #141
dwild wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does space exploration has the potential to transform civilization? Yeah it actually does. It represent funding in research, it represent dreams, it represent our future. It's also an amazing collaborative project between countries. Also let not forget that NASA only represent 0.5% of the US federal budget. Do you really want to lower your federal tax by 0.5%? Seriously? Please lower your entertainment budget, stop a…

I'm in favor of the space exploration spending, but your argument is terrible. (S)he could just as easily reply that if you believe that space exploration has so much potential to transform civilization, why don't you donate all your entertainment budget & etc to NASA?

He could easily reply with that, but it would be dumb. There are many causes I believe in strongly but I don't donate all my money to them because I don't have enough money to make a bit of difference to them. Big projects must be taken on collectively.

Re: Philae has landed

#174

Post by ajuc »

india_congrats wrote: post #44

Congratulations Europe. But why don't we hear people saying that the EU should focus on their poverty first and would be better off putting this money into getting the Greece, Spain, and Italy economies in order?

If people focused on poor in the past instead of science - peasants and slaves would be sligthly less abused, and slightly happier, but we would still use them.

Instead they focused on science and we don't need slaves nor peasants anymore.

Re: Philae has landed

#175

Post by icebraining »

dwild wrote: post #163
icebraining wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in favor of the space exploration spending, but your argument is terrible. (S)he could just as easily reply that if you believe that space exploration has so much potential to transform civilization, why don't you donate all your entertainment budget & etc to NASA?

He said that it wasn't worth it because it doesn't really transform civilization. That's his point. If it's the criteria to fund something, then how his expense can be worth it too? Why don't I donate all to NASA? Because I never said that it was worth our money more than something else that worth more than what my entertainment is worth. (Sorry if it a little hard to understands, english isn't my first language, I'm…

If it's the criteria to fund something

The point is that the criteria for the State/government doesn't have to be the same as the criteria for personal expenses.

Re: Philae has landed

#176

Post by mikeash »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #12

Amazing job! This might be a silly question but are their any ideas as to the actual real world benefits we could see from this? The director-general of the ESA said "This is a big step for human civilisation" so I presume there is some idea of what they expect to gain from this mission? Edit: Thanks for all the replies! I'm at work now but will take a look at them this evening.

In addition to all the other responses, there's one benefit I haven't seen mentioned yet. In the event that a comet is discovered on a collision course with Earth (an extremely low probability event, but one with enormously bad consequences) then knowing more about the structure and composition of comets would be essential to deflecting it.

Re: Philae has landed

#177

Post by yequalsx »

innguest wrote: post #135
kartikkumar wrote: post #53

Absolutely stunning feat of engineering. My bosses are on the drill team for Philae and were amongst the nervy faces being beamed all over the world. Great example of what European nations can do when politics don't get in the way. ExoMars [1] and Bepi-Colombo [2] are perfect examples of the inverse. Look forward to the first pictures from the surface. I'm at the Division on Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting [3] in Tu…

How can you people be so dishonest with yourselves and everyone else? Look at the fallacious arguments you put forward: - Nations have a long history of funding exploratory ventures. (appeal to tradition - doing something for a long time does not make it right to keep doing it) - it creates jobs (unseen consequences - it destroys more needed jobs that would have been created or maintained had this money been used by…

Few people agree that taxation is the same as theft. You appear to be someone who does have this view. That is fine but it is not a commonly held belief and generally is subject to derision and down voting. This should not come as a shock to you.

A very large percentage of people believe that having a functioning government is necessary and taxation is a necessary component for this. There are no examples of large populations of humans (many millions for the definition of large) living well without government. There are lots of examples of the reverse being true. That is, finding places where large populations live quite well with a government. Correlation not implying causation and all that, one can reasonably conclude that a functioning government, and hence taxation, is a necessity for large populations to live well.

There are lots of examples of functioning governments performing badly and subjecting large populations to miserable conditions. This means that people need to be vigilant with regard to the governance. It's good for people to question the decisions their governments make and people at the fringe can provide nice counter balances to group think and a herd mentality. Calling taxation theft might be a bit too extreme though.

Overall I think your view of each individual funding themselves only what they feel deserves funding is highly impractical and ignores human nature. Specifically it ignores the free rider problem. It also ignores that such a method is highly inefficient. Government is much more efficient than the solution you posed in another post of yours.

It is nice to fantasize about being like Daniel Boone and going it alone without need for government but in a nation of 350 million people that ability does not exist for any but a very few. The go it alone mentality does not scale well to large populations and have the net effect of making us all poorer.

Re: Philae has landed

#178

Post by CocaKoala »

throwit99 wrote: post #110
stellar678 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a nice long list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Do you really think that firstly, those technologies only exist because of NASA, and secondly that the cheapest way to innovate is to pick some arbitrary aim (Space exploration) and then spin off lots of innovation from it? You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers. edit: banned now, so I can't add any comments. It's really surprising jus…

> You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers.

That is an extraordinary claim that I'd like to see some evidence of. Having an end goal presents you with a number of problems to solve, which then give you an opportunity to innovate. Simply throwing money at somebody and asking them to come up with something doesn't seem like it would be nearly as productive as saying "We need to put a man in space and have him not die and then have him come back to earth and not crash" and then breaking that down into the smaller set of problems which need to be solved for that to happen.

Re: Philae has landed

#179

Post by Metapony »

india_congrats wrote: post #44

Congratulations Europe. But why don't we hear people saying that the EU should focus on their poverty first and would be better off putting this money into getting the Greece, Spain, and Italy economies in order?

I'm not european, but I imagine that the amount spent on this mission (which launched in 2004!) is miniscule compared to the amount that would be needed to fix a country's economy.

Re: Philae has landed

#180

Post by rybosome »

tedks wrote: post #123
rybosome wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nations have a long history of funding exploratory ventures. It is generally understood that the process is useful for a variety of reasons: it creates jobs, there is a small chance that something practical could be discovered, and most importantly it satisfies a basic human need to know more. With this mission in particular, we may be able to answer some very fundamental questions about the arrival of organic compou…

Hijacking the top comment in this subthread to make a meta-complaint: The comment-parents viewpoint is perfectly valid, but has been censored because of disagreement within the broader HN community. For all the talk about "free speech" that HN does when the topic is, say, not objectifying women, or making racial minorities feel included in tech, it certainly seems to perform an about-face when confronted with... obje…

I can't speak for everybody (and I didn't personally take any action against the comment in question), but I imagine the reaction was due to the tone of the message. HN is generally a community which tolerates unpopular opinions if they are presented thoughtfully; dismissing scientific research as "playing with toys" and failing to elucidate the reasoning behind a dissenting opinion does not meet that bar.
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