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How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

reason.com

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Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#141

Post by celoyd »

astine wrote: post #106
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #38

This is about 25 years too late, but good. The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to get. This means the number one rule is don't make us look bad. You can't waste too much money, you can't go making a bunch of controversial statements, and good grief, whatever you do don't have astronauts getting exploded on…

"as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political" "War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz )

This passage bewildered me. It’s hard to think of a time when the US military wasn’t comparably involved in politicized missions: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit...

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are not particularly unusual, and I don’t think they represent a rising trend. That doesn’t mean they’re excusable or inevitable, and they may have important differences from past politicized wars. I’m not apologizing for them, I’m just saying they aren’t a new phenomenon.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#142

Post by Jach »

ansible wrote: post #135
_dps wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale? I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit. So I think the only real options are: 1) do some low ROI…

I think we're looking at option 3. With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can send up AI…

While I agree that 3 is the most optimal solution in the sense that "all these other problems are solved given 3", we still don't have a firm time frame on it. It could be 1 year, it could be 50 years. (I wouldn't put it at 100 or above personally, barring global catastrophe.) So we do things in parallel and hedge our bets. Could we get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (or Mars, or somewhere else) within 50 years if we tried? I think we could. And that instantly protects modern humanity from many existential threats while we continue to work on problem #3.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#143

Post by rdl »

_dps wrote: post #89
VMG wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this. Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.

I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale? I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit. So I think the only real options are: 1) do some low ROI…

It's a waste of tax money, but there are clearly a lot of rich people who would pay for private space tourism.

Going for #3, combined with LEO manned spaceflight on a commercial basis, and then maybe a Mars or Lunar mission privately financed, would be fine with me, even if the same money in government would be more productively spent on aid to the poor or lowering taxes. Let the government spend money on purely scientific missions (with robots or telescopes), and maybe on establishing regulatory frameworks and contracts for specific amounts of space freight to cover government missions.

(If things keep going well technologically, we could have a Mars Direct mission for about 2x the cost of a series of movies about a Mars mission... at that point, it actually becomes worthwhile for private financiers to do it for the media rights.)

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#144

Post by tlrobinson »

oconnore wrote: post #84
heliodor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree there. Once upon a time, the sea was seen as dangerous. Everything can be made "safe" at some point.

Every year there are between 600 and 700 recorded deaths from recreational boating alone (not counting industrial or military accidents) [1]. No matter how safe we make it, there will always be accidents, and those accidents will kill people. [1] http://www.uscgboating.org/statistics/accident_statistics.as...

Nothing is perfectly safe, but if you could make space travel as safe as boating then I'd say heliodor was correct.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#145

Post by yummyfajitas »

tobylane wrote: post #133
VMG wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this. Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.

It made 14x as much for the US economy (including inspiring American children, excluding inspiring other children/nations). Can that sort of success ever be considered a waste over a long enough timeframe?

Over the short term, that's a great success. But over the long term (e.g., 50 years), it's only a 5.4% return. The S&P or DJIA, for example, had 7% returns over the same timeframe.

(Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#146

Post by redthrowaway »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #108
pemulis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total wealth of the Assad regime and their associates is in the hundreds of billions. You would have to pay them several trillion dollars at a minimum, though I doubt even that would be enough to convince them to leave.

I don't know - you don't necessarily have to compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth; you just need to be able to compete with the expectations of their wealth after you roll in your tanks and attempt to crush them. This is presumably a lower value, iff you have a credible threat to actually go in there and crush them with your tanks (which takes military expertise, expenditure, and the political w…

This is what I'm getting at. If the US wanted to remove Assad, he wouldn't have much of a choice: a life of luxury in exile, or death. I disagree, however, that it would require tanks. They could do the same as they did in Libya, which is far more justifiable and politically expedient. The dissidents in Syria are gearing up for war[1], so the ever-problematic boots on the ground would be unnecessary.

The US would only have to make Assad think it was serious about another Libya in order to give him some serious misgivings. Get NATO to make some rumblings, which would encourage Chavez to issue one of his proclamations against American Imperialism, then make a backroom deal to get Assad out.

At the end of the day, the Bush Doctrine of democracy-at-swordpoint is simply ineffective. There exists, however, the very real possibility of using soft/"firm" power to encourage the outcomes you want.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21543538

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#148

Post by Nick_C »

tokenadult wrote: post #2

This article ended up being more interesting than I expected. Particularly noteworthy is the point that if a program sets an unusually high value on human life, it diverts resources from other programs also intended to protect human life, and thus brings about LESSENED protection of human life through that drain on resources. This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "Th…

Yes. The "statistical murder" is a real phenomenon in ordinary life.

A decade or so ago Australia had a tightly regulated domestic air travel industry. Lobbyists successfully argued for deregulation so that air travel prices would come down, enabling more people to travel by the much-safer aeroplane than by risky road travel. It worked too.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#149

Post by pemulis »

huxley wrote: post #112
pemulis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total wealth of the Assad regime and their associates is in the hundreds of billions. You would have to pay them several trillion dollars at a minimum, though I doubt even that would be enough to convince them to leave.

Citation needed, sounds a bit tinfoily. Not that I agree with the idea of paying off people, but Syria's total GDP is only about US$60 billion, hard to imagine that it would take "trillions".

I was going off of a quick Google search of Bashar al-Assad's personal wealth, which led to an MSN article putting it at $112 billion (http://money.ca.msn.com/savings-debt/gallery/dictators-and-t...). Since huge chunks of the economy are controlled by the Assad family and close associates, and have been for decades, I figured that it would be reasonable to assume they had accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars by now.

Re: How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?

#150

Post by arunbahl »

tobylane wrote: post #133
VMG wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this. Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.

It made 14x as much for the US economy (including inspiring American children, excluding inspiring other children/nations). Can that sort of success ever be considered a waste over a long enough timeframe?

I think the inspiration point is a great one, if difficult to quantify. The American space program fostered a scientific literacy and pop-culture faith in the pursuit of engineering for surmounting important problems. And despite being a national program in a Cold War context, the success of the Apollo missions was bigger in scope than the US - it was a victory for all humans. We'd do well to cultivate these attitudes again.
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