Why has no Human Been Sent To Mars?

Originally posted by BlackJackal
Bottom line is that Space Exploration is a neccessity not an expendable budget line item.

It is an expendable budget item. I agree Velcro was a spinoff of the space race, and I like Velcro. I disagree that there will always necessarily be terrorism. That's a cop out. Same with famine. Somehow you are not intimidated by the challenges of space travel, but give up trying control population growth, unemployment, and children dying of malnutrition.

Originally posted by Aelita
It is an expendable budget item. I agree Velcro was a spinoff of the space race, and I like Velcro. I disagree that there will always necessarily be terrorism. That's a cop out. Same with famine. Somehow you are not intimidated by the challenges of space travel, but give up trying control population growth, unemployment, and children dying of malnutrition.

No I am not intimidated by the challenges of Space travel. I understand completely that the cost of human space travel could be high because you cannot make space travel fool proof. I understand that it is difficult but I also understand that anything worth having is difficult and costly to obtain.

You are entitled to your opinion and I respect that however I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Population growth could be helped by colonizsation of other worlds. A booming space age would create new jobs. Malnutrition, who knows a new food source may be discovered on distant worlds.

With all this said I would like to hear your solutions to the problems you have posed. How should we solve population growth without colonization among the others. Also in your eyes when is space travel acceptable.

Originally posted by BlackJackal

You are entitled to your opinion and I respect that however I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Population growth could be helped by colonizsation of other worlds. A booming space age would create new jobs. Malnutrition, who knows a new food source may be discovered on distant worlds.

With all this said I would like to hear your solutions to the problems you have posed. How should we solve population growth without colonization among the others. Also in your eyes when is space travel acceptable.

Population growth is a potentially exponential process that cannot be helped by colonizing planets (which in foreseebla future is limited to a handful in the solar system, and even then it'll probably grow linearly, not exponentially).

We should work to promote planned parenthood and develop new sources of nutrition -- microbial protein, for example, which can also help recycle organics. The pollution can be mitigated by invseting more in renewable energy sources. Dependence on oil is devil. There is an unlimited number of very interested scientific and technological challenges to be solved.

There are still miriad of dangerous deseases that need to be understood. Even things as trivial as obesity and diabetes are killing scores of Americans every day. That's not ok in my book, as this is completely preventable.

After there are few cases of famine and desease (meaning comparable to the rate of death by natural causes), and children get enough to eat, then we can think about stars.

Thank you for you frankness.

However I disagree because if 100 years from now we almost have these things under control and are impacted by a giant space projectile. Everything we did was in vain.

Good argument Aelita and BlackJackel.

I agree and disagree with both your points.

We shouldn't wait to go to space while we work hard to cure diseases and famine.

But we also shouldn't pour rediculous amounts of money now, to get into space, We NEED a better way to get to space then rockets, for now they are are only method of getting into space.

So lets just hit 2 birds with 1 stone.
Go to the moon and build a scientific base, learn more amout our moon and study its compositions and maybe build a telescope on it and maybe even large "fields" of solar panels that can be beamed down to earth for power consumption, and learn more about health and science and develop cures on the moon, or the space station sinse theres no gravity.