I was going to comment on this idiocy from Patrick Stewart, but a) it wasn’t anything new–he’s been spouting the same nonsense for years, and b) Lileks already did so more than adequately (as usual).

It’s tough to top Lileks when it comes to screeds, and I’m not saying that T. L. James does it, but he’s definitely (as Marlon Brando would say) a “contendah“:

The obvious flaw in such an argument (or its best feature, if you’re the one making it) is that the perfection used as a standard here is impossible. To overcome the usually-cited social, economic, and other problems would require either orders of magnitude more money than is available — let alone what could be applied by diverting what pittance the government spends on space each year — or a complete overhaul of human nature to remove the innate flaws, behaviors, tendencies, instincts, or whatever it may be at their root.

Another only slightly less transparent flaw/feature is that no matter how many of the typically-cited problems an all-out spare-no-expense global effort might succeed in resolving, the people making the argument today would be undeterred from finding other victims who need saving or problems that need fixing before we can even think about going into space.

In that vein, I’d point out that Jonah Goldberg made a similar dumb commentary a couple weeks ago on CNN. Rather than saying that we had to wait until all social problems were solved on earth, and every puppy had a home and no child went hungry to bed, he said that we couldn’t afford to send people to Mars until we’d finished the “war on terror” (the one that he himself has said was misnamed, not being a fan of a war on a tactic). It seems that everyone, even Star Trek fans, thinks that every want on earth has a higher priority than moving us into the cosmos.

But as Thomas, and countless others, including myself, have pointed out, the amount of money spent on space is so trivial, so miniscule in the context of mankind’s other problems, and the ability to solve the space problem with money so much more amenable, compared to them, that the notion that we must wait for them to be solved before tackling that one is ludicrous. While I don’t think that money spent on NASA, per se, is well spent, the notion that we could somehow transfer the NASA budget to some other more worthy cause and somehow thereby solve it is, simply, equally ludicrous.

There are various classes of problems, and saying that we must wait to conquer space until we’ve solved all the ills, social and miltary, on earth is equivalent to saying that we shouldn’t have settled the Americas until we had indisputable peace and prosperity in Europe. Does anyone think that, under those conditions, there would be any significant population here?