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?

Once again, i must quote what Paul Blay posted over at s.s.p:

"Hey Jo!"

"Yes, Fred?"

"I've discovered the cure for cancer!"

"Well, Gee. That's nice an'all - just a pity that an asteroid the size of Australia is
about to hit Earth."

"Oh. So you saw it first then."

"Ludicrous" is the perfect word. It is simply amazing that people have no sense of perspective. Even the most inflated figures for costs are insignificant compared to the resources that are waiting for us. Looking back, the arguments against human colonization are going to look so silly that they will be ever forgotten except for the occasional reminder that some person once said that the Earth is all we will ever need.

Woes to the legacy of that person!

Hear-hear. Those who decry space exploration always trot out the "it would be better to spend X on eliminting poverty and injustice and cheating boyfriends/etc than on space projects" line. As you rightly say, to suspend exploration of space until an infinite number of issues are cleared up means, in effect, to kill space exploration entirely.

Man would never have walked from the caves had we followed the sort of stringent test required by the space naysayers. By all means let us guard against foolish projects and waste. But space exploration is not just a good thing, it may also, particularly given the way things are going, be a crucial exit route if the earth is ever seriously threatened.

I guess Captain Picard is so glad Zephram Cochrane waited untill mankind achieved perfection before developing warp drive. Wait a minuite, he developed it a few years after a nucler exchange during WWIII if I remember trek lore correctly? By that reasoning, Patric Stewart should give his earnings from ST:First Contact to the poor and hungry so as not to give the wrong impression as one of a hypocritical Scotsman(Frenchman).

Every year billions of dollars are pissed away on froufrou "entertainment" like movies and TV shows while millions go hungry. We should shut down the entertainment industry and spend the money on feeding the starving millions. It's the humane thing to do.

The people who demand the entire budget so that social problems can be solved (as if they were an engineering problem) have had 30 years to demonstrate that their approach has some merit. They've failed.

That people like Marshall keep trotting them out is just another example of the intellectual bankrupcy of the reactionary Left.

To expound on Mike's comments, according to "Trek Lore", it took a Third World War (which detroyed almost all major cities) as well as "first contact" with an alien species, to even START to bring about social change on the order of what these critics talk about. And even then, according to the story line, it took the production of a space craft that could break the "warp barrier" to attract the alien species in the first place. The new "Enterprise" series runs with the story that all of the "vast social change" that is discussed in the Original Series and TNG took hundreds of years to come about once we learned that we were "not alone" in the universe.

Either way, as has been mentioned, with the relative pittance that is spent on space now, can it hurt to try and make some advances that might some day bring about the kind of change that these people are looking for?

Yes, getting hit by an asteroid kinda renders everything else moot, wouldn't it? Lucifer's Hammer should be required reading in the public schools.

Does anyone think that, under those conditions, there would be any significant population here?

Maybe, maybe not. Who knows what the natives might have accomplished if they'd been left alone for 500 years? Besides, even if there were no significant population here today, would that necessarily be a bad thing?

I'm not arguing against the larger point (I agree that going into space is a good thing), just trying to point out that the settlement of the Americas analogy may not make the most effective argument.

Founding of the Americas works fine, Ron. Just substitute "Siberia" for "Europe"...

I'll add, since Rand was too polite to do so, that old farts like us have been around long enough to see just how far the goalposts have been moved in the past 35 years.

An American family living at the poverty line today is noticeably better off than one at the median income during the Apollo era. Better fed, better clothed, better housed, better personal transportation, far better personal telecommunication, and in possession of conveniences, including access to medical care, hardly imaginable in the 1960s.

At the poverty line. If we could grab one of the predecessors of these social parasites, the ones bitching about the cost of Apollo in 1969, and show them, not the cutting-edge technology, but the ubiquitous technology of 2004 -- typical of any lower-middle-class household -- they'd think we'd achieved Utopia.

They'd think our problems had either been wiped out or were so near to complete solution as to be entirely unthreatened by "spending money in space." And they'd give space development a blank check.

But that's just the point--these people wish that Western expansion had never happened either. They won't be satisfied with the state of human progress on earth until it has rolled back to zero--i.e, the complete and utter annhilation of civilization.

Well I feel like EVERYONE missed the obvious here!! Who would have reported anything said about the production elements or the acting done in a Shakespearean play if the reviewer was Neil Armstrong or Jim Lovell. Why nobody that's who, because Misters Armstrong and Lovell are no more qualified theater critics, than Mr Stewart is a qualified NASA or space critic.

Mr Stewart gets to air his opinion, quite simply, because he WAS Captain Piccard, and actors say the public confuses them with the characters they play. It seems Mr Stewart has a problem seperating his fact from his fiction.

There's also the issue that although NASA doesn't necessarily spend its dollars on space exploration as well as we'd like, (and most of us have ideas on how to improve that, some of which might even work), transferring those dollars to, say, Department of Education to improve the education of children is probably even less likely to result in achieving the supposed aim of the expenditure.

Stewart has demonstrated precisely why I always thought Kirk was a better starship Captain. :)

What's sad is that this argument, along with the "Moon versus Mars" argument and the "Robot versus Man" argument go back as far as I can remember. Here?s a few more arguments on this issue:

o It is dangerous to leave all your eggs in one basket. The universe could have a surprise for us, and technological developments could lead to things more dangerous than nuclear bombs.

o We may be living on borrowed time ? we can?t assume that moving into space can just be put off for a few decades for our kids to do it. Something could happen that would close the door forever.

o New technologies and new science can help people on earth. We don?t know how to make a really good closed cycle life support system. We?ll need that to live in space permanently. Ecological engineering (designing ecologies) is likely to become an important profession in space ? and on earth. Also, the need to move faster or cheaper in space will push research on fusion reactors and superstrong materials. There?s many more bits along these lines. As for science ? it is hard to learn new science when you don?t bother to look (and let?s not forget that this is one of the key purposes of the fictional Enterprise.)

o Resources ? energy can be beamed down to earth. Materials can be mined from asteroids and be used to create things in orbital factories that cannot be made on earth.

o New ways of thinking, new kinds of societies, open frontiers. Existing societies tend to get more and more bureaucratic . Space gives us a chance to try new things. Most people on earth think essentially two dimensionally and barely understand there is a vast universe out there. Just knowing there is a frontier could be a wonderful psychological boost.

VR: are you saying such arguments are as cliched and threadbare as the "wait until we're perfect" argument and its siblings? Or are you suggesting these themes be promoted more vigorously to counter the anti-space exploration critcisms?

Ortega wrote:
> The people who demand the entire budget so that
> social problems can be solved (as if they were
> an engineering problem) have had 30 years to
> demonstrate that their approach has some merit.
> They've failed.

Manifold says:
> An American family living at the poverty line
> today is noticeably better off than one at the
> median income during the Apollo era. Better
> fed, better clothed, better housed, better
> personal transportation, far better personal
> telecommunication, and in possession of
> conveniences, including access to medical care,
> hardly imaginable in the 1960s.

Raul -- if America's poor indeed are better off today than they were in the 1960s, how can you say Medicaid/Medicare etc. has been a "failure?"
---
Besides, would you argue that government funded manned space exploration (Shuttle, Space Station) has been a success? If so, why?

MARCU$

if America's poor indeed are better off today than they were in the 1960s, how can you say Medicaid/Medicare etc. has been a "failure?"

Because they had nothing to do with it. It's been the advancing standard of living that has achieved this -- "a rising tide lifts all boats."

>> if America's poor indeed are better off today
>> than they were in the 1960s, how can you say
>> Medicaid/Medicare etc. has been a "failure?"

> Because they had nothing to do with it.

Okay, so we have poor, sick and unemployed people receiving foodstamps, housing, clothing etc.. Where do they get it from, if not from social programs?

> It's
> been the advancing standard of living that has
> achieved this -- "a rising tide lifts all
> boats."

I don't dispute the fact that advancing standard of living is a major factor both in the U.S. as well as over here in Western Europe -- but you can't totally dismiss the role played by the state in all of this.

MARCU$

They get it from social programs, but that's not relevant--even if they didn't, Jay's point would remain valid. Poor people in 2004 would still live better than middle-class people from earlier eras.

There's yet another error in Patrick Stewart's rationale.

Stewart: "[Space exploration] would take up so many resources, which I personally feel should be directed at our own planet."

Lileks: "Making movies takes up many resources which could be directed at our own planet."

James Lileks is comparing apples and oranges - a government program with, ahem, free enterprise. This reveals Stewart's ultimate error: his assumption that space travel will always remain a government program, that commercial space industry beyond a handful of satellite applications cannot be achieved.

In one sense, filmmaking is not frivolous; it expands economic activity, thus expanding the world's supply of jobs and wealth. Government space programs do the opposite; they remove funds from private commerce to be spent on space endeavors that earn no income. No wonder Stewart thinks that way - Star Trek follows the latter blueprint.