That's like saying world wars are beneficial to humanity because a bunch of shit gets invented to fight wars. No. Wars and so far space travel has done nothing for humanity. If you would have instead focused on inventing the inventions that came with fighting wars instead of fighting wars we still would have the inventions but would have been much more efficient.
Not really. That's not how the world works. Otherwise we'd have jumped from stone age straight to nuclear energy.
The way this works: space exploration presents a set of compelling engineering challenges that extend our capabilities. People solve those challenges, and then other people find more mundane uses for resulting solution. But without the initial compelling challenge, those inventions would likely either took much longer, or would not have been made at all, because ones on the market were good enough.
And that's just talking about trickle-down benefits. Then there's the whole lot of direct benefits from satellites - from the most obvious, like navigation and communication, to the less obvious, like weather monitoring, agriculture management, emergency response, national security, climate science, etc.
slaydemons|8 years ago
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
The way this works: space exploration presents a set of compelling engineering challenges that extend our capabilities. People solve those challenges, and then other people find more mundane uses for resulting solution. But without the initial compelling challenge, those inventions would likely either took much longer, or would not have been made at all, because ones on the market were good enough.
And that's just talking about trickle-down benefits. Then there's the whole lot of direct benefits from satellites - from the most obvious, like navigation and communication, to the less obvious, like weather monitoring, agriculture management, emergency response, national security, climate science, etc.