Found this cool post on reddit explaining why space exploration is important.
http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/jxgpw/so_what_is_so_good_about_space_exploration/c2fx31lTrue, but it's not happening at a rate where we need to immediately rush out humans to space and evacuate Earth to slow/stop stuff.
But my point still stands, we should continue on better priorities besides manning other planets like curing diseases and cancer, become more economically stable, help developing countries, solving world hunger, and advance more in technology like to develop more efficient fuel to even begin traveling farther than our moon because our usual chemical reactions using gasoline and rocket fuel are very hard to transport in space and the energy output won't get us far very fast.
1. saying "we need to cure cancer" is like saying "we need to cure disease". the goal of cancer research is prevention/detection.
2. NASA will create jobs and inspire children to enter STEM fields, which would help our economy, and could lead to technologies that help the earth in return.
3. in the process of researching how to get farther than the moon with a manned capsule, NASA will likely invent more efficient ways of getting to new places in space.
4. in the process of researching new missions in general, NASA will create technologies that benefit the earth as it has before.
Holy god no. I'm going to spare you all the massive explanation and paragraph and hope you can work it out for yourselves. Can you imagine if the American Military or Government got their hands on Orbital Bombardment technology? Or a technology that is completely out of reach for any other nation on Earth? You probably think NASA would only increase the amount of robots on Mars and put a man there in less time than already planned. Nope, there's a reason America has a military budget three times larger than the entire world's put together.
Increased funding for space exploration would be great ONLY if the entire planet put together some kind of coalition space agency and every state and country of Earth progressed at the same median rate as opposed to one single nation having too much power. Once again, there's a reason there are massive universal laws upon who can actually claim ownership of the moon and other celestial out-with earth objects.
The same awful scenario occurred when America was the only nation to have the atomic bomb in its possession. If the national socialist Regime was still in full swing by that time, it would have ended the entirety of WW2 - there's no question about it. Thank god Russia got its arse in gear and begun development of the same calibur.
Sorry to burst your bubble guys; humans are ass holes and there's no doubt that the technology that increased funding to NASA would open up new technologies that could be abused.
what the hell? if we already have private companies putting satellites above earth, there's no reason the USA can't just put an orbital death cannon up there now. it won't change anything; nuclear weapons still exist.
edit: besides, if humans are such starfishs, our goal should be getting off this planet, since it's bound to destroy itself by that logic.
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