If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
For example, if the goverment want research into a "item"
If it is taken through a military research institute, eg every researcher/developer etc is paid by the military, 1 their surly would be less overheads, 2 the military would not want to make a profit on it,
if it is taken to a private research and development company, yes they may drive the prices of what it costs them down, but not how much they would charge the goverment, surly they would raise this to make more money or GP
Anyway, I think Kat's point is that we do have technology coming out of space race (and it's the "race" that's important there) or from warfare. Both politically important.
However, what technology could have been invented without the money going to those two aspects.
In otherwise, try to imagine what we don't have.... but might have.
Is that correct Kat?
looking at a hypothetical path of technology had funds in the past been diverted, was more a defensive strategy to back up my main argument against counters of all the wonderful technology that has come out of space race as argument for it continuing.
Happy debating, I'm off to the pub!
It could be. It could also be a technology issue. it could be that the details of the concept also massively differ from the working product. But yes, I'd say something is invented when it works. Otherwise George Lucas invented a great fuck off moon which can destroy planets...
What do you mean, Star Wars is based on true events? no?
I can understand where Katralla is coming from, but then again talking about how money could've been spent in the past has infinite possibilities, if you believe the whole every choice you make, makes another parralel dimension doing the opersite decision etc.
The research is done at unis and Ratheon and Boing etc etc.
It's all done by private companies.
The germ of the idea for the internet may well have been military but it's development and the speed of that development wasn't.
Anyway ...I'm more concerned with America being that broke that they have to drop out of the space race.
I don't agree with MOK that hitch hiking to space on Russian craft is a good sign of them working together any more than they already were re the space station.
To me it is all a sign of a rapidly changing world.
For all the moaning we do ...me especially ...about the system we live in ...it aint looking good that science research manufacture and consumption is so rapidly going elsewhere and we can't compete.
Music art theater etc etc will follow.
Me neither...
Really, ERDC and US army Research Laboritory might have something different to say about that, admitedly they work with universities but a lot of the research is done outwith the uni's
I was going to say, wasn't it myself that said that?
I don't believe the working together is the reason, yes it seems the USA is in a financial crisis, the same as a lot of people so they cut the programme for the moment, however I will say it shows Russia and USA can/will work with each other.
WTF?
Have you even seen that documentary? The clue is in the start...
"A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far Far Away".
It already exists. He didn't invent it, or even come up with the idea. He just reported on it...
:thumb:
Constellation was on the other hand a pretty strange proposal from a technological stand point, it was a return to the moon that could have provided scientific discoveries and research but from a technological stand point I don't see how anything being considered involved new breakthroughs.
The plan was a pretty ill-concived proposal expanding on Bush Snr's stagnating and long ignored Mars proposals, at least as far as I can see. The technology was little more than a combination of Apollo age rocket flight and some of what was learnt from the increasingly fragmented and nationally divided developments on the ISS.
So I don't really think this specific programme would have added anything to our knowledge in the end, it'd be like suggesting that creating a system of interconnected computers would change the world - it's already been done.
It may have refined the process, but it's hardly changing anything in my eyes. Just because war or space exploration did benefit science in significant ways doesn't mean the same thing will automatically happen again. Surely you've got to judge everything, seriously, on its merits - not just throw money at an aging element of the industrial complex that's already been replaced by cheaper alternatives in other countries.
Just as the same with current military spending (which by the way vastly dwarfs NASA spending - 17.3 billion dollars to 680 billion dollars) most of the money isn't been spent exploring something unknown and new. It's been spent mainly to maintain and support what's already there.
NASA had to be created from scratch, building on test pilots and sound barrier breaking runs, it had to send men into places they'd never been before in the history of humanity. They had to learn how to handle problems no one had ever considered. That isn't what this programme was in my eyes.
I think the benefits talked about here are about exploring the vast unknown, about finding new ways to deal with vast almost impossible problems. That dream doesn't have to be war or space travel. War unites, the space race united, but that doesn't have to be all that can.
You know what current spending is on fusion research - as far as I can tell about 750 million euros a year, you can't even easily see anything about US spending.
In the words of Kennedy -
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "
Let's look to do the others
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qn37q/The_Virtual_Revolution_The_Great_Levelling/
Fine words but ...politicians words.
Historians I think are now agreed that it was because Russia was freaking the crap out of them with huge rockets ...lots of them.
The power and technology dwarfed what America had.
This kind of technology meant that Russia were streets ahead with inter continental ballistiic missiles as well as ahead in the space game.
America desperately need better rockets which were going to cost an arm and a leg.
Developing those rockets in the name of space explorationand going to the moon had massive public backing no matter what the cost.
The real race was in rocket power.
:yes:
Which kind of underlines my point about political will rather than technology for the sake of humanity. The by-product (as others have said) benefitted mankind but the motivation was two fold - military and exploration.
My only disagreement with that is it doesn't have to be this way.
Talking as if this was a natural law such as gravity is daft.
As humans we have choices ...we seem to make bad ones often.
When I say we I'm always inclined to think they.
But it is that way.
Good luck trying to change it