we have that alternatives: spend on Mars versus spend on war*.
NOT spend on Mars versus spend on "equality" or cure or something.

Also, money is just a tool to simplify exchange. Physicists/engineers is pretty much orthogonal to development of cure for cancer, and oncology researchers is pretty much orthogonal to automated space exploration. Everyone does his job.

*2Masters of the Obvious: i know that Mars is god of War.

[Edited by - Dmytry on December 5, 2004 10:25:38 AM]

Unfortunately, our world is still working based on principle of power. It seems like this is more important than starvation and other global problems. This will not change so easily for better as human is very greedy and egoistic being.

You are right, hunger for exploration is a great way how to reach some break-throughs. I just don't understand why so many financial sources go to gathering arms, instead of, say, exploring space, our planet, oceans etc. It appears as if we lived in a tense world, where you don't know from what side you can expect a rocket flying at you!

They go to arms because we let them, the government says "we need weapons and a military, because if we don't have one, someone else will come and attack us." and each government says that, the people shrug and so each government spends money on arms.

- ibutsu

Quote:Original post by Cibressus
space exploration is vital. feeding the hungry is good and everything, but i does'nt affect me at all. let the drowning drown.

I don't think this is a good aproach. This does not affect me so it does not matter. In my opinion, these are the issues which matter. These things affect everybody, directly or indirectly.

Quote:Original post by LessBread
It seems to me that we could spend more money on both space exploration and on finding a cure for cancer and on feeding the hungry, if we spent less money on fighting wars...

To me it rather seems that no additional money is required for feeding the hungry. There already is enough food for everybody. Just to keep prices stable we (I refer to the leading so called 'developed countries') are throwing away tons of food every day.
It is and always(?) has been a matter of proper distribution of food and goods and only very seldom a problem of availability.
Thus I don't think something needs to be cut down (apart from consume) in order to solve the hunger problem.

You see there are african and south american countries that export meat as dog food(!) to Europe and the USA. This is insane! It's also not easy to understand why people in Myanmar (formaly known as Burma) are rather cultivating opium poppy than rice (while opium poppy grows in the paltry mountain sides, the rice only grows in the malaria infested valleys, which keeps people from moving there...).

So in conclusion anybody who claims 'cut funds spent on military/space exploration/insert controversial area here' and rather feed the hungry' is just being polemic. These issues are very complex and there is no simple and general solution to this (at least not in our current political and economical system).

Just my 0.02€,
Pat.