I feel that going into space is a wasteful and fruitless concept.

I agree.

PhD here. I fully agree.

>inb4 sci fi escapist children with no education whatsoever start to spam straw man insults

>>6563291
Resources on this planet will be eventually spent / fucked up by the inevitable nuclear war ; where do you propose we search for resources , what do you propose we do when they run out ?
>inb4 ">>>/x/"

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>>6563291
I feel that going over seas is a wasteful and fruitless concept. There is no way we could gain anything with exception of them minerals on other continents (which even then it would be nearly impossible). Intercontinental travel isn't likely, and at no point will humans all band together to make some sort of "naval empire". I don't see the use of ocean voyages aside from researching fish and other things.

Discuss, gentlemen.

>>6563301
PhD here. I fully agree
>inb4 scifi escapist children with no education whatsoever start to spam straw man insults

>>6563301

damn, right on the spot
OP and OP fags forgetting about history or not knowing it at all

>>6563304
>>6563303
>>6563301
This kind of bullshit is exactly what I predicted in >>6563295.

The situation in sea travel was entirely different from space travel. Your combined ignorance of history, geography, economics, astronomy and critical thinking disgusts me.

1. Sea ships are and were always significantly cheaper than space shuttles. A mission costed almost nothing and the resources weren't wasted because the ship was not driven by expensive fuels and it returned someday. Literally the only costs were food for the sailors.
2. Back then in the times of oversea exploration we didn't know the geography over there. There was a lot of previously unknown land to explore. In space travel however we know exactly where we can realistically go. Thanks to astronomy we know our solar system pretty well already and using the laws of physics we can accurately estimate how fast we could travel and how far. The conclusion is that it's not worth it. Within our reach there is not much interesting to find in space.

We already wasted enough money on the race to the moon which was effectively pretty useless except for propaganda purposes. Nobody is gonna pay for even more fruitless endeavours. Deal with it, sci fi kids. Welcome to reality. I hope one day you'll grow up, lay down that escapism nonsense and embrace some real science.

>>6563296
>resources will eventually be used up
>better waste more of them to realize fruitless escapist fantasies

You're a fucking genius.

>>6563296
There are enough resources to ensure survival within this generation's lifetime. Everything happening after our death we don't need to care about.

>Let's all commit mass suicide guise, living is boring anyway

Is essentially what you're saying. We are going to run out of resources on earth at one point, or at least a lot of people will die because of the lack of them. We continue living because we might as well, there's no reason for us to be alive, so we may as well commit suicide, but we don't we carry on, going into space would allow us to carry on, unlimited (for all we know) resources provided we can get to and acquire them. Staying on earth is essentially suicide, so why don't you just take the short route and end it all now.

>>6563337
Even without the resources point, earth will be uninhabitable at one point regardless, and it will be swallowed by our sun.

>>6563323
>"It can't be done now so that means it will never happen" Nobody mentioned anything about it happening in this lifetime
>"We know where everything is already so that defeats the purpose of visiting"
uhm okay

>>6563323
you're just assuming we can't evermake it cheap enough so it's worth it, of course it's expensive now but we're working on it, same as Lord Kelvin claiming that we wouldn't ever make airplanes because it's too expensive and too clumsy and too inefficient because steam was the shit back then and he was right, up until somebody invented the combustion engine and suddenly it's worth it.

what if we build a space elevator and then we can have space travel just as we used to have sea ports, no re-entry needed, crafts aren't destroyed after one trip etc. etc.
the crafts themselves aren't super expensive since we don't need to launch them into orbit with a giant rocket anymore and when we start building factories out in space to build more things without needing to haul it off the earth to use it we'll probably end up making profit of it.

> There is no way we could gain anything

i want to interject with the fact that a whole slew of different tech we use today was made possible because of the space-race.

there is a massive cognitive dissonance between the cost of the space programs and the "intended" results. just because we didn't get what we expected we cannot dismiss what it brought us. also the in the entire history of NASA the most they have ever got out of federal funding is a whopping 4.41% and that was in '66, now it's closer to 0.5%. we've spent more running the military in a single year than we have spent on NASA in it's entirety.

>>6563323
spoken like a true gentleman, only with more harshness.

>>6563331
what about our kidz
>>6563329
That's such a constructive argument , moar plz ;

>>6563340
It is more of a problem that within our current reach, there is not much useful to go out there and get. Eventually, asteroid mining might be a truly profitable venture, but the first mining interest to get the right combination of asteroids in orbit will crash the market for everyone else and make such efforts no longer economically viable. Without revolutionary improvements in space habitats and self-enclosed habitats, there is no hope for space colonization in the conceivable future.

Continental colonization and space colonization are radically different. In the first I can cross the ocean and cut down trees to make my house and hunt for food. Space colonization requires me to bring everything with me to a very hostile environment as there is no means of easily acquiring food, water, air, or building materials at the destination.

Actually Nasa plans on mining the moon for something more valuable than them minerals. There's something called helium 3 that comes from the sun. We don't get it on earth because we are protected, but the moon's surface is covered in it. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but you heat that stuff up and you got mass energy. -So there's mass energy in space aside from them minerals

>>6563354
I do think that asteroid mining will be the first reasonable venture into space
>Without revolutionary improvements in space habitats and self-enclosed habitats, there is no hope for space colonization in the conceivable future.
yeah but you can only get those revolutionary improvements through practice


There are enough resources on this planet to last for this generation, so *we* don't give a shit about space travel. But one day there won't be and those scientists will be thinking of ways to get the fuck out of here

>>6563296
>Resources on this planet will be eventually spent / fucked up by the inevitable nuclear war ; where do you propose we search for resources , what do you propose we do when they run out ?

You reduce population, idiot. By war and starvation and overall neglect. This is by far the cheaper option, and is in fact the option that's chosen EVERY TIME by our nasty race of violent simian bastards.

>>6563291
a few weeks ago I saw Mars out of my window
at first I didn't know what it was - it was small, but not a tiny point like a star, it was bigger than that; a tiny orange circle, just hanging there

it's hard to explain what i was thinking but it was something like 'oh look, Mars is just over there'

i usually think about space as something which is up and away from me, out of reach somehow
but this was really different, I could see Mars right there, in front of me, I could wave at a Martian from where I was sitting

and I was aware that the sun was illuminating mars and not me, because it was behind Earth, I could feel it there suddenly

it was a bit like the thing where from some coastlines on a clear day you can see the coastline opposite, and it suddenly feels much closer, the world feels smaller

anyway I think of space differently now

>>6563323
>1. Sea ships are and were always significantly cheaper than space shuttles. A mission costed almost nothing and the resources weren't wasted because the ship was not driven by expensive fuels and it returned someday. Literally the only costs were food for the sailors.
This is wrong on so many levels i don't even know where to start.

>>6563373
>yeah but you can only get those revolutionary improvements through practice
I am not advocating stopping space exploration, but it is unlikely for there to be any substantial colonization efforts within our lifetime. I add the caveat of "without revolutionary changes" as the continued work will lead to gradual improvement and it should eventually be workable, but not within the foreseeable future unless someone comes along and spontaneously develops a nearly perfect enclosed, self-sustaining environment.

>There are enough resources on this planet to last for this generation
Depends upon the resource. Helium reserves are rapidly being depleted and no existing viable method of making more, we may need to go elsewhere to get the helium required for a wide range of scientific, medical and industrial applications.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEQrmDoIRO8

those who think space is a waste of time clearly has no idea what's up there

>hur satalites are a waste of time
> micro gravity research is a waste of time

the massive amount of resources contained in one good asteroid is enough to pay for the the entire initial investment


http://science.howstuffworks.com/asteroid-mining1.htm
>"One of these asteroids, according to Lewis, would contain 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of metal cobalt and 7,500 tons of platinum. The platinum alone would have a value of more than $150 billion."

>>6563291
>"I feel"
bait

>>6563547

>the massive amount of resources contained in one good asteroid is enough to pay for the the entire initial investment

the exorbitant high cost of the initial investment assures that it will never occur, nor is competency of spending that initial investment to actually attain the objective an assurance.

your assumption also rests on the presumption that it is physically possible to construct a perfect system to deliver them to market which is also unproven.

>>6563323
Well then I hope you can stop an asteroid the size of the moon. Or better yet, stop the moon when some terrorist group manages to take control of it and bring it hurtling towards the earth, where we all reside unless we spread humanity elsewhere.

>>6563291
>I feel that going into space is a wasteful and fruitless concept
He says while posting on a computer networked with other computers based on simple protocols developed as a result of a Space Race.
>There is no way we could gain anything with exception of them minerals in the spaces
He says while sitting with a cell phone in his pocket that is linked to communication satellites orbiting the earth.

Nearly everything in your life has benefited directly from space travel. There are the specific (overused) examples like Tang, cell phones, and velcro, of course, but have you ever stopped to think how satellites have benefited logistics and shipping? Everything you own or eat was most likely on a ship, truck, plane, or train at some point. All of those things use satellite networks to move products from point A to point B more efficiently and more cheaply. Space exploration has done nothing but benefit us on Earth.

>>6563323
>costed

Explain to me why I should disregard this entire post.

>>6563366

NASA has no such plans, it has public relations fluff on a variety of topics that percolate through the newsosphere.

the problem with mining H3 is that there are no fusion reactors that use it in operation or in the planing stages of coming online, nor are such reactors assured to be positively functional and superior to competitive power generation concepts, nor are the costs of moon mining known or is there any entity on earth with any likely prospect of attempting to mine the moon for the stuff. the earth's grid is completely non-aligned to make use for it.

>>6563587

The things you mention, satellites, computers(misattribution to space), are DONE. They now exist on continuities that are independent of "space exploration".

>>6563604
Success is not and never has been a reason to stop. It is only a reason to continue.

>>6563609

Go read a book of inspirational quotes, you'll find more worthless feel good pablum there.

>>6563612
>can't think of a good counterargument
>"go read a book"
lel

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>>6563291

What's the point of building these "flying machines" anyway? Everyone knows that objects heavier than air cannot fly.

>at no point will humans all band together to make some sort of "space empire"

Why would banding together be needed? Did USA rise into superpower by co-operative effort of 15th century powers?

>>6563638

Some things are not worth doing. Not everything is airplanes.

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>>6563577
>the exorbitant high cost of the initial investment
The problem with your side of the argument is, as always, that you're looking at past launch prices as examples of how expensive it is and always will be to launch stuff into space. There's a common misconception that it's the energy costs that make it expensive, which isn't true at all.

See, we got started with missiles. So our space technology is based on throwaway missiles. That's what makes it expensive: very high performance, sophisticated vehicles, made of costly materials to exacting specifications, being used once and then thrown away.

Rockets necessarily have to be big tanks of propellant. But most of the mass of that propellant is cheap liquid oxygen -- basically just chilled air. So the energy cost is not so terribly high. It's actually not that much worse than intercontinental flight.

When the launch vehicle is efficiently reusable, cost of launching to orbit can be mere dollars per kilogram, rather than thousands of dollars per kilogram. Once you're in orbit, a lot of other options become possible, which allow you to move mass with a minimum of propellant brought from Earth. Once you establish propellant production on the moon, or with a captured asteroid in Earth orbit, it can be brought to orbiting gas stations.

It's not going to be ruinously expensive to build a real space industry. It just requires a few tens of billion dollars, invested carefully and competently over time. Those investments are being made. Current progress is satisfactory.

Originally electricity was to amuse people and had no practical application whatsoever, then we realised something:

Science.

>>6563681

You can apply your rote argument to any and every human endeavour.

Not everything is electricity.

>>6563685
You can apply that shortsighted argument to any and every human endeavour [sic].

Not everything is 4chan.

>>6563339
Humans will be long gone by then

>>6563685
> Not everything is electricity.

Yes, it is.

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>>6563699
You're one of those guys who argues that thanks to the electroweak unification, Magneto should be able to turn protons into neutrons, aren't you?

>>6563701

Actually, electrons and protons are the same thing. No need to transform anything.

>>6563711
Sorry, I don't get your joke.

Is this something to do with "electric universe" crackpottery?

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>>6563323
>race to the moon
>useless

Yes, because the catalyst for the miniaturization of technology had no pay off at all, and no revolutionary technology has ever been created as a result of the space program.

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>>6563701
I'm not that guy or the guy you're describing, but I recently spent some time on /co/. Turns out Magneto's powers are really inconsistent from writer to writer.

>>6563547
I just checked out "Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewis (1996); a book about asteroid mining. I expect to be enlightened on this topic presently.

Personally, I think asteroid mining will only be of use when we make a concerted effort to create a mostly self-sufficient space economy. Stuff mined outside the gravity well should stay outside the gravity well. Basic physics applied to economics, really.

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>>6563291
>I don't see
yeah, we know

You're basically right OP.

>>6563323
>1. Sea ships are and were always significantly cheaper than space shuttles. A mission costed almost nothing and the resources weren't wasted because the ship was not driven by expensive fuels and it returned someday. Literally the only costs were food for the sailors.

One note here - if you convert the cost of the Mayflower voyage, as a percentage of GDP, to that of the modern day, it's actually in the same league of expense as plausible estimates for spaceflight. You actually start reaching the point where space colonies cost as much as prior colonies, as a percentage of GDP in initial funding, in the $500-$1000 per pound range. This is cheap, but not unreachable.

>>6564150
source?

>>6564177
Don't have one, sadly. I heard it in Jeff Greason's keynote talk at the latest ISDC, but it doesn't seem to have made it on to Youtube.

>>6563323
>A mission costed almost nothing and the resources weren't wasted because the ship was not driven by expensive fuels and it returned someday. Literally the only costs were food for the sailors.

Revisionism to support muh libertarian economcis general.

One thing the
>muh colonies
people seem to have forgotten is that the colonies were built as wealth extraction. Their purpose was to ship as much wealth home as possible. That's never going to be feasible for extraterrestrial colonies. Some businesses might make money off of it, sure, but at the end of the day someone is throwing money down a pit for the dubious privilege of having people on Mars.

You MIGHT see robotic or teleoperated asteroid harvesting, or shitty space hotels for tourists.

It will be easier to build a colony on the moon than to convince people to stop having kids or to kill people in quelling our overpopulation problems.

It also sounds better to mine minerals from space than to cut down forests to mine minerals, which we currently do.

Well, maybe these arguments won't convince anyone, but going into space is pretty cool.

Ultimately a lot of beautiful things are wasteful. We don't need TV, we don't need to pay people millions of dollars to pay sports so fatasses can sit at home and watch, we don't need art or music or weed or cigs or beer. Ultimately if your argument is pragmatic, we should all do nothing but buy food, water, air, housing, and condoms.

As humans, we do not limit ourselves like that, because as humans we are better than that.

That is why we into space.

>>6564202
>people seem to have forgotten is that the colonies were built as wealth extraction. Their purpose was to ship as much wealth home as possible. That's never going to be feasible for extraterrestrial colonies. Some businesses might make money off of it, sure, but at the end of the day someone is throwing money down a pit for the dubious privilege of having people on Mars.

I don't think that follows. The Plymouth colonists, for instance, weren't blessed with any natural resources they didn't already have in England besides more abundant space. They still paid off the cost of the colony - not by access to any kind of McGuffinite (gold, tobacco, lunar helium-3) but just by doing work. Making stuff. Farming stuff. Shipping shit back. Remember comparative advantage - you can be worse than everybody else at making everything and STILL be a profitable exporter of goods.

And remind me, what was the moneymaking portion of the Mormon colony in Utah?

It might be, yes. But humans have always had curiosity on what is out there. If nothing, it's still going to continue just because of simple curiosity, and it's cool.

>>6563323
>1. Sea ships are and were always significantly cheaper than space shuttles. A mission costed almost nothing and the resources weren't wasted because the ship was not driven by expensive fuels and it returned someday. Literally the only costs were food for the sailors.


It's always really interesting that so many people who are interested in the physical sciences have little to no understanding of economics or human behavior that drives the economy.

The costs will NOT be much different than building a space ship. Why? Because the main cost of building a ship in the 1600s wasn't wood or canvas, which was chopped up or sewn by manual labour - it was the incredibly skilled labour for some roles on the ship, fashion certain essential parts, direct the building operation, etc.

It's the same situation today - the engineers, project managers, and the salaries/prices demanded by manufacturers of specialized parts.

Considering as it is about as easy today to get boatloads of ores and fuels together due to technology as it was 400 years ago to get tons of certain woods and metal fittings together, the actual material costs shouldn't be very different.

>>6564208
>I don't think that follows. The Plymouth colonists, for instance, weren't blessed with any natural resources they didn't already have in England besides more abundant space.
America was also habitable by humans. Every other planet in the solar system is simply uninhabitable at best and outright hostile at worst. The simple costs involved with keeping people alive would outstrip any potential profit - and there's very little potential to begin with.

As to the Mormons, they are irrelevant; the US was already a sovereign nation by the time they became a thing. Expanding your borders is not the same thing as trying to transplant and grow a new society.

>>6564177
>>6564181

Wasn't able to find a source for that particular claim, but I can find the data to make the assertion myself.

According to
http://www.pilgrimhallmuseum.org/pdf/The_Pilgrims_Fur_Trade.pdf

The initial funding for the Pilgrim's voyage was around 1600 pounds, but they kept making more monetary demands from their investors and their debt may have been as high as 7000 pounds.

The total GDP of England at that time, according to
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/broadberry/wp/pre1700v2.pdf
was around 36.5 million pounds.

So the Plymouth colony took up about 0.0002 of England's GDP at the time.

Multiply that percentage by America's current GDP, and it turns out that - as a percentage of the total wealth available - this is equivalent to a cost of around $3 billion.

This means that, given that the Mayflower had around 102 passengers, this came out to an equivalent cost of $29 million per colonist.

(Jeff said $27 million, so I'm probably using about the same numbers he did.)

Jeff said that the typical amount per colonist on these ventures was around 2 tons of shit each, to which he added additional shit for life-support and suchwise, to compensate for the fact that the Moon and Mars are less habitable than the East Coast. His estimates were around 2 additional tons for Mars, and 4 additional tons for the Moon. (He did not give sources for these numbers, saying that he could fill a whole other talk explaining how he got them.)

So let's go with the Moon, and say 6 tons per person. That means you gotta launch around 6 tons of shit into space for $27 million each, which comes out to around $5,000 per kilogram.

Since this is actually a lot more generous than Jeff's number, I assume he's also taken a lot of additional things into consideration.

Also, colonialism itself was based on ideas that are mostly outdated and not really applicable anymore.

>>6564234
Also, there actually are very real potential revenue streams for a lunar colony, so I wouldn't discount its profitability.

(And remember - Richard Garriot made $5 million while up on the ISS. It took more than five million dollars to buy the ticket, but think of it this way - if the cost of a ticket to orbit was less than five mil, going to space would actually have been profitable. Partially this is just because space is rare, but as the price of a ticket drops, the amount of things it becomes affordable to DO in space also rise. At some point - probably a little less than a million a ticket to LEO - it becomes consistently profitable to send people to space for economic and business reasons.)

>>6563291
I agreee with OP.

Sailing across the oceans is a wasteful and fruitless concept. There is no way we could gain anything with exception to -

Oh fuck, someone else got to it before me. >>6563301

>>6563295
>PhD here. I
piled higher in what??? advanced basket weaving?

are you one of those morons who actually believe we drive flaming dump trucks full of cash into orbit?

the money spent on the "space race" was spent mostly employing people. the technological spin-offs are too many to name and the ROI (return on investment) for NASA ranges from $7 to $40 returned to the american economy for every $1 invested depending on who you ask... so WTF is your problem?

The closest solar system to ours is over 4 light years away. We would never be able to go that distance, and that solar system does not even have a planet in the habitable zone. We could never have a "space empire" without reaching another solar system.

B-b-but someone needs to launch them telecommunication satellites so we can download moar porn.

>>6564460
>We would never be able to go that distance
How do you know?

>>6564460

>we could never have a "space empire"

>When all else fails, make up an argument for your opponent and just criticize that. You can make them look really dumb that way and come off looking smart and reasonable.

Because there is no middle ground between "space exploration" and "space empire." And obviously everyone in this thread is just kiddie sci-fi futurists. You can tell by how many times everyone has suggested we build a "space empire." instead of just trying to gather resources.

>>6564460
Who gives a shit about how far the closest solar system is? It's not like we're going to run out of space in this one, even with full-blown space colonization.

All technology you use on a daily basis has been because of space exploration. Hospital instrumentation, smartphones, GPS. Its because space exploration. Earth has a lifespan. We will eventually encounter something or someone that is going to destroy us. Where would we be if we never left the trees? Where would we be if we never left the cave?

The technological advancements are unimaginable.

>>6564523
Thats what they said about global warming and look where we are now.

>inb4 global warmings not real.

shut the fuck up this isnt /pol/

>>6564460
There is nothing in quantum or theoretical physics that prevents us from creating a worm hole. Sure we probably wont have the technology for 100,000+ years, but you gotta start somewhere

>>6564561
Dude, the solar system is fucking huge. The estimated carrying capacity of its resources is over a hundred billion billion human beings.

We are not possibly going to run out of space, stuff, or energy here.

>>6564568
We already have a ring of trash around the earth, you dont think after 100k+ years of off earth colonization we'll have a clean solar system? When you have a finite amount of space, you will eventually run out of space.

I aint gonna lie, i ride Neil Tyson's dick, and i know that guy agrees.

>>6564568
and im not kidding, that is EXACTLY what they said about global warming.

>>6564582
>>6564581
By the time we're genuinely harnessing the resources of the solar system at capacity, the task of sending anyone to another star system becomes absolutely trivial anyway. The cost of building a ship? The asteroid 16 Psyche contains enough pure metal to build a hundred full-scale replica Death Stars. The cost of launching it? The kinetic energy to get a 100,000 ton colony ship up to half the speed of light? 0.3% of what the Sun puts out in a single second.

In the incomprehensibly far future where we really do strain the capacity of the Solar System's incomprehensible wealth, the capacity to leave is a trivial portion of those resources.

It seems frivolous to me as no planet anywhere near here is habitable. When the most habitable planet is 500 light years away and we have yet to discover how to go at the speed of light let alone faster than it, it's almost impossible to think that we could ever achieve such a thing

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>>6563291

Firstly:

Holy shit /sci/ you are cesspool of intellectual wankery shitposting in this thread for what is supposedly a science board.

Secondly:

I believe that there are business applications - tourism, mining, transport, telecoms.

I believe that there are social applications - connectivity, travel (walk<drive<fly<space), colonialism.

I believe that there are military applications -
obvious.

I believe that there are continued survival applications - eventual population density, resource scarcity.

But most importantly I think it comes down to this:

>By trying to do things that we can't do now and developing, refining and applying the technologies we use to do those things in other areas we improve our overall quality of life as a race.

>See 'applications of technologies developed for spaceflight'.

When we're using technologies derived from solar sails you'll still be saying spaceflight is pointless i'm sure.

i think the human imagination knows no bounds, that we are capable of so, so much. because we exist we have a real incentive and responsibility to spread our seed as far and wide as we can, to become universal citizens, lasting for eons of time. i see no end to the human race. perhaps now it is of value to focus our entire efforts and economy on minimizing the advance of global climate change, in order to survive until we achieve something akin to world peace. yet perhaps it is of more value in this highly diverse global society to develop everything everyone can be interested in to near perfection, as we are doing so well with trade, music, science, medicine, etc. of course we have a ways to go, but probably the best way we know of advancing is exercising our talents and skills, building our space program. i believe it all is possible, teleportation and godlike scientific advancement. we just need to keep on it, always, meeting challenge like we always do, together finding the answers.

How justified are comparisons to the past, sci?
Is it scientifically to say
hurr in 1500 BC we didn't even think of X and then BANG! we got shittones of profit durr
?

Is it reasonable to extrapolate in such rough manor?

Is the reason that we got so much profit of sea explorations appropriate for the space travel?

I guess you wouldn't say y(3) = 16 having just y(1)=2, y(2)=4, would you?

This is what happens when /sci/ tries to discuss a business topic.

>>6565048
>business topic
>field that needs government subsidies

When it doesn't we can start talking about profitability, for now we need to get it there.

>>6565113
Since we're talking about the future of venturing into space, it is reasonable to expect it being profitable (thus not requiring government subsidies anymore) due to the chance of laying a hand on the resources on asteroids and shits.

Basically we'd be having something similar to gold fever, so yes it's a business topic.

>>6565113
Actually, there are all kinds of space laws and treaties out there that discourage private space endeavors. That's why you aren't seeing too many investors. Not to mention that the materials can be hard to obtain.

>>6565113
>field that needs government subsidies [to survive]
>agriculture
>shipping
>energy
>fast food
>your argument is invalid

>>6565113

it doesn't need government subsidies, it just has them now.

>>6563768
One of my favorites. Keep OP in mind while reading the introduction.

>>6563291
What's the point in doing anything? What makes spending resources on research, exploration, and furthering human understanding any more important than spending resources on developing new technologies for an already technology obsessed, spoiled society?
We're the only creatures on Earth that can reach outer space of our own free will
>lol implying free will exists
, we're the only creatures who can research and understand our surroundings, what they're made of, how they work, even why they exist. Why not continue to learn and study with our brief time on this Earth?

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>>6563323
oh fuck 11/10 OP
holy shit mate