Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend.
zero-sum fallacy. You assume that all we get from the effort is some photos, ignoring the knowledge gains in fields as diverse as robotics, data compression/processing and astronomy (eg space weather) which must all be improved in pursuit of such a goal. The knowledge gained from such endeavors can have a direct impact back here on earth but helping us to build safer and more capable autonomous machines, make more of our bandwidth and thus lessen our energy use, and craft better satellites that be of greater utility in studying weather, deforestation, disease outbreaks and so on.
I strongly object to this 'what's it all for except vanity' whinge. We do it in order to obtain a greater understanding of our environment, and history shows that science and technology pretty much always pays for itself in the long run through benefits to all humanity. Just like delivering and utilizing aid more efficiently in places like Africa or Bangladesh could someday yield intellectual benefits that would aid the process of colonising a planet with scarce resources.
If we just wanted pretty pictures, we could buy coffee table books or a nice camera and go on a photo tour. The images from Mars are generally not that spectacular, visually. What makes them important is the tremendous step forward in human knowledge that they represent. That's why that photograph of Neil Armstrong (edit sorry, of Aldrin BY Armstrong) standing on the moon is, to me at least, still the single greatest achievement of humanity.
Thanks to the space missions we get technology that is useful for X and Y. So why not invest that money to research solutions to X and Y in first place instead? Presumably, with similar allotted funds we'd stumble into discoveries that are useful for Z (and maybe even W, if we're really lucky).
That's 3 or 4 letters for you, easy. And all we had to do was start with an useful goal. Who knew?
> Thanks to the space missions we get technology that is useful for X and Y. So why not invest that money to research solutions to X and Y in first place instead?
Technology doesn't work that way. Real life is not Sid Meier's Civilization where you pick what to research.
Because the fringe benefits of X and Y might not be apparent. Here's a long list of things that were developed for the space program and which have turned out to be valuable in other contexts; but which might not otherwise have passed the 'necessity test' for investment: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
Find some X and Y that pass the 'necessity test' then.
If X and Y don't warrant express investment in first place, how come they justify investments on space programs after the fact?
To defeat this reasoning, I suggest you try and find a reason why serendipity should work better in projects with less immediate usefulness. I could be convinced that's the case, but I haven't heard arguments in favour of this hypothesis so far.
zero-sum fallacy. You assume that all we get from the effort is some photos, ignoring the knowledge gains in fields as diverse as robotics, data compression/processing and astronomy (eg space weather) which must all be improved in pursuit of such a goal. The knowledge gained from such endeavors can have a direct impact back here on earth but helping us to build safer and more capable autonomous machines, make more of our bandwidth and thus lessen our energy use, and craft better satellites that be of greater utility in studying weather, deforestation, disease outbreaks and so on.
I strongly object to this 'what's it all for except vanity' whinge. We do it in order to obtain a greater understanding of our environment, and history shows that science and technology pretty much always pays for itself in the long run through benefits to all humanity. Just like delivering and utilizing aid more efficiently in places like Africa or Bangladesh could someday yield intellectual benefits that would aid the process of colonising a planet with scarce resources.
If we just wanted pretty pictures, we could buy coffee table books or a nice camera and go on a photo tour. The images from Mars are generally not that spectacular, visually. What makes them important is the tremendous step forward in human knowledge that they represent. That's why that photograph of Neil Armstrong (edit sorry, of Aldrin BY Armstrong) standing on the moon is, to me at least, still the single greatest achievement of humanity.