Space

The final frontier for humanity,or a distraction from life on Earth?

For Caleb Woodbridge

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” said Oscar Wilde. The heavens above have captured the imagination of scientists and poets alike for centuries. But is space travel just a frivolous waste?

No – there are many possible advantages. For the first time in history, we are getting close to having a chance of averting disasters like an asteroid strike. In 1908, the impact of a 20m asteroid flattened over 800 square miles of Siberian Forest with a force equivalent to the most powerful nuclear bomb ever devised. Just imagine that hitting a populated area, such as Washington or Beijing or Cardiff.

A lesson from history: Easter Island once housed a thriving society, seen in the thousands of remaining great stone statues. But rather than managing their resources, they cut down the trees on the island. With their resources dwindling and the ability to built boats to travel beyond their island gone, their society fell into chaos and decline.

This island Earth faces the same danger. We are squandering our resources rather than investing them in the ability to travel beyond our own native sphere. There’s a whole universe out there to explore, and we’re in danger of trapping ourselves on this planet before we’re even started.

This isn’t just an abstract argument: our future, the future of Cardiff, of our descendants and humanity itself may rest on our decisions about this now. And the desire to explore, to know, to discover is all part of our common humanity. This debate asks what is the purpose of humanity.

There’s so much to learn about our vast and incredible universe, and there’s no knowing what we can learn and achieve out there. Let’s not confine ourselves to this single planet around a single ordinary star. Our imaginations have long soared beyond the stars; why not aim to make that dream a reality?

Against Ben Read

Why bother with space when we’ve got all of planet Earth to care for, from people in poverty to endangered species? From the outset, I want to make clear that I am not against space exploration per se; I just think that there are better things we could be spending our time and money on.

The key reason, in my mind, is the astronomic monetary cost. Japan spent $1.7 billion in 1998 on space research, with Britain spending $470 million (shouldn’t some of this be reallocated to provide better public services?). In the same year, India spent $410 million on space exploration. Surely priority ought to be given to providing relief for the destitute within India’s own borders. Of course, by far the highest space budget is that of the USA, with NASA, in 2004, receiving $86 billion – a truly extraordinary amount of money, which could be spent on trying to resolve the terrible inequalities between rich and poor within that nation, shown graphically most recently in the wake of the New Orleans hurricane.

In a UN report of 1997, the cost to eliminate world poverty was estimated at $80 billion. Admittedly, poverty cannot be eradicated merely by throwing money at the poor. However, surely reductions in space research budgets and the resulting freeing up of funds, could be used to alleviate poverty and help in empowering the world’s poor, gradually bringing relief to the millions, if not billions, who are literally starving to death everyday. Considering this, the amounts of money spent on space research seem a gross negligence of our responsibility as rich nations.

Announcing the NASA budgetary increase of 2004, President Bush suggested we choose to explore space “because doing so improves our lives and lifts our national spirit”. It seems to me that there are better, cheaper, and less selfish ways of improving the lives of both our own nation and those across the globe.