Space Vs. Poverty Debate In India 315
MarkWhittington writes "Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was obliged recently to defend his country's space program, which involves the spending of billions of rupees when India still has a large number of people living in abject poverty. The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
Thoughts... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Humanity eliminates all poverty, is subsequently wiped out by asteroid....CONGRATULATIONS!!!
2) Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space. If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
Not just space, but research in general... (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot eat research.
Those early men who tried to make fire by rubbing some sticks together in vain were obviously wasting their time. They could have better spent that time chasing a mammoth, and humanity would have been far better off.
The Oregon Trail! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because driving West in a wagon with a gimpy wheel and grandma strapped to the roof to some new homestead next to a river and zap apple trees is perfectly comparable to development of the Moon- an airless, irradiated wasteland a quarter million miles up slope on a large gravity well.
Ah well, at least they won't die of dysentery.
Oblig. They don't shoot the money into space... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Jesus Said (Score:5, Insightful)
"The poor you will always have with you"
http://bible.cc/matthew/26-11.htm [bible.cc]
We will always have poor, and we will always have the responsibility to care for those who cannot help themselves, and help those who can help themselves to begin helping themselves (you have my welfare policy in a nutshell). But, we cannot allow it to be an all consuming policy that detracts from allowing those who do earn from progressing and from mankind as a whole from advancing.
Spave vs Poverty debate is a false dichotomy and I encourage Slashdotters to not fall into this trap.
Space vs. Poverty? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because the space program's goal is to load tons of rupees into a launch vehicle and launch them into orbit. And that's not counting the rupees stuffed into the launch platform to muffle the rocket exhaust or the solid fuel boosters whose fuel consists primarily of shredded rupees.
The money spent developing these capabilities is spent on Indians working on jobs. Developing a technological industrial base will help far more people over the long term than just dumping truckloads of rupees on the streets in Calcutta would.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even Jesus Said (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not a religious statement. It was an observation of fact. There will always be people who have less than others. Those who fall below some threshold will be classified as poor.
Re:Thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs program? (Score:5, Insightful)
Space programs may require a lot of high-tech work, but all high-tech work requires low-tech work. Ie. someone's got to dig the ditch to run the cables, someone's got to build the giant silos and buildings, someone's got to run the steel mill.
Money is like energy - it is not created or destroyed, simply transferred (at least, for ordinary economic activity - there are exceptions). Their space program is funding things on Earth, not shooting barrels of money into space.
Now, maybe it's not the most efficient way to create jobs for the poor, in the short-term, but think long-term. You cannot deny that the space program is a good thing in the long run. So when you look at it that way, it isn't a bad idea to spend some money "inefficiently" now, in order to improve things in the long run.
Re:Reasonable Goals Already Accomplished (Score:4, Insightful)
And we're still reaping the rewards of having raced to space.
Re:The Oregon Trail! (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, gravitational pull is proportional to the inverse square of the distance between the objects:
F=G*(m1+m2) / r^2
Re:But the moon is full of cheese (Score:5, Insightful)
The experience gained from government sponsored space exploration allows the government to tackle large problems in a coordinated way.
Basically it's a good team building exercise.
Now as to your comment about Indians not being smart enough to staff a call center with people who speak the language of those whom they will support. A reminder, they are the ones getting paid for this, not the ones paying for it, from their end it's working out quite well.
Re:But the moon is full of cheese (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people in India will eat meat maybe once a week, a little chicken with the daily daal bhat. Even if they all decided that cows were fair game, they'd be back to square one in a few months, with less fertilizer.
Compassion for the poor... (Score:2, Insightful)
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open your own wallet to help them, you're a saint.
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open someone else's wallet to help them, you're a thief.
That is all.
Re:Thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space.
What? No, it isn't. Sure, there are densely packed slums in the Third World, but most of the world's greatest cities have high population densities. People seem to deal with that just fine. A lot of people want to live in midtown Manhattan. And for those who don't, that's fine – we have no shortage of room right here on Earth. We can't find many people who want to live in Wyoming or South Dakota, and you think people want to live on the moon?
And if you're worried about there being too many people in general, then prosperity is the solution, not the problem. Social science has known for a long time that people in prosperous societies tend to have smaller families. This isn't a recent thing, either; the pattern dates back at least to ancient Rome.
If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
Space-nuts always reach for that analogy, but it's so flawed that it is amazing anyone ever falls for it. It was obvious from the start that North and South America were clearly inhabitable – they were inhabited already by people. Millions of people, in fact, until imported Eurasian diseases killed about 90% of them. For the analogy to work, the Americas would have had to be an environment far more inhospitable than anywhere on earth, even the Antarctic – even there, you've got oxygen and you've got (frozen) water. If European settlers had instantly suffocated when they landed on the shores of Hispaniola or Jamestown, they probably wouldn't have tried to establish colonies there. Again, we don't have large-scale human habitations in Antarctica or on the sea floor, even though those would both be far, far easier than trying to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of outer space.