Science and technological research are a very necessary component of our survival. There are items like sports, dumb TV shows, a good deal of fashion expense,and quite a few other thngs that are, to my mind, disposable. But this is a matter of personal taste. Being well fed and stupid is decidedly not a good idea.

Eugenics are illegal in most civilized countries capable of carrying it out. Really, that's what you're talking about. We would need to remove the "human" element from society to do anything you talked about.

We could all be ants, with no need for sports, no need for achievement. OSHA wouldn't exist - When someone died on the job, we could just replace them with someone new. There would be no world hunger, no violence. We would get rid of love, and just choose the best sperm and eggs, modify them, and implant them into purposefully bread, brain-dead hosts to grow. A whole factory of people pumping out perfect children until they die. We could all be walking, genetically engineered cogs in a massive clockwork.

Seems like a good idea to me.

Either that, or you could try and implement socialism. But we all know that doesn't work.

Toastydeath, what are you talking about? Naresh is advocating using the money that we currently spend on space exploration and weapons development for humanitarian purposes. Sand counters that science and technology are more important than frivolous things like fashions and sports. What does any of this have to do with eugenics or treating people like ants?

On one hand our westen culture does live to excess, often at the expense of the greater good (the enviroment and the so called third/develping world). On the other hand, it is our western culture's free right to live that way, and its choice, if it so chooses, to live at the expense or not of the planet and other peoples.

The egotistical concept of "free rights" is confronted by the examination of inevitable consequences. It probably was the "free right" of the Nazis to destroy what they conceived as a troublesome portion of their population but the world has taken a second look at the holocaust and perhaps judged German reasoning as monstrously faulty. When a rich and powerful country blithely decides to destroy the lives of millions of the world's deptived for its own advantage because it can, future world judgement may decide otherwise. The world is not composed of totally sequestered components. When ignorance and poverty and disease is permitted to fester in the world it will inevitable spread to what are now the more priviledged sections and the consequences will be disastrous to everybody. Terrorism is only the least of the problems.

My point is simple. You aren't ever going to successfully change the biological drives in humans that cause the problems in question. Sports and engineering sate more people and accomplish more financial/national goals than donating and helping poor people.

It's a nice thought, but isn't going to happen until humanity itself changes on a very fundamental level.

People are always justifying humanities failings by claiming that it is human nature to commit them and nature cannot be changed. But humanity has the potential to be extremely flexible and these claims of incapability to change have been disproven again and again. If you choose to live without hope, that is your personal problem. I am continuously accused of being a pessimist but I do see in a reasonable portion of humanity the seeds of reason and intelligence and compassion and the viciousness and stupidity that now strides across the world is not unconquerable.

Think of this world as one country with ONLY one single govt.!

Think that all countries today are states of that country!

One economy, one govt., with one undiscriminative policy!

How in that case we would choose to handle our problems?

What our priority list would look like?

Think! Feel! and make your own priority list and post it to me.

By the way, do not forget to write

What was the thought behind forming UNO?

What is UNO today?

What should be its ultimate goal?

Are you happy with their performance today?

What kind of UNO you would like to see?

That the Irish Catholics and Protestants in the same country, that the Sunni and Shi'a in Iraq are in the same country, That the Moslems and the Hindus are in the same country and all these groups have no difficulty in committing murder on each other all in the same country indicates it is not a problem of countries.Anyway, what the hell is this discussion doing in a site devoted to innovation? I see no innovation in this discussion.

People have murdered other people since before recorded history, and even language. The first tools were weapons. The earliest skeletons have damage from combat. It's fair to say since we're killing each other now, and have been for as long as we've been around, that there's a "nature" element to it. "Humanity" seems pretty inflexible, over the long run. The same negative cultural properties have occurred over and over throughout history, merely changing form. So while an individual may change, the long range average has not changed for thousands of years. All the same core problems that felled Rome exist today, in every country, to varying degrees.

Pointing out that humanity can be relied on for great evil is not "justification" for atrocities. It's letting you know that wonderful plans for worldwide peace and unity will never get off the ground, because powerful people with an abundance of resources and global reach have a big stake in keeping things the way they are. It's like when an engineer tells you that you can't build a dam with love and unicorns. He's not giving you some sort of justification, he's telling you to get back in touch with reality.

I point out that this is just another fanciful idea posted by a random person on the internet, being read by random people of no real consequence. The idea will get buried under new ideas about ways to turn lights off, speed limits, or bizarre perpetual motion machines. At best, a couple grungy protesters hanging outside government buildings waving signs that nobody cares about.

More than humanity is cruel, humanity does not care. Few really care about world peace - just "world peace" in their neighborhoods. I suggest one find a way to cure human indifference before setting about on all those other lofty goals.

While it is true that the world is filled with poverty, ignorance, and violence, it is equally true that to the degree a society enjoys personal and political freedom, these negatives are diminished!

In most, if not all cases, the poverty and ignorance of a country is directly related to the practices of its government.

So, to the point... Why space exploration? Assuming a country such as the USA, Britain, etc. with a reasonably free society and institutions, the development of knowledge - especially scientific knowledge - increases the overall welfare of its people. Please check out your favorite search engine for the benefits we, as a people, have derived from space exploration. It's incredible!

And finally, since all knowledge is related to other knowledge, the more we learn about any specific area, the more we will learn about all the related areas.

I'd much rather we spend the money on scientific research than continue to hand out billions on flawed social programs and political pork projects!

The sentiment is fair, but the reasoning is not. Specifically, space exploration and research has positive impacts on terrestrial ecology, as well as the demonized military-industrial complex (maybe demonized for the wrong reasons. Its a horrifically inefficient way of supporting technological progress, because of it's military focus, but hey, if anything it is turning military hardware into occasionally brilliant peace-time technologies.)

As it stands, the federal funds for NASA and the Pentagon go toward developing technologies that are seen as not absurd (though they usually stumble into that realm on the surface, like the Star Wars initiative) but as unprofitable. Once public funds develops that technology to some half-assed-excuse for "working", sometimes capitalism jumps into the mix and a corporation buys the jury-rigged technology now that it seems like less of a risk of developing it.

Space Travel is really not so much about colonizing other worlds, as much as it is a tax-supported way of developing technologies that any capitalist or corporation wouldn't touch. Whats great, though, is lots of the technology are things that are, essentially, environmental, such as solar arrays and methods for recycling basic human resources, as well as decreasing human wastes and pollutants. This funding is not intended to make us forget about earth (although some NASA guys and gals must definitley run on that assumption) but instead to fill in the flaws of a capitalist society. Even failed projects like the Star Wars initiative develop essential technologies, even though the big picture goes unfufilled.

There are good and bad kinds of research and technology, of course, but when compared to the Military-Industrial complex as a whole, Space Exploration and NASA have a much more benign bent to them. This kind of funding can hardly be suddenly re-appropriated to schools and hospitals, because to do so would send our entire economy into paralysis... a flaw of capitalism would suddenly open up and start causing some major problems.

We can't move backward, and the current technological climate is definitley not sustainable. Like it or not, we need to go onward, and suddenly siphoning funds off of the Military-Industrial complex would just keep us where we are today. Maybe you should try thinking of a new-and-improved way of solving the problem of whereby capitalism avoids ANY risky technology, nomatter how attractive or useful... but just bashing progress as a whole merely condemns us to an assuredly unattractive present-day. Outrage might have gotten you to this point, and it might convince others to get outraged... but logical thinking can both outrage AND solve the problem at the same time, and those are two things are essential to make any sort of lasting difference in this world.

Simplistic, perhaps narcicistic. Technology advancements help the poor.

We might be able to use technology to solve some of man's problems, but there are other obstacles to solving our problems besides the technical aspects.

Having said that, I believe manned space flight is a waste. Two or three times more science could be accomplished with unmanned programs. However, nothing can compare with the adrenalin rush when that huge rocket blasts off. (with a human in it)