What are the ethics between the next flight into space as opposed to the huge number of people who could benefit from clean water, food and education, given the same expenditure?

That just reminded me of a book by Isaac Asimov I read a couple of years ago, I think it was called “Foundation“. Mankind has invented a technology that allows control of time. The main I always gcharacter is this guy who is some sort of guardian and travels through time with the help of this technology to prevent catastrophes and disastrous events in human history. He falls in love with this woman who is also able to travel through time. He thinks she is a regular woman, but in reality she is from the future, outside this time bubble in which he lives and her mission is to destroy this technology. Anyway, in the end she explains to him that the time manipulation technology that had prevented suffering also had prevented humankind from exploring space and when they finally managed to man a spaceship and set out to new adventures, they discovered that the universe had already been explored and all the planets colonized by other living beings who were more adventurous. I got all mushy inside when I read this and thought, “Asimov must be a romantic.” I also admit, I loved Babylon 5.

But: “what a fool, what a fool is man…who clutches at the firmament, forgetting the earth is a star.”
- Han Suyin, A Many-Splendoured Thing

I’m not being very helpful today, eh?

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear those points of view coming from the USA. I come from Norfolk, England, which is essentially a farming area of the UK.

The figures and stats quoted by Erich Vieth are alarming, and I will have to find out the same stats for the UK. We are after all a tiny island with a huge population. I wish more people here were concerned that most of the fresh produce in our supermarkets comes from anywhere but our own country.

We could go off on many ’save the world’ tangents - but I get the feeling that you guys share my frustrations that so much of the world thinks that god or a politician is going to save them, and their own personal action will make little difference - wake up!!!

Mark Tiedemann wrote:-

Science urges people to look reality in the face and, comprehending it, places a moral charge to deal with that reality. Religion tends to tell people to (a) be selective about the reality they see and (b) ignore it when it runs counter to dogma. When it comes to this issue, religion can’t seem to get around itself.

I could not agree more. Whatever your view, science does stand out as the ‘here and now’, point of view. To ignore cold hard facts and well observed and predictable consequences on the basis of a religious belief, I am afraid I just view that as immoral.

What are the cold hard facts of religion?
I really enjoy the debate wth my religious friends, but it keeps coming back to…’it says so in the Bible’.

It’s a bloody book, for crying out loud! A collection of words and metaphors
that can and have been taken in infinite ways, mostly as a form of social control. Fine, lets debate and philosophise over the symbolism and metaphors contained, but it is not black and white!
And to come back to my point that Science IS at the cutting edge of opinion, as opposed to books that have been subject to thousands of years of chinese whispers and political manipulation.

I want to try and bring this back to grumpypilgrims original post, I have my roots in an atheist and scientific view, but it was quantum theory that really made me question that, and hold a spiritual viewpoint.

That view is unique and my own, and will never require any church for me to belong to, but I suppose if it hinges on anything it would be on the ideas of Jung and consciousness and the quantum idea that we are all interconnected in some way.

Did anyone else out there start to question the ideas of faith, because of Science?

Consuming less per capita of irreplaceable resources only slows down the inevitable. But if we wait until we are spending everything to feed ourselves, it will be too late.

The energy it takes to launch a weather satellite could power a city for days or produce enough food for the same city for weeks. The millions of lives saved so far by weather satellites might justify the cost (before weather satellites, there was no warning before hurricanes hit a coast). I can’t justify television satellites this way, though. Not all technology goes to our long-term benefit.

Science is not about controlling nature. It is about understanding it. Technology is about learning to manage nature to our best advantage.

Complexity theory finally proved that our degree of control over nature has distinct limits. Contrary to predictions in the 1960’s, we will never precisely control weather. Chaos theory emerged in the 1970’s from weather studies. But we now know that we can (and do) affect climate, not only locally, but globally. Little things add up to big things.

All of these serious issues relate to that thing that people just don’t want to discuss: whether we need to have fewer people on this planet in order to maintain some semblance of the civilization we treasure.

There are many sources of information out there on this issue. One is Population Connection (http://www.populationconnection.org/index.html) which published these disturbing facts:

Growth
10/1/2007

95% of the global population growth is concentrated in the world’s poorest countries.
Source: Richard Ottaway MP

Conflict
10/1/2007

Countries in which young adults comprise more than 40% of the population are more than twice as likely to experience civil conflict.
Source: Richard Ottaway MP

Funding
10/1/2007

Between 1995-2005 USAID’s annual allocation for family planning fell from $12 million to $9 million while HIV/AIDS allocation rose from $2 to $74 million. As a result, unwanted births rose from 11% in 1998 to 21% in 2003, and contraceptive users relying on public sector supplies fell from 68% to 53%.
Source: John Cleland, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

US Consumption
6/11/2007

The US has the resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. If all 6 billion people were to share the world’s resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80%.
Source: Overpopulation.org

Pregnancy Numbers
3/23/2007

Of the six million pregnancies that occur among American women each year, nearly half are unintended. As a result, American women experience 1.4 million unplanned births and 1.3 million abortions annually.
Source: Guttmacher Institute

–But you also touch on the fact that we are searching for resources to consume outside of the earth. Fair enough, but I wish we could turn the whole thing on its head and suggest ways that we can be more efficient and consume less.—

I’ve stated this elsewhere, but I doubt it can be overstated. You want humanity to consume less? Convince humanity to stop reproducing in defiance of all understanding—understanding which has emerged as a result of science. There are many factors which make this difficult, but religion–if I may point out one very big different between it and science–has a lousy track record on this point.

Science urges people to look reality in the face and, comprehending it, places a moral charge to deal with that reality. Religion tends to tell people to (a) be selective about the reality they see and (b) ignore it when it runs counter to dogma. When it comes to this issue, religion can’t seem to get around itself.

Because of science–if I may be blunt–we have developed methods whereby people can screw all they want without pregnancy resulting. Instead of promoting this, religion in general tries to put that genie back in the bottle, thinking apparently that god will provide.

You want to save the earth? Tell people to stop making more.

Science is without doubt responsible for so much good and progress in the world, but should it be the science of controlling nature?

Nature has a mind of its own, one that evolves over huge time scales, I worry that if we believe that we can control nature, that we are playing with fire!

It is true that with the current poulation growth, we face some tough challenges on how to feed and support such numbers.
I know I used the space progam as an example of ‘where do we spend the money for the best gain’, and I do wholeheartedly agree with your comments - I do realise that so much of our advances come from mans ability to reach for the impossible, and long may that continue.

But you also touch on the fact that we are searching for resources to consume outside of the earth. Fair enough, but I wish we could turn the whole thing on its head and suggest ways that we can be more efficient and consume less.

Perhaps nature has the answer here. Look at the largest mammals on earth - the whales. Capable of large life spans, free of many of the diseases that plague mankind, and grown and fed on phytoplankton
that contain all the nutrients required. I could go on and on, but my point is we should think a bit more about where our nutrition comes from and how we produce it in a balanced and natural way.

There is not enough land mass to support enough plants and animals for our growing population to consume, so what can we propose outside of genetic experimentation?

I would love to hear your views.

Many thanks

As for feeding people instead of throwing money into space: One is a subsistence strategy, and the other is a capital investment. If we put all of our resources into the immediate needs of feeding people and keeping them alive, we end up with ever-increasing numbers of people with ever-decreasing standards of living. If we invest in methods of improving the availability of resources at the expense of immediate needs, then the future holds an improved standard of living.

Why space? The Earth is starting to get a bit worn out. The total amount of all usable resources here is known to within a fairly precise margin. We have long passed Malthus’ original estimate of the total number of people the planet will support, through the use of fossil fuels to produce fertilizer and other technological means. One example of when money had gone to pure research instead of feeding people.

If we want room and building materials for the steadily increasing number of people, we need to work on reaching the orders-of-magnitude greater resources available in our neighborhood (the Solar system).

Or, we can return to the preindustrial, marginally civilized ways that most religions were developed to support and explain. We can easily limit our population with war, starvation and disease to a level where this planet will support us without the serendipitous benefits of further pure research. But I’m not hoping to leave this dystopia to future generations.

Increasing the gap of social inequality? Yep. Now, just a few percent of the Earth’s population suffer from rampant disease and starvation, and the majority have much higher living standards than were even imagined a few generations ago. We will never eliminate the bottom, but we could easily reduce the top simply by not proceeding to extend our technological grasp.

Science and technology are about understanding and controlling the world we live in. “Controlling nature.”
Religion is about accepting whatever world in which you find yourself. “Accepting God’s Will.”

–It seems to me that technology is increasing the gap of social inequality.–

Yes, that’s true. Has to do with education and apparently the “luck” of where you’re born. But–and this may seem like picking nits, but it really isn’t–technology is a product of the application of a certain slice of science, it is not science.

Trevor also said:

–What are the ethics between the next flight into space as opposed to the huge number of people who could benefit from clean water, food and education, given the same expenditure?–

The dollar amount of the space program has never been much compared to the needs you mention. However, let’s consider the likelihood of a space program that might provide medicines which can’t be created on earth (gravity well), the research on global climate change that is conducted from space (which can affect food production) and a scenario which could someday “capture” an “iceball” in space that could provide a new water source.

The spin-off technologies of the space program of the Sixties was immeasurable—hundreds of percent over and above the actual cost of the program. But the morale potential was even higher. One stat: suicides among citizens in this country over sixty five dropped precipitously during the Apollo program. After Nixon gutted NASA, the suicide rate skyrocketed (pun intended). The benefit of Doing Something Cool like that has benefits which can’t be measured precisely in dollars. But just having a program like that requires that, to do it right, we educate people. I don’t think it’s just coincidence that we started running educational deficits when we gave up on the space program.

I don’t profess to be an expert in either Science or Religion, but I thought I should explain why I feel that Science and Religion seem similar to me.

Both camps are trying to secure the hearts, minds and most importantly the wealth of their followers.
Money talks, and that is the problem I have with both camps.
Do the advances in technology or philosophy belong to the people, or are they the property of the highest bidder?
Both are good business in a commercial world.

We may never know how to save a soul (if that exists), but my god we have the resources to save lives and bring about global equality.

I just wish that both camps could see eye to eye over what really matters to human kind here and now. It seems to me that technology is increasing the gap of social inequality.

What are the ethics between the next flight into space as opposed to the huge number of people who could benefit from clean water, food and education, given the same expenditure?