http://fusion.net/story/184773/zacha...-lives-matter/

Why's Bernie Sanders anti-NASA?

He thinks that funding NASA is tantamount to stealing the food out of poor children's mouths. LOOOL.

NASA is a Koch brothers idea that essentially says that there is no Planet Earth.

His actual response to why he has voted to cut NASA funding several times seems more reasonable than your paraphrasing of it....

Sanders explained, “one is put in a position of having to make very very difficult choices about whether you vote to provide food for hungry kids or health care for people who have none and other programs.”

It's a emotionally appealing sidestep all the same. Bernie's lack of vision vis-a-vis the utility of space exploration shows that he either has terrible priorities or is intellectually lacking.

Do we know where Bernie stands on online poker?

How is it a sidestep? (Honestly, I'm not sure what you mean.)

I'm not anti-US military (although I disagree with how the military is used, that's for sure) but I would love to slash funding about 50% for roughly the same reasons Sanders wants to cut NASA funding.

Ok I see your ninja edit. From the context of the linked article, it says he has voted to cut funding. I'm not reading that as if he wants to eliminate NASA. Maybe he thinks NASA is useful but they're already getting more than enough funding. Maybe he wants them to be more efficient with the funding they receive. I guess I need more information.

I don't think wanting to deemphasize stuff like missions to Mars makes you a know-nothing luddlite.

Maybe it just means that you understand we can't fund everything and you have other priorities.

Yeah, it's not like making humans a multi-planet species via colonizing Mars would have an enormous amount of utility, like reducing extinction risk for humanity and opening up livable areas for potential billions after terraforming of Mars.

NASA takes up 0.47% of the federal budget. Medicaid takes up vastly more (plus state funding), and doesn't come with any of these massive, species changing benefits when we spend in that volume. And Bernie thinks we should cut NASA for Medicaid. Priorities, people.

It's the exact same type of derping that happened in the 60s during the space race. Some people thought that spending on NASA then was useless, and if those naysayers had their way we might not even have GPS or any other satellite related tech nowadays.

WE ARE NOT COLONIZING ****ING MARS

That is an idiotic sci fi fantasy, and it is ridiculous that anyone would use it as justification for spending billions and billions on exploring the idea.

We already have a planet (complete with oxygen, plants, and animals) we're perfectly adapted to. We're never terraforming Mars into anything even close.

And making a serious effort at colonizing Mars would take probably the equivalent of ten Apollo programs over twenty years. Like maybe 5-10 Iraq wars. So of course Bernie's point is quite sensible.

Damn that **** about colonizing Mars was some straight talk.

Except for one GIANT one. Taxes. In order to do the things he wants to do taxes would have to go up on the majority of the middle class (and the upper class). But it is the middle class taxes that would get him in trouble with the electorate.

Of course, it's sci fi. Men visiting the moon would likewise be sci fi if politicians like Bernie Sanders had their way in the 60s. The question is can it be accomplished. The answer is yes if the proper technologies are developed and honed to bring down space travel costs. SpaceX is doing that currently, but NASA should be as well. They'd better be able to do this tech R&D if given at least 1% of the federal budget, as opposed to their current 0.47%. Bernie would probably cut it down to an even lower level, further hampering this type of tech development.

Extinction events, how do they work? In addition to asteroids (only some of which we are tracking and could see coming), gamma ray bursts (which we cannot see coming), and near earth supernovas, there also human introduced existential risks such as nuclear war, and biological weaponry that could devastate humanity on this planet. Even without the human related events, these EEs happen frequently enough on Earth that we should try to find an insurance policy of sorts.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm
Terraforming would take 1000+ years, which sound like a long time bc we are individual humans who live 50-100 years. But in geologic timescales and in the timescale of the entire human species (anatomically modern humans have been around for 200,000 years) it really isn't.

This post is pretty bad. Thinking that we wouldn't have communications satellites and navigation satellites if we hadn't gotten into a pointless dick measuring contest with the Russians is absolutely absurd. Spending hundreds of billions on pointless manned missions didn't lay the groundwork for GPS satellites and communications. Those would have happened regardless as they were driven by the military (as was rocket development, driven by the need for ICBMs)

Sounds like a great deal for the .01% who actually get to blast off for Mars. Maybe they should fund it privately?

Sending the oligarchy to Mars sounds like a win to me.

JFC, you want us to spend the next 1000 years terraforming Mars?

I'll get right on that.

ffs, just read this
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-an...nize-mars.html

First develop the technology to bring down the cost of it (via funding NASA), then yeah. Unless you just wanna wait as a species to get killed off by whatever calamity is coming for us in 100k years or w/e.

Terraforming Mars would take multi terawatts power sources. Unlikely those resources would be useful to the billions of people on earth living in abject poverty. Let's ship it to Mars!

Elton musk can do whatever the **** he wants, idfaf. Anyone who wants the U.S. government to pay for that nonsense is a ****ing lunatic though.

Extension of the life expectancy of the human race is pretty big positive externality. It's exactly what the govt should be doing.

If this is a 1000 year project, then delaying it's start by a hundred years will delay it's completion by something like ten.

Tell you what, in thirty to forty years you can make this argument to my grandkids.

The human race has only been practicing agriculture for 10,000 years. What we think of as civilization is about 2000 years old. We've been using engines to do work for less than 300 years and in that time have managed to massively alter our planet and its climate. I'm not too concerned with 100,000 years in the future. I just want us to fix **** on our own planet so we have somewhere to live next century.

Oh I disagree very strongly. The government (and people in general) ought to focus their altruism on people living and about to live, not what happens hundreds or thousands of years down the road. The government should spend exactly zero dollars on a project that might let a few people survive on another planet while the billions on earth die.