this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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You're thinking backwards. Building colonies on the moon and ultimately Mars would require science investment in recycling materials, air, waste, oxygen, etc. Do you not see the potential benefits of that on earth?
These projects provide vast investments in science here on earth, including creating jobs for the scientific community worldwide. Do you not see the potential benefits of that?
NASA's budget is miniscule compared to how much you Americans pay for your wars. Iran has already blown through NASA's total budget for the Artemis programme (which began over a decade ago), in a war that's been going on for 2 months.
Nobody in NASA or the space community seriously believes in plans to colonise Mars to terraform it. If we could do that, we'd be technologically capable of fixing our own planet.
We wouldn't have gotten microwaves in the 20th century if we hadn't gone to the moon.
Stop these pessimistic reductive takes. This is a huge step for humanity to be visiting the moon again.
The issue being that the reason we're running out of air and filling Earth up with waste is not a lack of science or investment.
We are far, far beyond capable of fully sustainable, high-standard living on a global scale with today's technology, we just choose not to do it. Because instead the global system prefers to concentrate wealth on extremely wealth individuals and expensive vanity projects, like this one.
I'm a huge fan of space missions, and inventing stuff this way, but this mission is about 80% vanity, and 20% science. If the launch was purely for science and explorations sake, I'd be in favour. But as it is, it's like burning a huge pile of coal to prove what a good country you are, but with the outward claimed justification it'll help us discover renewable energy sources.
We already solved the problem, this is just making it worse.
But we could just invest in science without going to the Moon. The Moon is utterly superfluous to the investment.
For real. We can do things in the ocean or inhospitable deserts or Antarctica or any other hazardous conditions here on earth without having to send thousands of pounds of stuff to keep people alive into space. We know we can already send people to the moon. This talk of building shit there is nonsense.