109
i know which one id be prouder of
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
109 points (71.5% liked)
solarpunk memes
6054 readers
6 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
You're tilting at the wrong things. What NASA does is science. Science benefits humanity, and we always learn something by going to space, and we've been able to do experiments that would be otherwise impossible to do on Earth. In this capitalist hellscape, it unfortunately costs money to do science, so I can understand balking at the $93B + $4B price tag (spread over 7 years) but we currently spend trillions of dollars (over 7 years) just on the military and if ICE were to get their current budget over 7 years, it would also be over a trillion dollars.
We could absolutely feed and provide childcare for every child in this country for under $100B, but we don't need to defund science to do it. The annual budget of ICE alone could take care of all of that and still have some leftover.
The problem isn't spending $13B/yr on space science, it's spending $85B or $175B on ICE and the military (just as two needlessly wasteful examples; there are more).
I see your argument, but I disagree with it.
First, "science" does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.
"Science", as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can't. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can't afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can't afford the new technologies can't sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.
Every scientific "advancement" by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can't afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.
And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn't matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.
And if you were arguing "this is bad, but it's not as bad as a bunch of other stuff" I would be more likely to agree.
But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.
Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is "one of the good ones". That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.
And I think, if we think about what NASA's budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of "science", we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.