Other countries may exist.
This implies that Trump's budget will destroy human civilization entirely.
"Never" is a long time.
I mean, screw Trump killing NASA, but what they're saying is "they will never be solved... by the US".
Or maybe they're going all the way exceptionalist and assume they're the only ones who ever could. They are not.
I guess it's "never" if it slows down threat detection enough to get us all wiped by an asteroid, but that's a bit of a leap.
Guardian loves their clickbait headlines
“Only Americans can solve the world’s problems and find all the answers.”
Well being the cause of most of the problems certainly makes the solution easier to find.
And still the most palatable UK outlet, somehow.
there are better ones. But the Guardian is the only somewhat palletable mainstream one that covers most things and covers them live.
The US has enjoyed a commanding lead in the aerospace industry with few countries having kept or caught up over the years. What this means in practice is that we have an enormous base of knowledge here and people that are experts in very specific subject matter. Other countries (with maybe the exception of China) coordinate and consult the US to accomplish pretty much any non-US space mission you've heard of. If you blow that all into the wind as a result of these budget cuts, you are setting back global progress in space and earth science by decades. Sure, many of these people will continue their work in some other facility or country, but a large percentage will opt to leave the industry and those skills will be diminished or lost. It might not be an extinction level event, but it is the kind of setback that you do not recover from in a reasonable period of time.
Hey, like I said, screw Trump nuking NASA.
But, again, never is a long time. All of that is true, but even if this sets back space research and exploration thirty years that slack will be picked up.
Being realistic, though, the goal here isn't so much defunding NASA but letting Trump's corpo supporters privatize it, so their idea is to start making money out of all that talent and expertise being let loose. I certainly hope that a bunch of that slack goes to other public space agencies and the US becomes less relevant and loses that commanding lead, myself.
It's not just about privatization and you're naive if you buy that explanation. It is about knee capping science because they do not value it. You can't privatize basic scientific research because it is not, on its own, profitable. Privatizing is also not a formula for success when it comes to planetary exploration, as we've seen with the many failures private space companies have experienced trying to land on the moon (which is much much easier than interplantary mission development by orders of magnitude). This is largely because this expertise is solely located at NASA and only some of it has transferred to the private industry. Like I said earlier, nuking the NASA budget will not lead to the same missions getting developed privately, it will just kill the space science industry. Some of the expertise will go work on adjacent things, but most of it will just be lost. And that's the goal - to kill science. If they can privatize a bit of it and win favor with some corpos that's just a side benefit.
I don't think it's about privatizing research. I think it's about privatizing... you know, space. Putting things in orbit. Having satellite infrastructure. And if someone wants to do research and can fund it, probably that part, too.
You also seem to assume I'm defending this. I'm not defending this. I'd first nationalize SpaceX than privatize NASA.
I understand you are not defending this, but you are uninformed on the implications (largely the fault of MSM's coverage, not your own). The majority of what is getting cut in this budget is basic research. It's planetary exploration with the goal of improving our understanding of the solar system and Earth. Unfortunately it is very expensive to do this basic research and it is not profitable, which is why I'm pushing back on your privatization spin. This is work that is not and will never be profitable. There are aspects of space exploration that can be profitable, a la SpaceX launching comm satellites to orbit, but this is not that and it's a very important distinction to make because there are very few places in industry for these workers to move to. We will lose this knowledge and be forced to rediscover it in a more intelligent, wealthy, and Science minded era. And it's a global issue because most other countries rely on the US's investment in this sector, so it's a global setback of several decades. That's all I'm trying to communicate.
I am not uninformed. You are very excited to get to give this speech and are looking to project that lack of information onto someone, but I never "spun" this into the notion that SpaceX will take over NASA's research functions. I said the goal is to push the business portions to private hands. We agree this is at the cost of dropping the pure research functions in most cases. I explicitly mentioned a scenario where this delays research by thirty years.
Sometimes I feel this place is so ideologically aligned people are desperate for someone who holds whatever normie stance they are itching for a chance to push against. Sometimes they will just go ahead and do that at whoever says something that sounds even vaguely different from the default stance, even if it's not the thing they're arguing against.
I mean... Never by our current civilization.
With climate change ramping up, less and less will be devoted to space and exploration, and more resources focused on maintaining order and keeping people fed and working.
So unless the rest of the world can rally together in the next 50 years, we, our current civilization, will be likely nearly wiped out in the coming centuries. Not totally, I don't think. But modern society will not survive.
Now, I fully believe the rest of the world is completely capable of doing this, the question is can enough people in positions of power put aside petty differences and work for the betterment of humanity. Because clearly my government won't.
The titles is definitely click bait, and if they really believe it they're delusional.
Right.
I swear, Americans are so utterly convinced that they are the main character in the full arc of the planet. Every American I know is sure we are two days away from the apocalypse (alternate a US civil war) and entirely unwilling to take any steps to prevent it. It's kind of shocking.
I mean, those things are bad, and reward structures are what they are, so global change is hard to enact, but yeah, no, the fall of the US empire is probably not a global apocalypse.
More likely than not a messed up planet in the midst of a global recession will see significant challenges with the US as a superpower remnant very much in the line of modern Russia, because hey, the cleptocracy comes standard.
That's not the end of civilization by a lot. And just so we're clear, even as the USSR was crumbling they had a working space program. The rest of the world can keep strapping things to rockets.
And that's assuming that the real goal, which again seems to be to privatize the sector and hand it over to rich idiots with delusions of grandeur, doesn't refocus on this. Lord knows Musk will obnoxiously babble about multiplanetary civilization to anybody who will listen like nobody else has read Dune or something.
This is literally the dumbest headline I've ever read
This headline is the epitome of hyperbole.
"America is the only country. No other countries exist." - this headline
"This moment in time is also the way things will be, forever"
Lmao that's exactly what I came here to say. Do th se guys get their worldvied from Hollywood movies or something?
Or they're saying that the US is about to kill all life on earth, which is highly likely
Aren't you happy?
All you people who said "Let's fix our problems here on Earth before travelling into space"?
You'd rather Elon Musk controls space than a government elected by the people?
Looking forward to every other country on earth advancing space exploration while America feeds SpaceX more money to blow up endangered bird sanctuaries.
Implicitly because we'll kill all life on Earth before another country has enough funds to do the research themselves?
They're being elitist with their headline, but this is why I personally think they're sort of right.. We will make the planet uninhabitable for modern society before the sane world can pool their resources.
Not gonna lie, the headline was kind of funny
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