As a Country, the US Needs to Focus on Off World Endeavors

The argument I will be making is practically summed up by this John Steinback quote, "While the lifeless rubbled surface of the inconstant moon becomes increasingly littered with the burnt-out bones of vehicles, the bathyscaphe has visited the deep and unknown places of the earth only a few times." The ocean covers more than 70% of the earth's surface, yet 95% of it remains unexplored.[1] This, to me, is ridiculous and our efforts of space should be targeted downwards. This debate will explain why. A lot of my arguments will be disproving Pro's points, turning them to my arguments (explaining why doing exactly what pro advocates for but with the ocean is better,) or both! Let's get started: Contextualization arguments: It seems that most of Pro's arguments are based upon the idea that we are in a resource crisis, that the earth has too many people! This is simply not true, let's get our debunking hats on and start working. First off, most of this argument comes from this article. [2] Which uses numerous studies, books, statistics, speeches, etc. to explain the points. Pro has become prone to the misunderstanding that just because we have an insatiable lust for overusing resources we are overpopulated. Well, if everyone demanded their own private island it would also seem that we would be overpopulated while only having a couple million inhabitants. The point of this argument is to show that just because we are not sustainable in our current use of materials doesn't mean we use too much because there are too many people, but simply because we just use too much! a. Food For example, we produce enough food to feed 10 BILLION people. The reason there are still hungry people in the world is explained by Oxfam, an international humanitarian organization, in response to the Somali famine, "Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures." This 10 billion people's worth of food has to be going somewhere right? Well, most of it is going into the mouths of first world countries, they usually eat more than their fair share. The rest are not distributed well, even the charities to Africa or the likes, because of political failures. The World Education Service stated that, "world agriculture produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago...This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day." b. Water It is quite unreasonable to claim that we are running out of water, the earth is literally covered in it. Science will develop the necessary means of utilizing this vast resource, and the water we have now is more than enough already. The problem lies in how we use it, not only do first world countries use more than they need, by bathing, recreation, negligence, etc. but also how we don't protect it. The water cycle is fairly simple and explains how you can't use up or destroy water it's infinitely renewable, but pollution and mistreatment is causing a problem. People living in dry areas aren't thirsty because of overpopulation, but due to lack of distribution. The best catch all statistic to explain this is that plankton make up more biomass than all of the humans combined, yet are we seeing plankton everywhere? No, because plankton doesn't overuse and abuse the resources. Even in Pro's own words "if the entire populous was to live at the average European standard of living, the Earth could only adequately provide for two billion," this is simply because we abuse resources, either we need to reform or we need to use them more efficiently. c. Non renewables This article explains it very well for metal non renewables. [3] The author uses the example of tellurium to show how we are not running out. It is one of the rarest metals, only 0.001 parts per million are tellurium (Te.) The earth's crust is 2% of the earth's weight and with the statistic I just mentioned it means we only have 120,000,000 tonnes of tellurium to mess around with. But we only use 125 tonnes a year! That's just short of a MILLION years of Te. Yes, this doesn't necessarily ring true for every metal but it does! "what we really want to know is whether we will be able to get metals at the price we want to pay for them. To which the answer is a very differently reasoned 'Of course, yes!'. For this brings us to economics, not metallurgy or geology. If we want to use more metals than we can cheaply extract from the ores then the price will rise. A high enough price will mean that we don't want to use that metal anymore (we'll, for example, go and make our solar cells from silicon). So be definition we'll always have a supply of metals at the price we want to pay for them. They only become unavailable when the prices rises to where we don't want to use them." If such supply becomes too low then we either move on to another supply or find a new way to get that supply. For fossil fuels, this article is well written. [4] This explains how we are not running out of fossil fuels and why that is the true problem. For example, the US has the biggest deposits of Oil Shale in the world. This can be used to make about 4 trillion barrels of oil shale! Why are we not using this? That would destroy the oil market! No, we just can't do so economically. It isn't feasible when traditional oil is so much cheaper. But, as the article suggests, as time goes on, tech improves, and the oil prices spike, it will become more attractive. Okay, what these arguments prove in this debate is that Pro has no harms in the status quo that they are solving. Most of Pros arguments are rooted in this. Such as 1. Yes there are resources out in space, but why not use what we have on earth? Technology is vastly farther away from efficiently mining the cosmos than using the resources we have under our own feet! Therefore, it is economically and financially more secure. Having any handful of countries flood the market of any resource, especially precious and valuable ones, is harmful for the economy of the earth. This is because those people then develop a monopoly, if people are underselling them they can simply cut prices due to the mass amounts of the resource they have. This kills of all competition then we only have those few providers, effectively, and unnecessarily, shifting our dependence from earth to outer space. This is logically bad because we will always have the earth as a steady resource in the foreseeable future (millions of years.) I'll mention 2 a little later. On to 3. I've already explained how this will play out, but lets say that these resources are magically distributed evenly throughout the world to the countries. Well, then there would be no economical increase overall because we would all have access to such vast amounts of wealth. But as I explained that is not how it would happen, sure some countries would benefit economically but at the expense of others; and disproportionately so. If we utilize the earth, everyone has some sort of resource they can provide to the global market. 4. Extinction event This argument doesn't have any proof, and yes pro does need proof because it is such a specific set of circumstances that would bring about our end (reasonably at least) that spreading out does little to nothing. Humans can survive every environment available to them currently just with stone age technology, from the Kalahari desert to the arctic. [5] What would need to happen is a giant meteorite impact at the level of the dinosaur extinction. But as astronomer and space scientist Robert Walker says, "If you ask someone what could make us extinct, they might well say, an asteroid impact. It tends to be top on everyone's list. But if you look into the topic closely, it's not possible." This is because the last time this happened is about 3 BILLION years ago and that was when the solar system was still settling down. There aren't any impacts that big on any of our observable planets and moons. He goes into more explanation of why it is impossible as well. 5. Technology This argument is nonsensical and illogical. Space exploration did not directly cause all of NASA's patents/inventions and even if it did, the need for them would have brought about those technologies anyways. Now back to point 2. Something to rally against. Instead of space I suggest the ocean! This is because of all the disadvantages and lack of reason for going into space on Pro's part. The biggest reason to go into the ocean instead is simply because the ocean does it better. a. Climate 'it is already clear that the oceans offer a plethora of viable solutions to the Earth's most pressing troubles. For example, scientists have already demonstrated that the oceans serve as a "carbon sink."'[6] The potential is also nearly limitless, as the article explains. b. Food and water Moon cheese is not real cheese! But really, the ocean is much more feasible into solving the topsoil, food, and water problems that Pro claims, if they even exist in the first place. c. Health Modest ocean research has yielded higher results in medicine than the vast exploration of space by NASA. [6] Simply because medicine comes from earthly means. d. TO BOLDLY GO If we need something to rally behind, or simply that it would be beneficial, the ocean is CLEARLY better than space. "In short, there is further research into which could yield important insights about Earth's geological history and the evolution of humans and society. Addressing these questions surpasses the importance of another Mars rover or a space observatory designed to answer highly specific questions of importance mainly to a few dedicated astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and select colleagues. Sources: [1] https://tinyurl.com... [2] https://tinyurl.com... [3] https://tinyurl.com... [4] https://tinyurl.com... [5] https://tinyurl.com... [6] https://tinyurl.com...