Space Exploration is a waste of time and money

"My opponent mentioned that we could be using this money for feeding people however we are helping people since it has benifitted the world. Also my opponent has claimed that there is a lot of money wasted however 500 billion was spent on the miliatary speaking of losing lives. Space exploration has also led to many indirect benefits" What benefit? My opponent makes the claim without actually specifying what the benefit is. In R1 he referenced some of the discoveries made by astronomers over the centuries, yet none of these required actual exploration of space so they are inadmissible. He has yet to respond to my objection regarding the nature of "exploration"; nor has he addressed the contention that spreading out will not save the human race from extinction at all, but in fact will only push back the date an extinction would occur. Furthermore, military expenditures are irrelevant to this debate. The fact that we waste money in other areas is not a justification for wasting money on exploring space. "the challenge and difficulty of the space programme, and its ability to draw on some of the finest minds, has brought about great leaps in technology. The need to reduce weight on rockets led to shrinking, and so to the micro-chip and the modern computer. The need to produce safe but efficient power-sources for the Apollo missions led to the development of practical fuel-cells, which are now being explored as a possible future power-source for cleaner cars" Firstly, theoretical physics is also difficult and challenging; on top of that it uses considerably less resources (both funding and physical material) than space exploration. Mathematics and philosophy are also challenging topics that spur new and innovative thinking and are comparatively cheap. The dearth of other options available make the claim that space exploration is necessary for innovation patently false. Secondly, it is a fairly large leap from a rocket to a microchip. The development of computers was actually spurred by codebreakers in WW2, and it was *not* rocketry that led to the shrinking of the microchip, it was the invention of the integrated circuit. {1} It is poor reasoning to presume that because they both involved making things smaller and a gain in plausibility or efficiency followed that they are related. "The need to produce safe but efficient power-sources for the Apollo missions led to the development of practical fuel-cells, which are now being explored as a possible future power-source for cleaner cars." Again, an appeal to a shadowy potential future benefit is not an argument in your favor. "We understand - just maybe - .1% about space and space-time. We must proceed with future missions and create more." A question for you- how can you claim to know what percentage of space and spacetime we are *not* aware of? And even if I am given reason to believe you did not just pull that number out of your arse for rhetorical reasons, you have not justified the imperative to discover more knowledge. You have not shown why the benefits of such a costly action outweigh the costs. "Everyone believes that space exploration is a good thing, even if we can't fully explain why." Appeal to popularity. In 1850 it was a fact that the public overwhelmingly supported slavery. That was not, is not, a justification for slavery. The issue here is not whether people want to explore space, but whether the outrageous expenditure can be justified given current knowledge and conditions. And you admit here that there is no justification, that you don't know why it should be done, but that somehow, something good will come out of it eventually. Maybe... "Traditionally, it has been the role of the federal government, when confronted with capable frontier territory, to take a leading role in the development of the infrastructure easing expansion into that territory. Of course, much of those communications also helped to establish the mechanisms for stimulating local economies. Without modern transportation systems, authority and economic opportunities would have expanded much more slowly across our great land." While this may make sense in reference to trains or airplanes, this is a poor analogy in reference to space travel. The cost of launching a rocket into space at speeds reasonable for the travel of interstellar distances, both monetarily and in terms of energy, is orders of magnitude more than the cost of building a railroad across the country. For example, in order to travel, roundtrip, to a star 5 parsecs from earth (16.3 lightyears) it would take 1000 times the yearly energy consumption of the US. Thats right. 1000 times.{2} If we are in the midst of an energy crisis now, imagine how much worse it would be were we wasting that much energy hurling rockets into space. Especially since we have no idea, when we send the rocket, if our destination will even be habitable, such outrageous expenditures are unjustifiable. Unless and until we have: 1. a better energy source, capable of output far exceeding what we are currently capable of and 2. a better understanding of the conditions where we are heading, so as to maximize the chance of actually landing somewhere we could live your arguments fail. As it stands you rest your case on a bunch of unverifiable "ifs"; the benefits are far too contingent on lucky circumstance to support your case. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org... 2. http://www.physics.uc.edu...