It's like me saying I have a choice between two news cars and deciding that I can afford both (by ignoring my mortgage, food, and all other expenses)

Maybe we should be looking at the best ways we can spend our money, and not any way to spend our money that’s better than our biggest failures.

First I dislike the JSF. If there was any actual R&D, it's all seekrit and classified, in spite of China already having obtained the plans. (50 terrabytes worth of data, perhaps not enough to recreate the thing.) The JSF is its own trillion dollar expense, and didn't help with Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria.

Second, and in the spirit of the letter, R&D is one of the best things we can spend money on.

It's an old argument, but the lives and property saved by carbon monoxide detectors alone are probably worth nasa's budget.

For a more recent example, consider all the Soylent discussion last year. Research into space exploration has to pin down exactly what nutrition is required, making products like Soylent better, with the added improving food aid - literally saving starving children like in the letter. This aid doesn't need to come from the government, any aid organization could take advantage of the knowledge.

Finally, and a little closer to home, NASA has one of the very few research computer labs. If you want to argue that pair programming is effective or not, you're pretty much going to have to rely on nasa research. Even for google, it is too expensive to try to understand what programming practices actually produce good software.

Government funded research proving feasibility does pretty great things. There is 0% chance google would have a self driving car without the years spent on the darpa grand challenge. By showing it's possible the government opens up new markets for anyone to exploit.

When you look at algorithms like bandit, you see the trade off of exploration vs exploitation. I think it's very hard for any company to do much exploration. They need to make money - developing new technologies is a big honking cost center. At least some resources need to be consistently allocated to exploration.

So we really shouldn’t be asking whether or not anything good comes from a particular action, but rather whether that action is the best way to accomplish what we want. And it just doesn’t seem like manned space exploration is needed for any of the research we need - except perhaps politically.

And I suppose that’s where theoretical best options run up against reality. Theoretically, it might very well be the case that we’d get much more scientific bang for our buck if we didn’t focus on putting people in space or blowing things up (research from defense spending). But manned space flight and military spending (and of course, lots of pork for the locals) might be the only way to get these funds to go towards any research, even if 90% (made-up number) of it gets wasted.

Politically, it's hard to engage emotionally without some sort of story. I vastly prefer adventurous explorers to fierce warriors. Maybe we will do something sane without the space story, and that would be great.

I do think there are fundamental problems with defense research. The NSA did great stuff, didn't they invent RSA? but they couldn't tell anyone about it. That system has intrinsic biases about secrecy that aren't useful.

I'll agree space isn't optimal, but they broadcast their successes as widely as possible. As far as i can tell, nasa is open about technology and research. Military success is grisly, and likely secret. Space biases technology to being small, light, and versatile. These aren't bad things. The military on the other hand will throw thousands of warm bodys at solving problems. Ships can be built with a handful of crew, but that dosn't have the prestige of a supercarrier with 6k guys.

I think a space context also thinks a lot harder about failure detection and recovery.

Anywho - i don't think we disagree. Thanks for the thought provoking point of view.

That is an exaggeration if we look at it in terms of the federal budget. If we compared the annual federal budget to say a median income, this is more a decision of if we should buy a plane ticket or two, not if we should buy a car or two.

There should be more interest and development in the quest to preserve and backup the brain in foundations such as http://www.brainpreservation.org/

The current conception of space travel as displayed in much of popular media is next to impossible and wrong. The biological factor will impede any of such fantasies.

The only way to sustain human space travel is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.

It did no such thing. It proved that survival in space is not as easy as we had hoped, and gave us a list of specific problems to tackle. Perhaps it will ultimately turn out to be impossible, at least with any technology feasible in the near future, but we're still far from certain.

http://imgur.com/a/7om70

> The only way to sustain human space travel beyond our solar system is to eliminate biology and replace it with technology.

I think that might make a substantial difference.

My point was that etymology (though interesting) is largely irrelevant to whether something is exclusionary or not. And it's a bit of a non-sequitor to point to the use of a word from a heavily sexist era as some sort of argument against it being sexist.

Words have a social affect beyond the pure literal meaning of them. And really, it's not hard to not use exclusionary language.

I'm not sure I understand your first sentence. Are you saying that people continue to use those words (the second of which I don't recognize) in the same manner as they were used before, and that at the time those words were being used in a way that was not harmful?

I don't think that I am aware of that any common use of that word that matches those criteria, but I may be mistaken (I certainly have not thought this through).

I'd like to note that I wasn't necessarily claiming that using the word 'man' now for a certain purpose is not imperfect, just trying to note a difference between the compared circumstances. (This may have been influenced by a position, and perhaps the method of discussion I am using might be counterproductive, with all its qualifiers and fallbacks, but uh, hm.) Now I am mostly trying to understand what you mean by this most recent message.

When you are talking about using a word from a heavily sexist era, are you talking about using 'man' from 'mann'? Also, are you saying that the use of the word 'mann' at that time was sexist?

If that is not what you meant, I apologize, I don't mean to put words in your mouth.

Finally, I agree that connotation and other properties of words can be harmful when the denotation would not be.

Which very well may be a sufficient reason to avoid the use of the word 'man' to mean a human of any gender.

(though, due to ignorance, _successfully_ avoiding all use of exclusionary language might be difficult? Though of course, avoiding any single instance of exclusionary language likely would not be hard.)

I note that my way of approaching these sorts of things might be harmful, with all the extra qualifiers everywhere, and a few other things like that. However, I didn't really feel comfortable not responding at all, because I felt accused of saying something that I felt I had not said, and which I did not understand how it might follow from what I had said. I hope that I have not engaged in moving any goalposts, or similar harmful rhetorical-ish stuff. However, I feel I might have done so (though I am not sure exactly where), so I apologize if I have.

No need to apologise, by the way, I didn't feel like words were put in my mouth by what you said. I just didn't see the arguments you put forward as meaning it's okay to use certain language - the same arguments work for slurs.

the second of which I don't recognize

It's a racial slur against Spanish folks in British English. Doesn't have the same impact as the other word, but it's still a slur.

Also, are you saying that the use of the word 'mann' at that time was sexist?

I am saying that at the time, women were second-class citizens and largely considered to be in the social background. There aren't a lot of women in the history books, for example. Saying that 'mann' meant all humans in an era when women weren't considered as equals doesn't give the word a lot of credit as a gender-neutral word.

It's a bit like how for a long time 'the UK' and 'England' were interchangeable. The UK had a couple of other countries in it that weren't England, but people frequently referred to the group of them as 'England'.

though, due to ignorance, _successfully_ avoiding all use of exclusionary language might be difficult

Difficult sure, but at the same time, still something to strive for. 'man' and 'mankind' are, at this point, purely rhetorical devices, both of which have plenty of alternatives.

Nobody said that. The etymology was only brought up to show that 'man' being gender neutral is not a neologism that can be easily argued against.

I don't know why you brought up slurs at all. Using a term that focuses on a gender or race does not imply insulting anyone.

If you enunciate clearly you can probably use "negro" without upsetting anyone, and only getting odd looks for such an out-of-fashion term. Mentioning race is not where the social baggage is.

Both sexist terms and racial slurs are exclusionary language, which is the point I was getting at. I never said that people were being insulted by man/mankind.

It is really the other way around, since "man" as meaning both genders is the more original meaning of the word. So there is nothing sexist about "mankind". However it was arguable sexist to use "a man" to mean "a male" rather than "a human".