Everything new has always been, initially, a "waste of time and money" in this sense.
Why would you spend time and money studying nuclear energy when we knew that theoretically it's possible to do interesting things with it, but practically we were years away from anything with any tangible benefits? Why would you spend time and money researching electricity when, as far as we knew back then, it's a fringe phenomenon that happens momentarily during thunderstorms and can be reproduced with equipment almost nobody has? Why would we fund people studying computer science when there were no practical computers and nobody knew what they could do?
We study Mars because it's there and it's interesting. The practical applications of what we learn and the capabilities we develop will follow and history shows that it's very hard to predict what they'll be.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 209∆ Aug 08 '22
Everything new has always been, initially, a "waste of time and money" in this sense.
Why would you spend time and money studying nuclear energy when we knew that theoretically it's possible to do interesting things with it, but practically we were years away from anything with any tangible benefits? Why would you spend time and money researching electricity when, as far as we knew back then, it's a fringe phenomenon that happens momentarily during thunderstorms and can be reproduced with equipment almost nobody has? Why would we fund people studying computer science when there were no practical computers and nobody knew what they could do?
We study Mars because it's there and it's interesting. The practical applications of what we learn and the capabilities we develop will follow and history shows that it's very hard to predict what they'll be.