Asklemmy

No, they are making us go extinct (while ironically living their outer space exploration fantasies)

Yeah I also think that during the climate crisis we need to be more focused on keeping earth habitable than finding a way off. Like I really do think that long term goals should include space colonization! And I support going to space more from time to time to better understand things. But I see space tourism and attempts to use space as a dick measuring contest and attempts to use space as a backup plan when our ecosystems collapse and no. I love space, I’m glad we did so much space research and I want some of it to continue. But how could we ever hope to build the long term space flights we’d need to get past earth when we can’t stabilize environment on the planet we evolved on. We can’t terraform mars until we can prevent the destruction of earth.

I guess it’s not that I oppose spending money going to space it’s that I think we need to be diligent with it and treat it as the scientific venture it is, not the capitalist and tourist venture many want it to be.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

We are not going to colonize all of space, at least not anytime soon.

Whitey on the moon

Chemical Engineer is the new poet in terms of world leadership lol Merkel was a research chemist.

How to better treat muscle wasting, osteoporosis, certain eye disorders, force development of hydroponics and other efficient farming techiques, life support, genetics research, advanced materials etc. etc.

This is also the root of why leftists hate bazinga solutions for climate change

I'm genuinely asking... but is this for real?

I should add: What are "bazinga solutions"?

This reflects a lack of understanding of the good that comes out of space research. SpaceX exists because Republicans defunded NASA. Space experiments help us solve problems on earth. Not to mention we depend on satellites for everything in our daily lives from weather predictions to communications. Not all of space is "hurr durr I'm Elon musk let's go to Mars!" In fact most of it isn't.

For one thing, satellites are necessary for monitoring the health of the earth and ecosystems

For another thing, if all the rich people got in rockets and blasted off to go die on Mars, the world would be much better off

For these reasons I 100% support all space-related research

There is never going to be a time when Earth is perfect and there are no problems anywhere. There is an argument to be made that we should prioritize nonhuman spaceflight but unfortunately robotic missions are not capable of doing a lot of the stuff people can. eg. anything requiring that decisions be made rapidly without the need for mission control to puppet the instruments from Earth. Manned spaceflight also forces the development of technologies like life support, hydroponics, advanced materials science research and the like that would be useful here on Earth as well as medical advances that can be useful for treating osteoporosis, muscle wasting and eye diseases like glaucoma which is the leading cause of blindness. Much of this cant easily be done on Earth due to the need for a microgravity environment. And again, you cant do this with just robots. People have to be exposed to these environments to result in the physiological changes that microgravity causes.

So you do like that JWST went up and that its a benefit.

JWST is childsplay compared to the kind of telescopes we can put up in space with a rocket like starship at a fraction of the cost.

Instead of a complicated unfolding structure, Starship will be the housing for the mirror, so we'll have a 9m mirror in space with a vastly simpler setup. JWST was 6.5m and cost more than I believe the entire starship development budget will ever cost.

Next, put a complicated mirror like jwst in starship, and we could probably get it past 20m!

We also get things like starlink or others constellations that provide global internet with a dish, and soon, because of large rockets like starship, global cell coverage.

Global cellular coverage will be incredibly helpful and even save lives.

We can get so much from it, and the cheaper and more reusable it is to get up there, the more we'll be be able to do and learn to do

I have a feeling the "lefties" you're talking about aren't actually leftists in any real sense.

I think there's (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it's not even necessarily based on sect, I've seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won't even deny that I don't still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don't even think that they could be propagandized - that's a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!

And second, there's can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself "more of a leftist" regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don't do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you're that person, you might think "Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I'M the one who's more strictly obeying the scientific method!" Again, they're obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some "leftists".

What "political slogan" might you be talking about? You a climate change denier or an "only 2 gender" transphobe? Because odds are that you are based on your rhetoric.