At the end of the video, Margaret says that space exploration was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s. People wondered why the government was spending time and money exploring the solar system when critical problems existed here on Earth. What do you think? Should the government resolve Earthly issues before exploring space? Or is a scientific investigation of distant worlds a fundamentally human endeavor of exploration? Explain your argument.
I think that space exploration is still controversial now, to an extent. There are a lot of things going on in the world – there’s poverty, hunger and disease etc. and often I think many people thing that our endeavours should turn towards solving those problems rather than how to get to Mars.
I think that we should still invest in space exploration – the scientists and engineers who work on these things can’t be redeployed to solve world hunger. That’s not something within their expertise. I’d also say that it’s not necessarily the part where we actually accomplish the end goals of various space exploration projects that we achieve the most. The journey to those goals are where discoveries are made that can be applied to our Earthly issues – the approaches taken to solve space problems allow us to come at terrestrial problems from a different direction that might not have been previously considered.
