Some messy thoughts about Earth and Mars

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 05:17:27 GMT

I've always really liked sciencey stuff, and space is cool, so I've been pretty happy about the Perseverance landing on Mars. We have ACTUAL AUDIO OF ANOTHER PLANET, THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. It's a wind gust, but it's a wind gust on FUCKING MARS!

So this is all kind of rambly, and not completely well put together, but...

It's really rubbing me the wrong way to see snide takes about how horrible it is that we sent a probe to Mars, because that money should have gone to XYZ cause instead, and anyone happy about NASA stuff should turn in their leftist cards because we obviously don't have "real" priorities.

Like... I care *deeply* about ending homelessness. I lived in a car for years, while working 40 hours/week, because I was unable to afford to live somewhere else.
I care very much about a LOT of social ills.

While it isn't exactly the same, this feels very similar to the kind of "whataboutism" that crops up a lot in any discussion of some particular facet of social justice. "This situation is bad, but WHAT ABOUT this other thing that's totally worse imo, and how can you care about A if B is a thing?" We can't help immigrants when we have homeless citizens. We can't help the homeless when we have hungry families. We can't expand food access when some of them could be on drugs... Until we've determined we just can't help anyone.

It also feels close to the same attitude (though in some ways inverted) that says spending time on art or writing or music or philosophy is a waste, and you should only care about hard sciences. Or that anything that doesn't immediately make you money isn't worth doing, so unless you can turn your hobby into a hustle, you need to quit wasting time on it. That any leisure activity makes you a weak person.

And yeah, it's not the exact SAME argument (I'm not saying the Mars rover is someone's frivolous hobby, lol.) But I do feel like it comes from a similarly... single-minded focus? Where whatever someone prioritizes must be the ONLY thing that anyone focuses on, and everything else must be pushed aside. It's not realistic when applied to a single person, and it's not realistic on a larger scale either.

And I feel like it's a little... disingenuous, maybe?, to decide NASA's budget and a longstanding scientific mission is the thing that should be scrapped, and gee, if ONLY we weren't wasting all this money on science, then we'd finally solve homelessness/racism/poverty/queerphobic violence/global warming/*insert area of focus here.*

And that ties into the general anti-science sentiment that's extremely common on the political right, but also in parts of the left. Even in a time where STEM fields are considered the "real" or "important" areas of study... a lot of the results of those fields gets treated with disdain.

Maybe it's naive or something, but I DO think that there are things that are important on a grander scale. Not a spiritual one, necessarily, but I DO believe that things like scientific advancement and art matter. And I don't think caring for those things is mutually exclusive with wanting to address immediate issues in the world.

(And no, I'm not wading into the "Elon Musk colonizing Mars with indentured servants" stuff. That is a very different thing.)

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mistressofmuses

Some messy thoughts about Earth and Mars