Space sucks, there's nothing even up there. There are plenty of places on Earth that haven't been explored yet, finish with this planet before you start looking at other ones, nerds.

        • BatCountryMusicFan [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          Alright, facetious sniping aside, you can't have global communications of the kind we have now without either a) a fuckton of radio towers and fiberoptic cables or b) satellites, or both.

          Satellites alleviate the need for big radio towers and fiberoptic cables that are otherwise necessary to communicate across oceans or with very remote areas. Do people living in the Solomon Islands deserve access to the internet? Is thousands of miles of oceanic cable or a network of satellites more feasible for getting it to them? What about ocean-going ships whose trips are made infinitely safer by way of satellite GPS and weather-tracking satellites?

          For that matter, what about nearly every global attempt to track and study climate change that makes use of data taken from orbit? What about non-commercial scientific experiments like the kind the old Mir station carried out and China's Tiangong station is carrying out right now? The Hubble and Webb telescopes studying deep space objects, enriching our understanding of the universe?

          Opposing all that because astronomy or space travel is "hubristic," is reactionary in the extreme. It's rubbing right up on chuds' fixation on an idealized past, never mind writing off the efforts of AES nations to realize the benefits of space exploration.