I'm a Dreamer, But I Ain't the Only One

operationaltruth:

thatpoliticaldude:

American exceptionalism at its finest.

A thousand times no to everything about this.

You are more than welcome to express your opinion, but I am still allowed to tear it apart with my own.

First off all, it’s ridiculous to call space exploration an example of American exceptionalism. The notion of “exceptionalism” refers to a belief that a certain nation or circumstance is quantitatively distinct from any other prior or current ones and its norms can’t be judged against the norms of these others.

One, the United States isn’t the only country with a space program. Isn’t the only country with hungry children, isn’t the only country where the government funds science. While you could of course argue that it probably spends a considerably greater amount of money than its European or Asian counterparts, the idea itself isn’t exceptional.

Two, generally, the term “American exceptionalism” is used to refer to what politicians perceive to be our political and economic “specialness”. Generally it’s used as an argument for why the US can’t become like socialist Europe, that the country was founded on the notions of democracy and capitalism, and therefore must always have free market, etc. etc It’s also used to describe a belief about the position of the US in global politics, this idea that we have this obligation to somehow export democracy and make everyone else as free as ourselves.

Space flight doesn’t have anything to do with this. Even if this is going to sound like ridiculous rhetoric to you, science is the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Does everyone believe this? Do I think that the government has pure intentions for the use of science? Of course not. But I still believe that curiosity is part of our legacy as human beings. Exploration, our desire to discover and learn—these things are not unique to the US government or Americans or western society. The need to learn is part of living as a human being.

Secondly, (and this part won’t be so long because I’m mostly going to switch from relying on rhetoric to relying on figures to make the essential argument) let’s take a look at the US federal budget for the year 2010.

0.45% to NASA ($18.96 billion)

<0.3% to the National Science Foundation ($6.87 billion)

2% to scientific and medical research as a whole.

To give you a point of comparison, more than 20% of the federal budget goes to the Department of Defense ($705 billion)
*This number only includes what is specifically allotted to the DoD, not other military and defense related expenditures (weapons manufacturing, financing of foreign arms sales, intelligence gathering, counter-terrorism, or Homeland Security).

Since its creation in 1958, NASA has spent about $471.23 billion. A few hundred billion dollars less than the DoD budget of last year alone.

There’s, of course, also the additional facts that NASA creates jobs, generates income, and carries out research in a variety of fields other than space exploration (like climate change, aviation safety/control, and increasing fuel efficiency).

I’m not denying that poverty remains a problem in the United States. However, I think expressing anger at this by showing disdain for scientific exploration is, at the least, very misguided.

Sources:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/may/HQ_09-102_FY2010Budget.html

Numbers and percentages based on the United States Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2010.

Also there was bit of yielding to people more intelligent than myself.

Videos:
“NASA: Increasing the Awesome” by Hank Green
The end of the fifth episode, “Blues for a Red Planet” of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos