programming and dev manpower= billions of dollars of tech. and manpower isn't meaningless.
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @BAlyssaHauk
And you'd rather they do what? Calculate more digits of pi? Make even fancier graphics to game with? Everything is meaningless if you're a nihilist. And if you're not then why do you value some things over others?
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Replying to @phyphor @BAlyssaHauk
I'm not a nihilist. I literally have never identified as a nihilist. (I'm religious.) if any sum of money above fifty million dollars is going to be spent, I want it to be put towards making human being's lives better. putting robots on Mars doesn't. It's a very expensive hobby.
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @BAlyssaHauk
Just because you don't see that there can be benefits to human lives doesn't mean there aren't any. Why are you so adamant that it is worthless but buying a PS5 isn't?
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Replying to @phyphor @BAlyssaHauk
If there's benefits to human lives to putting rovers on Mars then fucking name one, stop this circuitous argument about "then why not eat protein gruel and till soil?"
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I should point out at this point that while nothing about Perseverance is anything other than blue-sky, non-applied research at this point, it's not just "taking pictures of Mars" for its own sake It's specifically NASA doing a big life sciences project
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
They're investigating the Jezero crater, which is believed to be a dried-up ancient seabed and the most likely place Martian microbial life could've existed if anywhere The goal is to try to discover extraterrestrial life for the first time, if possible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
There's a lot of possible "side effects" that branch off from that, if anything comes of it In order to be recognizable as life, any Mars microbes would have to be *similar* to "life as we know it", but it is very unlikely they would be *identical* to life as we know it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The outside chance that we could discover a new kind of macromolecule that works similarly to Earth proteins but using a different "library" of monomers than our 20 amino acids would be a big deal So would discovering something similar-but-different to the "language" of DNA/RNA
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Insight into abiogenesis (how do you make life from non-life at the initial bootstrap stage), which we're arguably more likely to get on Mars than Earth, where life was so successful it completely consumed and destroyed any trace of its earliest origins That kind of thing
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Is it going to give us the cure for cancer anytime soon? No But the whole argument of pure scientists that we should keep them around is we don't know what we don't know yet until we go looking
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
And, in particular, when trying to invent new stuff to build, nature often surprises us with ideas/inspiration by throwing examples at us that we didn't have the imagination to invent from whole cloth
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Which is why many still argue it's more profitable to go looking for "cures for cancer" (or whatever else) by searching for novel organic compounds made by existing organisms in the Amazon, rather than having a computer simulation try to invent them by trial and error
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