Get_Off_My_WLAN

Superman himself was a refugee too, undocumented even, brought to Earth as a child because his parents wanted him to escape the fate of their home.

I get it, because we want to do the opposite of what RFK Jr wants the majority of the time.

I really appreciate that these types of collectors of random appliances exist whenever I need to buy something and want to read real opinions written by people instead of the garbage sponsored recommendation list articles that seemed to pollute the search results (even before the LLMs appeared) that forced everyone to start appending ‘reddit’ to their Google queries.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address the symptoms in addition to the source.

Sharpie enough to control hurricanes.

In that scenario, I agree the pragmatic choice is to save the majority.

But many situations tend to be complex and aren’t as clear as a trolley problem, so I want to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a false dilemma when there’s possibly more than two options.

Those are already arguments for why NASA and space programs shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I remember watching something about the space race, and there was a clip of public opinion during the time of the first mission to the moon, where a man complained that the money should’ve been used to improve the lives of poor Americans instead.

Regardless, for the scenario in The Martian, if money is already being spent and going to continue being spent on space missions in the future, I think you can rationalize it as using money for another or next space mission. They would still gain knowledge from what they had to do to pull off that rescue, so it’s not a complete waste of funds for a mission either.

On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives. That includes both people in imminent danger, requiring expensive emergency services, and people suffering slower, persistent risks like hunger that require sustained support.