When there is so much poverty and so many problems with the world(climate change, australian wild fires etc) do you

Question: When there is so much poverty and so many problems with the world(climate change, australian wild fires etc) do you feel like the ESA NASA and other space agencies are a waste of money when we have should be spending money sorting our own planet.
- Keywords:
  climate change,
  money,
  society,
  world
Asked by AnswerMyQuestion on 17 Jan 2020.
- Stephen Durrant answered on 17 Jan 2020: last edited 17 Jan 2020 4:30 pm
  
  The Satellites we send up as Earth Monitoring satellites help us to address the problems you highlight. Without this knowledge we would not be able to effectively address the issues. So no it’s not wasted money. In fact, the money that the European Governments give us to fund the projects not only provides the Observational knowledge/data and pays for the satellites, by paying the Companies in Europe to make the satellites and equipment, it pays the wages of the managers, Engineers, technicians, admin staff in these European companies, so provides jobs.
  So we are providing work/jobs and helping to ‘sort out’ our own planet.
- Abbie Hutty answered on 20 Jan 2020:
  
  The space industry is tiny compared to a lot of industries in the world, but we are doing far more than our share in helping with those things, so on balance I think we are considered to be in the “sorting out the planet” column.
  
  More than half of the factors that we observe to detect and monitor climate change can only be monitored from space, so our spacecraft are informing us about where the problem is and helping us to focus our efforts in solutions to the problem. Also things like the wildfires, or other natural disasters like Tsunamis and earthquakes we use satellite imagery to detect the damage and to focus relief efforts- so space is essential in the relief efforts and reaching trapped people quickly enough to save their lives in those kinds of events.
  
  If you want to find a career that will help save the planet then engineering is definitely what you should be looking at – if you devoted your whole life to trying to get 6 billion people in the world to change their lifestyles and stop having babies and eat different foods and not pollute it would be nearly impossible to make a noticeable difference- but if you design a new technology that cleans up pollution, or creates green energy, or makes our cities and homes smarter and more energy efficient, you can have a huge impact.
- Divya M. Persaud answered on 20 Jan 2020:
  
  This is a really important question and hard to answer. In the US, the budget for NASA is less than 0.001% of the total budget, and a lot of that money goes to earth science satellites that help us monitor the weather and especially natural disasters, as well as study climate change so that we can better be prepared. However, this is still billions of pounds. Like every discipline, we do a lot of wasteful things, like travel that puts a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, having plastic waste from laboratories and other waste from engineering, and using a lot of water in desert areas to support facilities. So while it’s only a little money (even less in Europe than in the US), we have a responsibility. I as a planetary geologist know that my work doesn’t directly impact people’s welfare on Earth, and doesn’t “sort out” our planet. I want to make sure that some of my work goes towards climate study, and this is a consideration that I personally make. Space is a field that is largely intellectual – we study it in the spirit of pursuing knowledge of the universe we live in, for the sake of knowledge – and so often we lose track of how we impact society and the ways we should do better. I think we in space exploration need to always think about questions like yours to make sure we’re responsible citizens and use our funding in a way that doesn’t add any harm, and maybe also does more good than we think.
- Yuri Yushtein answered on 28 Jan 2020:
  
  There are many sides and facets to the humankind development and evolution. A balance is needed to ensure stability and inherent drive for persistence of humanity. We are all passengers of the starship called Earth. There are “internal” issues of societies and sustainability to be addressed, as well as “external” matters of planetary evolution and space hazards. And there is human evolution in understanding and learning ourselves and the world and universe around us.