New Mars Forums

Okay, so there's this lofty goal of getting to Mars. And we all have different levels of intelligence and resources - so clearly all contributions can't be equal.

But the truth is, getting to Mars (in our lifetime) won't discover itself. Someone's got to work on it.

I believe that the trick is to get as many people as we can working (either directly or indirectly) towards the goal. And certainly things will proceed more quickly with active help than with less help.

Frankly, how useful is eating doritos at a computer, reading about this stuff? More needs to be done. So my question is ... what can the 'common man' do to speed the process?

See, the thing is, people contribute in three ways.

They produce/make/design/sell a product which advances technology. For example, people work at Dell labs making superior computers. Cool.

People buy/rent technological products. Think about flat screen computer monitors. Clearly, they are an advancement of technology. But, this technology wouldn't have been produced without people buying them.

People pay taxes. The government then uses some of that money to field research. Universities are a good example, lots of the money for them comes from the government. Unfortunately, the government never has enough money to do everything people want it to do. Ultimately, sacrifice needs to be made in some area. If you want to change government spending, then people need to suffer. New roads and health care or landing someone on Mars?

Because of the last two contributions, people are more useful than you'd think. The only problem is when people don't fall into the last two catagories. People who make minimum wage and then buy McDonalds and pay rent don't really advance technology. They kinda do, because McDonalds pays taxes on their profits, but the people don't directly contribute.

The problem with each person is that we're slowly consuming non-renewable resources. The food we eat means that the rainforest is being burnt down (to grow cows/coffee/etc). The gasoline we burn can't easily be replaced. Our styrofoam cups slowly take up landfill space. If we burn all our non-renewable resources before we can replace them with another technology, we (humanity) are sunk.

What's funny about the government is that some of their expenses could be reduced. If people didn't water their back lawns, then the government wouldn't have to spend so much money processing water. If people didn't commit crimes, then we wouldn't have to spend so much money prosecuting and incarcerating criminals. Etc. Smoking is a funny one, because of the cancer. The gov't spends gads of money treating cancer patients - but, cancer research usually has other, useful, applications.

But really, what do YOU contribute? And what can be done to increase the average contribution among us?