OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend more money to model the collision! Will insects survive or just single-celled life? Let's spend millions on computer simulations of the collision itself, answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
vs
OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend some money developing a plan to mitigate the risk - move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive, or at least launch some of our most precious info into space (or on the moon) so that a future alien civilization will at least know we existed.
And once again, by your proposed model to fund science. How are we even going to know there's a comet hurling towards earth ?
Gazing out there for neat stuff in the cosmos isn't even a problem in the first place, so it's completely useless by your metric.
>>move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive"
Those are screenwriting scenarios
>>answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
The answers to those questions have allowed governments to, in as far as is realistically possible, have scenarios and structures in place, for actual world-wide calamity events.
>>Try reading.
You make some highly unorthodox points. There's nothing wrong with that in itself; in fact, it's welcomed.
But when people respond to those points and indicate they have no merit (like how research scientists are in it for their own enrichment), being rude and dismissive is not going to convince anyone you're right; quite the contrary.
Actually we can change orbit of comets/asteroids if we know few years ahead of time that they will impact with Earth - by bombarding object with few hundreds kilograms of "metal spheres" we cause small change in energy of object, causing it to deviate from its orbit quite a bit in the long run.
OMG there's comet hurtling toward Earth. We didn't study the problem enough so now the debris from our nukes is going to take out ten land-locked cities, instead of just coastal cities from the tsunami.
The frustration you're feeling is a side-effect of reality. Complex problems are complex.
OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend more money to model the collision! Will insects survive or just single-celled life? Let's spend millions on computer simulations of the collision itself, answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
vs
OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend some money developing a plan to mitigate the risk - move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive, or at least launch some of our most precious info into space (or on the moon) so that a future alien civilization will at least know we existed.
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Obviously, the first case has no merit.