Major diseases haven't been cured yet we continously send things to space?

[Rudkobing]

Finding cures for those diseases takes time.

[Cerus]

Cure a premature birth? OP - you realize that's not a disease that can be cured right?

[vindicatorx]

Can someone please logically explain this foolery to me?

What don't you get? We have mades large strides in some areas on others we haven't. Just because we can go to Mars doesn't mean we have learned how to eradicate disease. Cloning a sheep is relatively easy compared to killing off a virus that is constantly evolving.

[Cerus]

There will never be a cure for cancer because cancer isn't a disease. Cancer is a "they" not an "it".

Cancer is a fascinating subject. <3

Look at you trying to be all smart and failing miserably. Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissue. There are various forms of cancer, colon, breast, skin etc. They're all cancer and all fundamentally the same problem.

[EnclosedOne]

As long as some countries insists on overpopulating the world, we need deadly diseases...

well we're getting closer and closer to a time when antibiotics won't do dick anymore because we've abused the fuck out of them so diseases that were once curable won't be anymore and a lot more people are going to die. it's happening in india right now and a strain of e.coli I think (maybe i'm wrong) that is antibiotic resistant was just found is some poor woman here in the states.
We need to drastically scale back our use of this miracle drug or work on making new ones (which no one is doing right now) or a lot of people are going to end up dying in the future

[Ragnarohk]

Look at you trying to be all smart and failing miserably. Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissue. There are various forms of cancer, colon, breast, skin etc. They're all cancer and all fundamentally the same problem.

Wrong, cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of disease.
It's like saying "infection" is a disease.

Diseases have well defined symptoms. You can't say that a Mesothelioma presents the same symptoms as an Ewing's Sarcoma or a Willms' or a Pheochromocytoma.

Edit: I even checked my 3rd year Medical Pathology textbook. Robbins and Cotran, Pathologic Basis of Disease 8th edition. Chapter 7, page 259. " When will there be a cure for cancer? The answer to this question is difficult, because cancer is not one disease but many disorders that share a profound growth dysregulation"

[Charge me Doctor]

Cancer is also not a conventional disease brought on by a virus, there is likely no realistic cure.

Move your consciousness to a robot body - cancer solved

[bloodmoth13]

I'm not a medical or engineering person but i've never understood this. We send rovers to Mars and people to the moon and space but we haven't cured major diseases over here such as HIV and Cancer. Once you hear a groundbreaking news on a "cure" almost being found, news goes silent on it afterwards. We can clone goats but can't find a cure to premature birth. Can someone please logically explain this foolery to me?

Different fields of science.

A rocket scientist may be just as qualified at curing diseases as a common farmer, forcing him to work in fields he performs poorly in would only serve as a detriment.

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Move your consciousness to a robot body - cancer solved

brain cancer!

[Charge me Doctor]

brain cancer!

I'm not talking about moving your brains into a robot body, you silly, off course you will have robot brains, just get rid of the curse of flesh

[Zeta333]

I'm not a medical or engineering person but i've never understood this. We send rovers to Mars and people to the moon and space but we haven't cured major diseases over here such as HIV and Cancer. Once you hear a groundbreaking news on a "cure" almost being found, news goes silent on it afterwards. We can clone goats but can't find a cure to premature birth. Can someone please logically explain this foolery to me?

because regardless of what we cure or cant cure our future is not on this planet. We do irreparable damage to it every year and will soon exceed our ability to live here without running into population problems.

[Chrno]

I don't know, there's nothing out there worth finding anyways. I mean, the least we'll do is start another war which deals with mining meteorites and asteroids.

ignorance is bliss they say.
haha

[Zvezdichko]

I'm not a medical or engineering person but i've never understood this. We send rovers to Mars and people to the moon and space but we haven't cured major diseases over here such as HIV and Cancer. Once you hear a groundbreaking news on a "cure" almost being found, news goes silent on it afterwards. We can clone goats but can't find a cure to premature birth. Can someone please logically explain this foolery to me?

Greetings.

I'm a scientist, as well as a space journalist.

I can assure you - if we stop our space program and redirect funds to curing AIDS and cancer, they still won't be cured. In order to cure diseases you not only need money. You can give a whole lot of money for medical research, and still make no discovery at all.

In order to make new discoveries, you need to have new horizons. Space is what gives you a new horizon for more discoveries. In fact, space technology gives many spinoffs in other field. Even the failed Beagle 2 mars mission produced a spinoff from an instrument that's now used in hospitals.

But you may ask - why should we wait medical discoveries come out as spinoffs from other fields, like space? Can't we get them directly and fund them directly.

As Neil Tyson explains - the world doesn't work that way. ""Let’s say you’re a thermodynamicist, the world’s expert on heat, and you’re asked to build a better oven. You might invent a convection oven or an oven that’s better insulated or one that permits easier access to its contents. But no matter how much money I give you, you will not invent a microwave oven, because that came from another place. It came from investments in communications, in radar. The microwave oven is traceable to the war effort, not to a thermodynamicist.

That’s the kind of cross-pollination that goes on all the time, and yes, it’s wacky. It’s surprising. There’s no reason it should happen. But it does. And that’s why futurists get it wrong more often than not—they observe current trends and just extrapolate. They don’t see surprises. So they get the picture right for about five years into the future, and they’re hopeless after ten."

[Deleted]

For the most part I tend to be a lurker, as I enjoy observing how much peoples opinions differ, but I might as well hop in right?

Heres where I stand, I can see where OP is comming from, however I can also agree that there is bearly any relation between the two topics. On the one hand we have Space exploration, on the other we have Cancer research. Both are, undoubtedly essential and important. Quite a few technological advances have been made due to Space Research. And quite a few people suffer from cancer, but where are the two related?

As someone previously metioned, im suprised that OP used Space Exploration rather than wars, which is a complete an utter money sink and a waste of human resources.
As far as I am concerned, I believe the proper question would be "Why are we so terrible at allocating our money". I mean lets be honest, the top 5% of the world have more money than some countries. Rather than having that in a private account, why not invest in the public? (I bet someone will quote me and say "Hurr Durr, capitalism is essential", yeah, but thats besides the point)

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As Zvezdicho mentioned literally seconds before me, Even if we were to redirect all our resources to cancer and aids research, we wouldn't be able to cure it most likley, both are diseases which are beyond our current medical development.

P.S.: Zvezdichko means Little Star, which i found hilarious (I assume hes Bulgarian or Macedonian...I'm Bulgarian)

[Zvezdichko]

P.S.: Zvezdichko means Little Star, which i found hilarious (I assume hes Bulgarian or Macedonian...I'm Bulgarian)

I'm Bulgarian

[Xerra]

Seems strange that everyone lumps cancer together... you realize its a mutation of the cells that grows. Its almost natural in a sense and its just our environment that makes us prone to the effects. If you think skin cancer and brain cancer are in the same category then... well that is being silly. You want to cure cancer? Fix the hole in the ozone, ban cigerettes, euthanize those who have a greater than normal predisposition to cancer. Force everyone to have a perfect diet, no excess in alcohol and there you have diminished cancer in the world. Oh and euthanize people over the age of 40 probably as well. humans living for as long as they do was not nature's life span for them so in that time more things can go wrong. But its pretty much impossible to cure it. You would have better luck going all Ghost in a Shell and downloading people's minds into cyber brains in order to cure diseases with people as cyborgs than making some miracle drug that solves nature... Shoot might as well research religion and faith healing for as likely a cure as anything else... pray the cancer away!

[Deleted]

Call it bait as much as you want, I honestly think its an interessting discussion, perhaps if we ignore OPs lack of common sense, and perhaps replace Space Exploration with something truly pointless, something that is a true money sink, i think it would be an even better discussion

[Skroe]

My position is that, as the proto Imperium of Man, we have a right - and further - a responsibility to terraform Mars. It is there that we will make contact with the Omnissiah, and our Techpriests will usher in a new age of technology - it is from Mars that Terra shall craft the Golden Throne. It is upon Mars that we shall build our great Titans and colossal battlecruisers. Mars is the first step we must take to colonizing and terraforming all the galaxy - only then will the Emperor's conquest be sated - only then - when the last Xenos is purged from the last world - will our service end.



Mars had 4 billion years to be a boring rock since its atmosphere died. It's time for it to be fun again.



In a thousand years, when we're generating artificial planet-sized magnetospheres - those bratty children of Mars can look back at our actions and cry about the loss of the Mars that was - but they can also hop in their FTL ships and go check out a similarly barren rock in the next solar system over: we have a few trillion rocks in this galaxy - we need to use some.

Yellowstone isn't a great example - because it implies there is an entire Earth surrounding it full of accessible materials and space that we could be using instead. If Mars was the last Mars-like planet in our galaxy, I could agree to wanting to preserve the inhospitable 'rockness' of it.

Until we reach the farthest star, I claim all these worlds in the name of Mankind Undivided.

Science Fiction psuedo-science aside, I share the sentiment, but forget about the sharing. That's less likely than FTL.

[Zvezdichko]

It's a fact that the budget of Hollywood movies is comparable to some unmanned space projects. Indian Mars Orbiter mission costs less than "The Martian".

Yet nobody complains about how much money is being wasted on these movies (which sometimes, frankly, suck). No, everybody puts 3D glasses and eats popcorns. Nobody complains because wasting time in cinema malls is something THEY enjoy, while rocket science (the real science) could be very boring if not presented in a popular way.

[ati87]

Call it bait as much as you want, I honestly think its an interessting discussion, perhaps if we ignore OPs lack of common sense, and perhaps replace Space Exploration with something truly pointless, something that is a true money sink, i think it would be an even better discussion

What would that be?

Medical and scientific research gets allot of funding and it may not be equal across the board but it's called priorities in the end.

And to the OP, if the US for example is spending money on Nasa what do you think happens to that money?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren...b_3561205.html

Studies estimate a $7-$14 return on investment for every $1 of NASA expenditure, with all of it going directly back into the U.S. Treasury.

The following stuff we got because of space exploration

Aircraft collision-avoidance systems

Cordless power tools

Corrosion resistant coatings for bridges

Digital imaging

Ear thermometers

GPS (global positioning satellites)

Household water filters

Hydroponic plant-growing systems

Implantable pacemakers

Infrared handheld cameras

Kidney dialysis machines

LASIK corrective eye surgery

Memory foam mattresses

Scratch-resistant sunglasses

Safety grooving on pavement

Shoe insoles

Virtual reality

Weather forecasting

http://www.investopedia.com/financia...ploration.aspx

[yoma]

News for you: space exploration and our "sending things into space" are the only things that are allowing this idiotic conversation to take place. They are also the reason the world is connected globally and information is shared from opposite ends of the world instantanesouly, which I would imagine supports scientific research in many sectors, including diseases.

[If you haven't figured out the allusion yet, I'm referring to satellites. Sorry for no spoiler alert tags]