Allan Milne Lees
1 min readJun 8, 2021

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People aren't hardwired to explore. It's been estimated from DNA evidence than 99% of everyone who's ever lived did so within a 8km radius of their birthplace. People move because of famine, war, and other exogenous stressors. Next, there's absolutely no reason why space exploration should involve sending people into space; it's an absurdity resulting from an unhealthy Sci-Fi fixation. For a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on temporarily pushing people out of Earth's gravity well, we could build hundreds of robotic missions that can do infinitely more than any human could accomplish. We could therefore acquire knowledge that will enhance our understanding of the universe in which we live, while directing the funds left over from not being squandered on manned space missions toward far better ends. The issue is therefore not A/B but a/B, where A is our current obsession with thrusting humans into space while little-a is the rational pursuit of knowledge via robotic missions.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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