140
Universe’s mysteries may never be solved because of Trump’s NASA cuts, experts say
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
140 points (88.5% liked)
science
18776 readers
1187 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Never" is a long time.
I mean, screw Trump killing NASA, but what they're saying is "they will never be solved... by the US".
Or maybe they're going all the way exceptionalist and assume they're the only ones who ever could. They are not.
I guess it's "never" if it slows down threat detection enough to get us all wiped by an asteroid, but that's a bit of a leap.
The US has enjoyed a commanding lead in the aerospace industry with few countries having kept or caught up over the years. What this means in practice is that we have an enormous base of knowledge here and people that are experts in very specific subject matter. Other countries (with maybe the exception of China) coordinate and consult the US to accomplish pretty much any non-US space mission you've heard of. If you blow that all into the wind as a result of these budget cuts, you are setting back global progress in space and earth science by decades. Sure, many of these people will continue their work in some other facility or country, but a large percentage will opt to leave the industry and those skills will be diminished or lost. It might not be an extinction level event, but it is the kind of setback that you do not recover from in a reasonable period of time.
Hey, like I said, screw Trump nuking NASA.
But, again, never is a long time. All of that is true, but even if this sets back space research and exploration thirty years that slack will be picked up.
Being realistic, though, the goal here isn't so much defunding NASA but letting Trump's corpo supporters privatize it, so their idea is to start making money out of all that talent and expertise being let loose. I certainly hope that a bunch of that slack goes to other public space agencies and the US becomes less relevant and loses that commanding lead, myself.
I mean... Never by our current civilization.
With climate change ramping up, less and less will be devoted to space and exploration, and more resources focused on maintaining order and keeping people fed and working.
So unless the rest of the world can rally together in the next 50 years, we, our current civilization, will be likely nearly wiped out in the coming centuries. Not totally, I don't think. But modern society will not survive.
Now, I fully believe the rest of the world is completely capable of doing this, the question is can enough people in positions of power put aside petty differences and work for the betterment of humanity. Because clearly my government won't.
The titles is definitely click bait, and if they really believe it they're delusional.
Right.
I swear, Americans are so utterly convinced that they are the main character in the full arc of the planet. Every American I know is sure we are two days away from the apocalypse (alternate a US civil war) and entirely unwilling to take any steps to prevent it. It's kind of shocking.
I mean, those things are bad, and reward structures are what they are, so global change is hard to enact, but yeah, no, the fall of the US empire is probably not a global apocalypse.
More likely than not a messed up planet in the midst of a global recession will see significant challenges with the US as a superpower remnant very much in the line of modern Russia, because hey, the cleptocracy comes standard.
That's not the end of civilization by a lot. And just so we're clear, even as the USSR was crumbling they had a working space program. The rest of the world can keep strapping things to rockets.
And that's assuming that the real goal, which again seems to be to privatize the sector and hand it over to rich idiots with delusions of grandeur, doesn't refocus on this. Lord knows Musk will obnoxiously babble about multiplanetary civilization to anybody who will listen like nobody else has read Dune or something.