India's MOM Mars mission makes final course correction India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has made its first course correction since June and is now on track to to arrive in orbit around the red planet on September 24th. Known to Indians as “Mangalyaan”, the craft is famous for having left the launchpad, and Earth, last November for the tiny sum of US$74m. The craft has since …
Visited India very recently, I cannot get my head around the fact that they can send a probe to Mars yet children as young as 3 are begging in the streets?
On the other hand
I cannot get my head round the fact that here in the UK they want to build a high speed rail link to shave a few minutes off the travel time and at the same time they are cutting benefits to the 'poor'.
Being poor in India is a very different thing to being poor here.
Newsflash: India itself gives aid to other countries. I.E. Sri Lanka. Stop thinking in terms of 'us the rich world aiding the less fortunate', it's all about politics and diplomacy (which is something one might not aprove of but is how things are done in the real world...)
This argument is nothing new. At the height of the space race in 1970, there was a hit song in America called "Whitey On The Moon" - the point being that poor black people were paying taxes and getting not much share of the pie, while the government spent billions putting (white) men on the moon.
I've got sympathy with anyone in a position of poverty who sees these things as an expensive waste, but I don't believe that cutting research programmes would suddenly mean "yay, no more poor people". In the long term, it probably has the opposite effect.
Hmm. To paraphrase, the original post said "there's poverty in India, so why spend money on space missions?".
My post said "there was poverty in 1970s America, and people said the same thing at the time".
Failing to see the strawman there. Just pointing out an analogous situation.
India is by no means poor and like RikC mentioned, India doesn’t need aid. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/9061844/India-tells-Britain-We-dont-want-your-aid.html.
Coming back to the poverty in question, let’s look at a simple analogy. You (India) are the bread winner of a poor family and you have only £1 on you. Given a choice between using £1 for a feast or feeding everyone just about enough using £0.5 and investing the remaining £0.5 on a plant that would help you grow stuff you can sell and make more money, what will you do?
Lets all be practical, priorities are different and every problem cannot be approached in the same way!
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