>>12800668Actual scientists don't care about NASA or space exploration. At least not in the same sense as a lot of the general public. Actually space exploration is a cool idea, but the shit going on right now is just for show. We still have more to learn here on earth before we can seriously start exploring space, although it's certainly good to devote some time and money to space exploration. The people who are actually into this stuff are mostly normies, Reddit soitards, and tech/engineering people.
That being said, I am super passionate about a lot of 'mundane' stuff, but it's generally either (1) very general scientific topics that have significant historical and philosophical interest to the broader intellectual,community (e.g. consciousness, evolution, realism, etc.), or (2) mostly technical problems that are specifically related to my area of expertise, namely combinatorics, applied math, and mathematical biology.
If can't pretend to know anything about space exploration. It's not anywhere in the realm of what I study, but from what I've heard and my very limited understanding, the two real areas where space is actually a little interesting, is looking for signs of organic chemistry on other planets and moons in our solar system, and using telescopes to orchestrate large scale experiments to test relativity and shit about dark matter, dark energy, etc. The shit about colonies on Mars or the moon is just a way to appease normies and get grants for defense contractors in FL and TX, who then use this money to lobby for more grants and more funding. Don't get me wrong, I suppose funding science and engineering, but I think we should support individual labs and individual scientists, especially the ones who DON'T have funding from big tech, big pharma, the military, etc. I support decentralized science, not big science.
