I feel like if the Project Hail Mary crisis happened today, the response would be more like what happened in Don't Look Up.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I watched that movie with the expectation of watching a comedy but I was left with the realization that it's 100% what would happen nowadays
I watched the whole movie thinking it was about COVID. Afterwards, my wife mentioned it was about climate change. I suppose the reality is, we're just awful at responding to any large threat.
Why I refused to watch it. See I didn't see it as a comedy but a tragedy.
It's definitely a tragedy. It has some humor to it, mostly things like poking fun at people who claim that the planet killing asteroid is going to boost the economy.
I think it's with a watch.
Of all the stuff happening in PHM, Stratt is the most unrealistic part
I re-watched the movie a few months ago, and I had a similar realization: it was quite depressing to see a depiction of NASA that is now entirely lost to us.
If someone is left behind, he will die anyway whatever the amount of money thrown to his rescue. Mars isn't the Moon, it's a much more hostile environment, even just the journey from the Earth to Mars is a much more hostile environment.
My real wonder would be if the majority of Americans would okay the amount of money it would cost to save that one man?
Depends where the money is coming from. Military budget? Absolutely. Being taken from social services and whatnot? No. The amount of money that would cost could save so many more lives if it was used for things here. Choosing to spend it on saving an astronaut rather than on, for example, feeding homeless people and distributing medication and disaster relief is like a version of the trolley problem where the trolley is already heading for the 1 person, but you have the option of switching it to the other track to kill more people if you want to. I'd have a really hard time calling that moral by any metric.
Those are already arguments for why NASA and space programs shouldn't exist in the first place.
I remember watching something about the space race, and there was a clip of public opinion during the time of the first mission to the moon, where a man complained that the money should've been used to improve the lives of poor Americans instead.
Regardless, for the scenario in The Martian, if money is already being spent and going to continue being spent on space missions in the future, I think you can rationalize it as using money for another or next space mission. They would still gain knowledge from what they had to do to pull off that rescue, so it's not a complete waste of funds for a mission either.
On the morality point, I'd argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we're assigning monetary value to human lives. That includes both people in imminent danger, requiring expensive emergency services, and people suffering slower, persistent risks like hunger that require sustained support.
On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives.
Resources are finite, though. If rescuing one person requires, say, 10 units of resources, but rescuing 10 others require only 1 unit of resources, isn't choosing to rescue the 1 over the 10 already placing relative value on human lives, by declaring them to be 10x as valuable as the others? This is obviously operating on the assumption that we don't have the resources to rescue everyone who needs rescuing.
In that scenario, I agree the pragmatic choice is to save the majority.
But many situations tend to be complex and aren't as clear as a trolley problem, so I want to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a false dilemma when there's possibly more than two options.
Well I think the opposite.
Saving that one single person is great propaganda. Donald would definitely throw one million people under the bus in order to save that single individual
See the recent medicaid cut to make a few hundred billionaire friends happier/richer