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Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.
In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.
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Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization “Will Inevitably Fail”
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @12:53PM (3 children)
>Joe Public gets roads which are vastly more valuable infrastructure than what NASA produces.
Are they, though? Compared on dollar cost?
The NASA programs pushed digital computing forward at least a decade, possibly more. Materials science, etc. The arguments are old, well worn, and all too true. What is the modern cellular communication network worth compared with 1980s land-lines? It costs less to maintain, and presents orders of magnitude greater value. The only thing that comes close to NASA ROI is military research when it eventually trickles into the public sector, and it's a distant second - in no small part due to the lack of transparency of military R&D programs.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:13PM (2 children)
Of course they are. That's an absurd question to ask. And even if you consider space theater a near infinite value activity, those roads (and other transportation networks like railroads and air flight) are immensely valuable to generating space activity. Meanwhile NASA's space activity itself has remarkably low value to generating future space activity. SLS for a glaring example will actually defund a lot of future space activity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:55PM (1 child)
Seems to me that SLS was largely based on a (cleverly moronic) executive order from a lame duck that the ethnic minority incoming executive didn't have the political clout to correct, in the reality of the more near term shit shows he was given to clean up.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2022, @01:57AM
That's the space activity you're lauding. The highest goals are merely political theater.