World is Green

The Slashdot story ““In a pathbreaking event heralding its arrival as a space power with capability to recover an orbiting satellite, India today successfully brought back a spacecraft to earth, giving a new impetus to the proposed manned mission to space in the next decade.”

This created some interesting discussions from the Slashdot crowd.

It did bring the regular jokes but also some serious discussion.

mfh writes: Now we can have cheap interstellar labour!
Anonymous: Holy Cow!

Jokes apart,

Udderly asks:

I was in India last year; the poverty and malnutrition [wfp.org] in the outlying areas is simply heart-breaking. Worse than anywhere else that I’ve been. Call me old-fashioned, but before a gov’t starts acting on all of their world-stage aspirations, shouldn’t they feed their citizens?

It may seem a fair question to ask, but there were some interesting observations.

Unother responds:

Yes, but you are presuming a causal linkage between the two if you suggest this (i.e. Money for Space = No Money for Food for the Poor).

I’m certain that a few things are on the mind of those who advocate the Space Program for India:

1. India’s borders with the Happy Happy Joy Joy Club members, Pakistan and China
2. “Rising Tide” Theory (lifts all boats)
3. Ensuring India has its own capacity to commence further Industrialization, removing some of its dependencies on “First World” technology and power.

In the end, I think India is reaching for the stars to make sure there is a way for those people to be fed.

And continues:

I’m sorry, but that’s silly. Money is not a “zero-sum game”. You are thinking of “money” in a pure balance-sheet, consumption-level sense. Remember, money is a carrier of value, a representation. If the value of a thing increases ten-fold, do you still pay the same in money for it?

As an example, let’s say that by India being able to launch its own satellites it is able to improve its communications grids and make great savings in the cash sense, without relying on Western launchpads and satellites.

Don’t you think they’re saving money in the long run? Don’t you also suppose that by saving that money, they can re-invest those savings in programs that assist the poor?

geobeck responds:

Let’s go back to 1499. European countries were launching voyages of exploration, seeking out new trade routes and discovering new countries. Guess who else was doing that? China. Until their government decided that they should fix their problems at home before spending excessive resources on maritime exploration.

So where is China today compared to Europe in terms of domestic poverty? If you’re going to stay at home until your domestic problems are solved, you’re going to stay at home forever.

140mandak262jamuna writes:

Improving communications is so important for the agriculture sector. So many poor Indian farmers harvest their perishable crop and bring it to the market to sell at market price manipulated by the local agents/middlemen. Knowing what is the price in the town 15 km to the south vs the price in 14 km to west will mean a difference of 30% in revenue to the guy tending a half acre plot growing eggplants.

ChrisA90278 responds:

The problem with this argument is in India that experiment only cost maybe 30 cents per person. Even if the total cost was $500M there are so many people that when you spread the cost out it becomes affordable.

Conversely if you took the money and used it to buy food it would work out to less than US$1 per poor person. Giving money or food away does not address the root cause of poverty The other thing is that the Indian government did not simply burn up the money. The spent it all. If a space experiment costs $500M then all of that $500 went to some scientific institution, university or the like. Al places that they need to support. Money
spent on space is not spent in space it is spent on the ground and goes back into the economy

Some related comments,

udderly gives a simple test of poverty and hunger:

While anyone can cook up stats about hunger, there is a simple test that can indicate the true level of hunger in an area: offer a half-eaten sandwich (or whatever) to someone in the street and see the reaction. In the inner-city area near us where I serve, that will at least get you cussed out, if not get the crap beaten out of you. However, we have had six-year-old children at an outdoor restaurant in Oaxaca, Mexico, gratefully eat the last bite of our salad. Similar results in the countries listed above.

be-fan on welfare and India’s aspirations:

So after they feed their people today, what do they do tomorrow? Welfare is a luxury for countries who have enough money that they don’t need to make hard choices between economic progress and social well-being. For a developing nation, spending money on welfare for today’s population is a sure way to perpetuate poverty to future generations. Investing in the economy, on the other hand, at least gives the hope that fewer people in the future will need welfare, and moreover that the government will be able to better afford welfare for those who still do need it.

There is also something to be said for the importance of a nation having ambitions on the world stage. Let me use as an example Bangladesh, where my parents were born, and which I still visit on occasion. Bangladesh has no ambition as a nation. Bengalis have no national pride to speak of, aside from a generally provincial sense of moral superiority. Their poverty is something that doesn’t just manifest itself in the lack of food on the table, but something that infects their very mindset. They accept the state of affairs in their country, the political corruption and the social instability, because they lack the pride to believe that they are entitled to something better. Of the various problems the country
faces, this lack of pride is far worse than flooding or hunger or disease combined. India presents a very stark contrast. If you look at the villages of India, you’ll see the same hunger and disease you see in the villages of Bangladesh. But Indians have a great pride in their country, and in its long history of civilization. Their ambition drives them to improve their economy, invest in their infrastructure, and preserve their democracy. It is this ambition that makes it likely that in another couple of generations, India won’t have to choose between improving their country and feeding the hungry. There is no similar hope for Bangladesh.

gd23ka links to an important question:

“Feed your children India!
(Score:0, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22, @09:16AM (#17709874)
why dont these heartless hindus use some of their engineers to design
sanitation systems, water purification plants, food preservation
technologies etc? This sorry excuse of a nation has the world’s largest
concentration of hungry people without access to clean water or toilet
facilities. Shame on them!”

He does have a point however. “The World’s Largest Democracy” ™
India spends a lot of effort on developing military capabilities. Feeding their people is obviously not a priority.

I find Slashdot very interesting. You can waste a lot of your time reading there but sometimes you can get some valuable insight and there is always humour.

John Schubert, the former chairman and managing director of Esso Australia, says, Australia has reached a ‘tipping point’ on climate change.

The Commonwealth Bank chairman credits the drought, extreme weather disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in the US and Cyclone Larry in northern Queensland, record global temperatures in 2005 and former US President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth with dispelling any remaining doubts on the threat of climate change.

“I have to say that the Australian community reached a tipping point about September-October, over about a six-week period, when it was just extremely clear that the Australian community bought in that climate change was a real problem,” he told The Australian.

“If there is one piece of fact that I was shown it was probably the ice-core data that shows 650,000 years of both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and there’s just a hugely close correlation between them and it’s pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that the carbon dioxide levels are due to fossil fuel burning, largely,” he said.

The respected company director, who sits on the board of mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton, has now joined calls for Australia to implement a carbon-trading scheme. His push comes just one day after BHP’s great rival, Rio Tinto, said the federal Government should move ahead with emissions trading even if major polluters such as China and the US refused to be involved.

With more and more corporations and company executives acknowledging climate change due to fossil fuels, the time has come for the government to supply the required policy.

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