Isaac Asimov’s 1969 Letter About Why to Spend Money on Space Exploration

28322_isaac_asimov (2)

Asimov wrote in 1969, three days after the historic Apollo 11 moon landing:

I got a letter from a reader who wrote to berate me on the expense of the space program and telling me I ought to be ashamed for not spending the money on the cities and the poor.

I wrote back to say that the people of the United States spend exactly as much money on booze alone as on the space program. And if you add tobacco, drugs, cosmetics, and worthless patent medicines (and chewing gum, suggests Carl Sagan), then we spend far more on these useless-to-harmful substances than on space exploration.

(Asimov’s numbers are actually off – the real numbers were – and are – even more extreme, to the tune of $50 billion a year on alcohol compared to NASA’s entire annual budget of $18 billion).

I should also note, however, that none of this should be construed as an attack on the critical importance of alcohol to the proper functioning of our civilization.

Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Life in Letters via Brain Pickings.

This entry was posted in Culture, History by . Bookmark the permalink.

About

I design video games for a living, write fiction, political theory and poetry for personal amusement, and train regularly in Western European 16th century swordwork. On frequent occasion I have been known to hunt for and explore abandoned graveyards, train tunnels and other interesting places wherever I may find them, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I am preparing to set off a zombie apocalypse. Nothing that will stand up in court, at least. I use paranthesis with distressing frequency, have a deep passion for history, anthropology and sociological theory, and really, really, really hate mayonnaise. But I wash my hands after the writing. Promise.

Leave a Reply