I’m listening to a podcast about the potential for life of some kind on Venus (due to the recent detection of phosphene gas). The scientists are calling for an investment in comprehensive missions to Venus at a cost of $billions. What’s the return on that type of monetary investment?
In: Technology
So one of the first things to remember is that the money isn’t exactly fired off into space, most of it is spent on engineers/scientists and the money makes its way back into the economy.
We also get indirect returns in the form of new technologies that are developed as part of the mission, these then make their way into normal use. A great example of this are solar panels. These were mainly developed so that we could have a source of power for spaceships, but now you see them everywhere.
Then we get long term, kind of indistinct returns. Developing the technology and doing a mission to Venus like this (or really any major mission) is going to move our species closer to being a multi-planetary civilization. This is something that is still probably beyond our lifetimes, but it is a crucial step in ensuring that we aren’t wiped out by some random event (like an asteroid). Each of these missions is bringing us closer.
All these reasons I’ve given can be applied to almost any space mission. But for this case specifically, the prospect of finding life elsewhere in our solar system is so exciting because it is the first time we will have ever found something else like this. It shouldn’t be thought of as something that will give a return, but rather as something that will help us to understand the universe better.
There is probably very little direct monetary return on the investment. The return value of scientific missions is usually measured in the discoveries they are making. This may at some point in the future have some monetary value but that is the wrong way to look at it. If we send another mission to Venus we might be able to find more about its atmosphere and how these gasses that were recently discovered is formed. What data we return and what discoveries we might find is down to the equipment, the mission profile and what is there to be discovered. So there are lots of options for future missions and we can not say exactly what the return will be but there will be returns on the investment and the more we invest the more scientific discoveries will be returned.
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