There’s a fake bus stop in front of a Düsseldorf nursing home to trap Alzheimers patients who “wanted to return to their homes and families but had forgotten that in many cases neither existed any longer,” the Telegraph reports.

“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

Proponents of federal funding for space exploration often argue that if it wasn’t for public finding, private donations would never have provided sufficient support to land a man on the moon.

Great minds, notably the eloquent astronomer Carl Sagan, have unapologetically maintained that NASA could have discovered many of its findings here on earth if the agency’s budget was diverted to earthly projects. I am referring, of course, not to space exploration but to the research conducted in space that brought us Velcro and the like.

But when it comes to space exploration, there is little evidence supporting the need for humans to be in space in the first place. We like the idea of it, it feels good, but its really not all that necessary. Machines simply do a better job for much cheaper. For the most part, the bulk of space exploration and research can be done mechanically.

Sagan and his colleagues maintain that the point of space exploration is not about improving the human condition, it is about expanding human understanding. Space exploration is not a profitable venture. The human species has just begun to open its eyes to the limitless beauty of the cosmos. We should therefore cherish being alive during what is merely the beginning of our serious inquiry into the cosmos.

But since space exploration essentially attracts no profits, they argue, government must therefore bear the burden of its costs. They view this in the same realm as art: unprofitable yet important for society. It is this final point that rubs me the wrong way.

There are lots of positive ventures that don’t draw profit. But it doesn’t follow that government must therefore support them. Private donations regularly, even if they provide a smaller dollar amount, buttress non-profitable ventures better than public funding.

So how true is it that space exploration needs public funding? Earlier this week Alex Tabarrok posted on the history and future of private space exploration. He quotes Alex MacDonald, a NASA research economist:

For the majority of its history, space exploration in America has been funded privately. The trend of wealthy individuals, such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Robert Bigelow, and Elon Musk, devoting some of their resources to the exploration of space is not an emerging one, it is the long-run, dominant trend which is now re-emerging.

MacDonald provides a list of major observatories and their costs (click to enlarge).  Privately funded observatories are in bold.

He points out that “private spending on space exploration is even more impressive when we scale by personal wealth.”

…rather than scaling the expenditure as a share of the total resources of the U.S. economy, the expenditure can be scaled as a share of the resources of the individuals who undertook the projects. James Lick was the richest man in California and the Lick Observatory expenditure represented 17.5% of his entire estate. The equivalent share of the wealth of the richest man in California today, Larry Ellison, is $3.9 billion dollars, approximately four times higher than the GDP equivalent share.

I want to be clear here. Not supporting public funding of something is not the same of not supporting it. I support space exploration, I truly believe in its importance. But arguments that it requires public funding for its survival seem to be dubious.

An important milestone:

The news that China may now be the world biggest energy customer comes based on analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA). According to the IEA, China overtook the U.S. in energy consumption sometime last year.

Its stories like these that make me proud to be a human being. We are amazing.