More important, exploring mars or a cure for cancer?

How bout exploring Mars for a cure for cancer. Excellent! *lame air guitar*

Disease research is much more important, Mars exploration will most likely do nothing to help most people. Especially in these troubled economic times, pouring money into the NASA pit will help nobody, whereas disease research (not necessarily cancer) could save countless lives.

There is a cure but they're hiding it because the money is in treating!

I think finding a cure is a more noble cause.
On the other hand though, maybe exploring Mars would lead us to find a cure.

Let's see.

Save dying people vs. playing with moon rocks.

Look, I'm all for explorations to Mars. In fact, I wish the government would pay more for this than the silly war in the middle east. Our military budget is just way too high, but unfortunately it's not going to change.

Save the sick I say.

Huh, Mars just moved into Cancer this week. Not helpful to your post but I find it interesting.

The ongoing "Mars mud" stories culminating in yesterday's NASA announcement are fascinating. I would love to be among the generation that first interacted with alien life (even if that interaction is liable to be nothing more than a robot scraping it into a petri-dish).

As for cancer, it's not one illness. There isn't a single "cure". The research that is already done is overwhelming. A quarter of all research my Faculty undertakes is cancer-related. What we haven't caught onto yet are the reasons why cancer as an illness has become to prevalent. Would people abandon the internal combustion engine, all plastics, aerosol deodorant if it halved the incidence of cancer? I think that's a more important question than Mars vs. Cancer.

To answer it, though, you don't do one thing or the other. You channel funds according to the priorities you've assigned both things.

Forget cancer research, I think of it as population control. We need less people on Earth. Mars all the way.

NASA

Cure for cancer,FUCK mars.

Mars.
<3

Unless researchers want to inject massive amounts of diamond dust into cancer paitents, more money won't help much. It takes time ...not more money.

screw mars aint nothing but a rock to me, save lives bro

theres nothing on mars it would be stupid to even bother

First...we don't need to go to Mars. We need to go to the moon and the asteroid belt and mine the wealth of resources there (sure, there's probably stuff on Mars...but probably isn't a "very likely" the way the moon and the belt are)

Second, laser technology is being fine tuned for cancer treatment and has proven fairly successful. What we need is for government funding to be allocated toward R&D on the new tech (like cancer killing lasers and spacecraft lifting lasers, etc) and upgrading our infrastructure (as was promised).

Third, we need to phase out on all our conflict areas (we're in more than just Iraq and Afghanistan, people), rely on assassins and destabilization methods for dealing with planet-threatening tyrants (ala the North African Revolution), and cut our defense budget (I say this as an Army soldier).

I was just thinking about that! They give NASA billions of dollars to explore Mars to look for "life", while here on Earth there are people dying from starvation, cancer, aids, etc. Seriously?

Mars is boring. Just a big, red pile of sand.

NASA! People have been using the "boldly going no where joke" since the start of the company. If it wasn't for the space race we couldn't have the communication tech we depend on, we wouldn't have the information age. The Feds should fund NASA, the private investors are only interested in a space hotel.