The price tag attached to the New Horizons space probe weighs more than the actual planet.
At $720 million, Pluto was certainly not a cheap vacation (especially since the probe didn’t even bother to get a hotel room and park itself on the beach for a few days). New Horizons costly trip to Pluto is the equivalent of you spending ten years and a million dollars hitchhiking to Washington DC, simply so you can drive by and take a picture on your Nokia flip phone. Many people would probably say that the trip to Pluto was too costly, but actually those high quality photos New Horizons took will be extremely valuable to scientists. All kidding aside, traveling to Pluto and finally exploring the furthest reaches of our Solar System will create a new dawn of space exploration and continue to propel us forward.
It’s fortunate that NASA has very deep pockets to fuel such a mission, but it turns out, the exorbitant price tag is nothing compared to some of the stuff we’ve wasted our money on right here on Earth.
7. Daylight Savings Time ($434 million-$1.7 billion per year)
How could daylight savings time possibly cost more than going to Pluto? If you’ve ever experienced daylight savings time, as I’m sure you have, you’ve probably experienced the inconvenience of it. You or one of your co-workers forgets about it and is late to a key meeting, or you miss your flight as a result. Say you’re waking up an hour earlier than usual and you’re exhausted while sitting in traffic. Since you aren’t paying attention, you get into a fender bender. While it’s hard to place an exact figure on how much money it costs us each year estimate range to almost $2 billion, according to the Things That Cost More Than Space Tumblr page.
6. Pirates of the Caribbean Films ($1.04 Billion)
Hollywood has shelled out a lot for the sake of Captain Jack Sparrow. There was $140 million spent to make The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), $225 million to make Dead Man’s Chest (2006), $300 million to make At World’s End (2007), and $378.5 million for On Stranger Tides (2011). In 2017, we can expect Dead Men Tell No Tales.
5. Trump Taj Mahal ($1.1 Billion)
That’s right, the man currently running for President with the campaign slogan, “make America great again” poured over a billion dollars into the world’s most expensive casino, according to The New York Times. The facility itself cost $500 million. The huge building covers 17 acres and was dubbed the “8th wonder of the world,” by its publicists. The costly business venture in Atlantic City was Trumps third casino in the gambling capital of New Jersey.
4. The Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium (1.2 Billion)
The Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium features a max capacity of 105,000 people and the world’s fourth largest TV screen. Completed in 2009, Jerry World could have financed the trip to Pluto, plus another trip to Neptune if we’re counting at a dollar per mile rate (NASA’s 3 billion mile trip to Pluto cost lest than 50¢ per mile).
3. ATM Fees ($8 Billion)
Those $2 charges here, and $3 charges there really begin to add up when the entire population of America has to contribute. According to 2010 data, Americans completed about $2.1 billion fee-carrying ATM transactions that year, at an average cost of about $3.85, which totals just over $8 billion.
2. Spam emails, $21.58 billion
Information Week shared the toll that spam took on America in 2004. The National Technology Readiness Survey estimated that the roughly 170 million adults who were online that year spent three minutes a day deleting spam, for a lost productivity cost in the tens of billions for that one year.
1. Hangovers, $160 billion-ish
The CDC in 2011 published a study (based on 2006 data) that put the cost of excessive alcohol consumption that year at $223.5 billion. Some 72% of that, or about $160 billion, “largely resulted from losses in workplace productivity.” That Atlantic’s take “suggests that the economic drag from hangovers is about $160 billion.”
[Featured Image Credit: Lunar and Planetary Institute via Flickr]