I’d do it! I’d do it! I would give my every earthy possession and a few non-vital organs to go up in space (as long as the spaceship had windows). I am seriously peeved that I may never see casual space travel. There are some companies that are trying to offer it, but I don’t trust 'em.
“…There must have been some magic
In that Phrygian cap he wore,
For when they placed it on their heads
His initiates were reborn…” Happy Mithrasmas, all!
I am not an expert on what’s out there in space. So here’s the opinion of an ordinary person:
NASA needs to keep up the work they’re doing because it’s really flippin’ cool. I mean, it’s outer space!
I may not understand it all, but someday my daughter will have to do a Science Fair project, and maybe she’ll decide to do a project about space. Maybe she’ll think it’s really cool. Maybe she’ll keep studying it. Maybe she’ll end up with a job as an astronaut, or a scientist, or a doctor.
That’s a common person’s take on the whole thing.
Right, because aside from a horribly misinterpreted photo, there is absolutely nothing scientifically, geographically or topographically remarkable about it. Mars missions stand to gain much more, scientifically, by studying the poles, or old water basins, former volcanic areas, etc.
Only because of the, again, horribly misinterpreted Viking photos.
Yes. I mean, if I can accept hexagonal rock columns forming by coincidence in Scotland, I can accept Cydonia. Besides, what’s so remarkable about these? These are from the 1998 MGS photos which, let’s all remember, were taken at a resolution much higher than the 1976 Viking photos.:
http://www.aadm.com/cydonia/my98face.gif
Doesn’t look too compelling to me.
I’m as sure as I’m going to get.
Could it be? Sure. It could also be that dogs are made of chocolate, but it is extremely unlikely. Just what, in your mind, distinguishes a natural pattern from an unnatural pattern? And what makes Cydonia unnatural?
Does this look natural or unnatural?
http://ukdb.web.aol.com/hutchinson/encyclopedia/images/0340N074.gif
How about this?
Well, I think the MGS photos are pretty conclusive, but whatever.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
In response to my question (which no one respoonded to) I would much rather be in outerspace than deep seawater. I get freaked out by oceans – even Discovery Channel photography. But I would go into outerspace in a heartbeat. I dunno, it’s just beyond cool! As far as the Mars face goes, I think it’s accidental. No big message to us earthlings or anything. It’s a random pattern.
I vote for outerspace too. All that water pressing down over my head would freak me out at first.
I would do either or both. Deep-sea exploration amazes me, especially all the work done by Robert Ballard with various wrecks like Titanic and Bismarck. And I would pay nearly any dollar amount to go into space; double that to go to the Moon.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
I’d like to see the sparkly things that the astronauts saw in the movie. Nobody ever came up with a good explanation of what they were. Also, I think weightlessness would be about the coolest thing ever! The next best thing to flying!
If by “sparkly things the astronauts saw in the movie”, you mean the mysetious “fireflies” that John Glenn saw swarming around his Mercury space capsule –
Well … somebody did come up with a good explanation of what they were. That somebody was Scott Carpenter, who went into space on the very next Mercury mission right after John Glenn.
He discovered that the “fireflies” were tiny flash-frozen droplets of water from his last overboard urine dump, which were catching the sunlight.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Every time I hear some mallet head grousing about spending “their money” on the space program, they are invariablly the same conservative Repugnicans that want to spend my money on education vouchers to send their kids to segregated religious schools. That wouldn’t be you, would it Eddie?
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
Isn’t TANG reason enough? Seriously, though. The space program is more than taking pictures of crap in the sky. We reap a lot from the byproducts of space exploration, like Velcro, for example. 
One week only! Special holiday sig line:
“HO! HO! HO! Now it’s time for me to get jolly on your naughty asses!” – Futurama Santa
Well, as I scan this thread I see the expected personal attacks, and pretty much the same tired arguments I expected, such as:
Space exploration is cool - I want it !
Think of all the oh so excellent byproducts of space research (oh wow…velcro!!!)
It isn’t really all THAT much money is it?
Some day we’re going to need to colonize another planet or the moon because we are screwing up the earth so badly.
Well I will address these arguments:
Space exploration is cool
Well…so what? That is only your personal opinion. That doesn’t mean that the nation must make an enormous commitment of tax dollars just because you think something is interesting. I think something else is interesting and cool yet I don’t ask the government to pay for my interest. Neither should you. Pay for your own damn curiosity.
Well, so far I’ve seen velcro and teflon cited as technologies stemming from space research. These are not what I would call societally critical technologies. Further, there is no reason to think that they would not have been discovered in some other context. Just because an invention was discovered in a space research program does NOT preclude its discovery in another context.
$13.5 BILLION dollars is a great deal of money. It’s $50 to each one of us and I for one don’t care to have it cavalierly thrown at a space exploration program which I don’t support and which the great majority of citizens of this country can’t possibly understand.
Some day we’re going to need to colonize another planet or the moon because we are screwing up the earth so badly
If we are poisoning the earth, let’s fix the earth. Each of you presumably intelligent individuals here knows how improbable, fantastically expensive and futile it would be to attempt to colonize another celestial body in any near term. We are no closer to having a propulsion system which would make this possible than we were thirty years ago.
And as far as the personal attacks go - I am not a “troll” - you smug posters who like to throw that term around can throw it somewhere else. The fact that I have thrown mud at your sacred cow does NOT make me a troll…or unimaginative…or a conservative Republican…or any of the other adjectives sent my way. I just DARED to disagree with you…to raise an issue you find provocative. And rightly so, given the defensiveness of many of the responses. I’ve always found that defensiveness comes from having to defend a relatively indefensible position.
I open my mouth and the whole world turns smart.
I guess “because it’s there, and we’ve never been there” isn’t a good enough reason for exploration anymore, eh? That’s too bad. It was always good enough for me.
We do have to pay taxes. We don’t have a choice as to where our tax dollars are spent. If I could designate, I would. Oh yeah, in a minute. Then I could send my tax money to NASA, and you wouldn’t have to.
But we don’t have that option. So I have to settle for knowing that some of my tax money is funding the space program and other things I like. I can live with that.
Why ought NASA to be funded?
I note at once that, by the strict libertarian argument, NASA ought not to be funded by tax revenues. Of course, by the strict libertarian argument, no institution ought to be funded by tax revenues (I note that this is an entirely different matter from whether space exloration should be conducted). The gripping hand is that the strict libertarian argument supposes and imposes an atomistic individualism which has never been demonstrated in human history.
Libertarians often make the mistake (surprising given their self-proclaimed philosophy) of confusing statutes with case law, common law, and custom. Iceland and Ireland were both polities that many have associated with libertarianism, and even anarchy, but both were slaveholding societies. Anarchocapitalistic feudalism is an almost trivial invention (indeed, it is arguable that feudalism is practical anarchocapitalism).
Now, leaving aside the libertarian argument that neither NASA in particular, nor the U.S. Federal government as a whole, ought to exist, why ought NASA to be funded?
In any business, we note the existence of “barriers to entry”. In some cases, these barriers may be wholly artificial, as, e.g., becoming a taxi driver in NYC. In others, the barriers may be those that are not arbitrarily imposed by government. One of these, perhaps the one that all others can be reduced to, is capital requirement. To set up a new “e-business”, the amount of capital needed is very small: only enough to buy a server and a dedicated phone line, and to set a web site (this leaves out the actual “business” aspect, i.e., providing some good or service that another person wants badly enough to pay for, but that aspect also seems to have been forgotten by many of the founders of “e-businesses”). Thus, there are IPOs for new “dot-com” enterprises every week. OTOH, the capital requirements for settiing up, say, a new automobile manufacturer are enormous. We therefore haven’t seen a serious attempt to do so in some years (whether DeLorean was ever serious is left as a problem for the student).
Now, there can be, and are, many opinions as to whether any space-based business (aside from LEO satellites) would ever be profitable. All agree, however, that the capital requirements for such a business would be considerable. One of the enormous capital requirements of such an endeavor would be the development of suitable vehicles for launch, return, and landing (these are not the same activities, and need not be carried out by the same vehicle). We might, therefore, reasonably charge NASA with the applied research for creating such methods. This would be fully congruent with past government support for roads, canals, and railroads. We note immediately that, in the past, the government seldom, if ever, actually administered the transportation systems that it had created, and it may reasonably argued that NASA, having done the development, ought not to be involved in the day-to-day running of a space transport system.
Having developed such a system, it is unreasonable to suppose that it would be used for exploration. Contrary to the current myth, the Merchant Adventurers of the Renaissance did not break new ground, but established their trading posts on shores that government-sponsored expeditions had previously explored. Of course, the peculiar combination of libertarianism and luddism that insists that, had Columbus not been financed by the Spanish crowns, European economic and political could have been confined to Europe, leaving in the Americas in a (fondly imagined but wholly imaginary) state of ecological harmony will not find this a positive precedent. Indeed, we might imagine that the objection to a space program is a sort of alternative-time-line insistence that the Western Hemisphere not be revealed to the prying eyes of the high-tech satellite.
If exploration occurs, we can imagine that pure research will not be much retarded. Although various corporations (notably IBM, AT&T, and Xerox) have, in their time, advanced the cause of pure research, organizations that must, by their nature, pay attention to the bottom line in the next quarterly report are not ideally situated to carry such research out (nor, it must be said at once, are goverments that have to pay attention to opinion polls and frequent re-election campaigns). Indeed, exploration and pure research are almost inextricably linked; every exploration is pure research in a geographical sense, and statistically, we may sure that each exploration will turn up some matter that will be investigated further.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Note how EddietheDane ignored my post, which pointed out that the economic windfall from NASA without the new inventions was a major boost to the economy. Also, you want a list of items that NASA funded that made an impact in your life? You like your computer, I mentioned that, you like the internet? Guess what, global communications are rather dependent on Comm Sats, as well as the chips mentioned, both of which needed NASA. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a commercial company would have put them up there if it weren’t for the fact that NASA was footing most of the bill and had done the research before hand. Remember, a lot of money had to be spent just to get the first satellite into orbit, companies are not going to dedicate $1 billion dollars on a project that is of such a high risk venture as early space exploration was. As I said, the economic windfall is massive, and touches everything you do today. I bet you can not mention ten things you do in the modern day that was not touched and most likely made better by NASA.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
Actually, you just about summed up the Dept. of Defense, the Dept. of Agriculture, the Dept. of Health and Human Services, etc, etc.
It may blow, and I’m sure there’s a better way, but for now, that’s the way the U.S. govt.'s agencies operate.
And let’s watch the political labels, folks; I’m a fiscally-conservative civil-libertarian, and I don’t think we’re spending enough on space exploration and research. Not to search for the next techno-panacea to solve our planet’s current woes, but for the best possible reason of all: It’s There!
I feel the moment Human Beings stop searching and questing to expand our horizons of knowledge and wisdom, we become just like any other animal on this planet: herd creatures roaming around aimlessly, searching for the next piece of land to graze on in an increasingly diminishing world.
<FONT COLOR=“GREEN”>ExTank</FONT>
<FONT COLOR=“BLUE”>“Ground Control to Major Tom…”</FONT>
EddieTheDane wrote:
You left out:
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Someone here said it’s costing use each $50 for the space program. BIG FUCKIN DEAL. I drop that at Walmart everytime I go there. I drop that at a tavern in about 3 hours. It’s two goddamn tanks of gas! $50 is nothing – absolutely nothing – by middle income standards.
UncleBeer:
[shudder]
danielnsmith:
Well, if you want to bitch about waste of tax money, it’s pretty much pick a card any card, isn’t it?
Beeruser:
Then, why don’t you give it to them? What’s to stop you?
Akatsukami:
[eyes rolling…]
Have you any idea what libertarianism is?
I believe you’ve confused libertarianism with anarchy.
tracer:
Could you expand on that a little, please?
What are the costs, politics, logistics, and time-table involved for transfering every human on earth to, say, Mars?
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
GirlFace:
Do you go there voluntarily, or does someone force you to go? And if they forced you, would it be okay?
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
Libertarian, would you please shut up? Not every thread on this board has to be an argument about your cruel and immoral philosophy. When people say things like “I spend that at Wal-Mart,” they generally tend to mean “I the consumer feel I get good value at Wal-Mart, and I the voter feel I get good value from Program X.” (GirlFace, please correct me if I’m wrong here) It’s a freakin’ metaphor, for Ghod’s sake, not an invitation to debate private police forces. You’ve got a damn thread named after you, go back there.
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine