You know what's worse that enduring dental work with your mouth full of probing, needling instruments? Listening to your dentist explain why sending humans to Mars is foolhardy and finding yourself unable to articulate a retort because your mouth is fucking immobilized. I actually experienced this this morning and can assure you the agony is exquisite.
"Besides, I don't know what people can do on Mars that those rovers can't."
Scrape, scrape.
"And anyway, there are too many problems to work on here on Earth before spending all that money on a Mars mission."
Scrape, scrape, poke.
6 comments:
I finally answered (once he'd taken the stuff from my mouth), that one could *always* point to problems on Earth that need funding and endlessly avoid exploring space. I didn't have time for the comparative planetology angle, in which -- by reconstructing what "killed" Mars -- we learn how to prevent a similar fate here on Earth. (Makes Tang seem pretty damned insignificant.)
You know, for $300 billion we just might have a workable starship. Possibly of the Orion nuclear "put-put boat" variety, which was shelved a long time ago for political reasons.
I'm not advocating spending hundreds of billions on starships. But I really do wish $20 or so of the Iraq war money could have gone to financing a permanent lunar base and manned expeditions to Mars.
Is that too much to ask?
Which is kind of what Bush implied he might do. More lies.
That's another thing my dentist brought up. He talked about the "Moon-Mars initiative" like it was for real. Without getting partisan, I said that I thought the initiative had much more to do with militarizing space than scientific exploration.
Mac:
Sorry, but space is already militarized, and will continue to be militarized (I hope nobody thinks the Chinese are going into space for peaceful research purposes). All exploration in human history has been driven, at least in part, by military reasons (those British explorers in the 19th century, for example, were almost all Navy or Army personnel). The reason we went to the Moon in the first place was to one-up the Soviets - the reason Bush is now talking seriously about a Moon then Mars initiative (and he IS serious) has everything to do with recent Chinese moves in the same direction. A new Cold War is brewing, and with it will come a new space race.
Paul
Mac:
I meant to add that those British Army and Navy explorers in the 19th century also managed to get a lot of very important scientific exploration done as well. Until we have one world, one government, we'll have to live with the mix of the military and science.
Paul
Paul,
Of course space is already militarized. My comment to my dentist was simply to dispel any notions that W was into space travel because of a sudden interest in science. Surprisingly, a lot of people seem to think this is the case.
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