space&planets

[schneefink]

Today when I wanted to be excited about the successful Mars landing (!) I encountered the opinion "we shouldn't fund NASA/space programs because there are so many things on Earth where the money would be more useful," and (apart from how many scientific advances are thanks to space programs, and how many other things could be defunded first, like the military, etc.) it occurred to me that there are people who look up at the night sky and just don't care what's out there. Or at least not enough to spend resources on finding out. (The countries with space programs don't really have resource problems, they have resource allocation problems.) And part of me gets it - there are so many problems on Earth that look more immediate and pressing and so on - but on the other hand I also can't really imagine a reality in which humans don't reach for the stars. As a group, we're curious, that's what we do. It would be boring otherwise.

Comments

[ambyr]

K has exactly zero interest in space, which always baffles me when it comes up, because otherwise our interests overlap very closely, and--didn't every geek spend their childhood staring longingly at the stars, reading astronomy textbooks for fun and dreaming of being an astronaut? Apparently not.

[schneefink]

Yeah, I also used to think that every kid has a dinosaur phase and a space phase (and probably an ancient mythology phase) but apparently not? Weird.

[trobadora]

I don't understand it either. It's space!

[schneefink]

Exactly!

[muccamukk]

Well, and if they want something in the US to defund... the purely science people wouldn't be my first pick. Or my fifth.

I'm glad the robot made it though. I always worry about them.

[schneefink]

Yeah, science programs would be waaaay down the list. We need science! It's very useful!

I didn't use to anthropomorphize robots until I saw cute robot comics by xkcd and others, and now it's hard not to.

[yhlee]

I hear you. I'm married to a gravitational astrophysicist (LIGO acts as a "gravitational" telescope for very massive objects, usually inspiraling black holes or neutron stars) and I think my husband has the coolest job on earth. It's certainly far more interesting than what I do!

[schneefink]

That does sound really cool!

[tassosss]

I hate that attitude, especially since a HUGE part of NASA is studying Earth.

I know this is preaching to the choir but problems on Earth that NASA is contributing to understanding and solving (off the top of my head): they build all of NOAA's weather satellites (weather forecasts, hurricane prediction), they do research on global air quality (that we breathe), fire detection (that destroys homes), the ozone hole (that kills life), land use including watching forests and farms change (that provides food and resources), the disappearing ice sheets and glaciers (climate change, sea level rise), aquifers (drinking water and agriculture), global rainfall (same, plus flood and landslide warnings), snow cover (also drinking water), energy use with night lights, phytoplankton (health of the oceans which people depend on for food), and then the downstream applications for all of these that clever people think up because the data is free and accessible. They do the basic research for how all of these systems work, so that we can build better climate models, and they've been doing this for long enough that scientists can see 10-50 year trends.

And looking at our planet helps us understand what to look for on other planets. Because that is so amazing! And cool! And SPACE!

Sorry to rant. Earth science person here (so also all the grants that NASA awards to universities to do research). But yeah, I hate that attitude so much. It's so sad and small-thinking. All the stuff we learn about other planets gives us new ways to think about our own.

[schneefink]

Yess those are some things I would have said but (probably fortunately) there was no time for a long discussion.

[isis]

I have complicated feelings on this; I think space science is super important, but I also feel that there is too much emphasis on humans in space and not enough on unmanned exploration and actual scientific measurements. But landing robots on Mars is yay!

(My dad worked for NASA.)

[schneefink]

I don't know how much actual emphasis there is on putting humans in space today apart from PR, but yeah, I don't think it should be a priority right now either.

Nice! Did he have cool stories from work to share?

[isis]

It was more that the whole family was part of the culture of space exploration. Like, we watched the moon landing together (I barely remember it, but I remember it!) and when the first Space Shuttle took off, we went to Goddard's auditorium and watched it with other NASA families on a big screen. If my class was doing a field trip I didn't want to go on, or if school was canceled and I didn't want to stay home, I'd go in with him and he'd set me up with one of the first small computers - this was in the early 1970s, it was maybe the size of a large microwave (now), with a single LED line display (like a calculator) and a paper that printed out as it went. I learned BASIC on that machine with a tutorial program! I was able to get a summer job with a NASA contractor while I was in high school, and it just jump-started my whole life in science.

He was a research scientist in Goddard's Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics, so I gleefully told my friends that my dad was an extraterrestrial physicist! His actual field of research was planetary magnetospheres, and he was very famous in his field...of about a dozen people. Now at age 86 he is still, amazingly, active in a network of scientists and science teachers, mostly talking about how to preserve the history of science, and how to teach it to young people, and encourage them to become scientists.

[schneefink]

Cool! Pretty much all I know about magnetic fields is that they are apparently very tricky and mysterious so that must be an interesting field of study.

Do you also have a job in science?

[isis]

I do! I ended up going into earth science rather than space science, and specifically meteorology; I work in climate modeling for a quasi-governmental research institution.

[schneefink]

Cool!
Oh man, I bet listening to all the climate/global warming "discussions" on the media must be frustrating.

So if science fields and the internet are small: do you know eponymous-rose? She's a Critical Role fan and meteorologist who iirc specializes in tornados and tornado forecasts/modeling, and sometimes she talks about weather science and it's always super interesting.

[isis]

I doubt it; tornadoes are weather, and I do climate - vastly different timescales!

[duskpeterson]

I always suspect that the people who say this have never encountered science fiction. How very sad for them.

There is of course a legitimate question of how to allocate scarce resources, but it's as you say: if one looks at NASA's budget compared to that of our military complex, the whole argument goes down in flames.

[schneefink]

We watch SF together! That's why it was such a surprise.

Don't forget, NASA is going to need more money to help with the Space Force ;)

[duskpeterson]

Maybe they're like the Star Trek fan that my apprentice knows, who said, "Why do we need to spend all that money to explore space? The Enterprise has already done that."

[schneefink]

...I don't even know what to say to that ^^

[isis]

I forget, did your dad also work at GSFC?

(schneefink, Dusk and I actually grew up on the same street! We kind of lost touch after...I want to say elementary school, really, but it was amusing to discover each other again in these spaces!)

[duskpeterson]

Whoa, hello! I'd forgotten your nick!

My father was a lit prof, but my ex worked at Hubble. He scheduled this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation

[schneefink]

Neat! Kinda impressive that you recognized each other too - I'm pretty sure I could be talking to several childhood friends in fandom and never realize ^^

[isis]

Both our pseuds contain clues to our real names (though mine is far more obscure), and some years ago when I saw her biography on her web page I realized I knew her!

I've actually figured out a few other people I knew from e.g. college (and vice versa) due to references to mutual friends or activities. (One person mentioned a mutual friend and we figured out that though we didn't know each other, she was a close friend of one of my brothers in college.) It's always a little startling to realize, especially when I feel that my current RL friends (and most of my past ones) would be "say WHAT?" about fandom.

[schneefink]

Heh. Several of my RL friends know that I'm "in fandom," though I think most of them don't have a clear idea what that means. Some of them are enthusiastic fans of certain TV shows and/or read fanfic occasionally, but it's not the same (though I find it difficult to explain how exactly.)

[dancing_serpent]

I also can't really imagine a reality in which humans don't reach for the stars.

Yeah, I don't get it, either. My fascination with space started when I was really young, and so did my sister's. Our dad is a big science (and science fiction *g*) geek, so he encouraged us in our interest in any way possible.

[schneefink]

And there's so much to see nowadays! We went to the planetarium a few times when I was a kid and it was always fascinating.

[dhampyresa]

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

[schneefink]

Indeed :D