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

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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.

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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!