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.

[trobadora]

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

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[dhampyresa]

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE