Everyone I know who thinks that going to Mars is a waste of resources, gives me too high a number as to how much they think NASA is getting. How much of a US tax dollar does NASA get? They would usually answer say 10%, maybe even 20% of a tax dollar. It’s actually half of one penny. Half of one penny! People actually attack NASA for it’s half of one penny and they continue to say that NASA is spending it on the wrong things when NASA is a force of nature unto itself to inspire a generation to be scientifically literate and yet one of the greatest problems this world has today is its absence of science literacy.
People spent so much time talking about the financial crisis and I’m thinking, how much of that could have been mitigated, if not all together, if the people who were lent money were mathematically fluent enough to calculate the effect of a variable interest rate on their monthly payments. They wouldn’t have accepted the loans!
Nobody writes articles about the economy we could and should have because of the averted measures that were taken. Obama had a parallel exercise in describing what the economy would have been if he had not guided it. Then you get to compare what’s worse or better against what is.
Nonetheless an annoying side effect of how the US media spin Obama is by always showing that he’s black. On describing Obama’s birthday, FOX only showed pictures of Kevin Hart, Chris Rock and more african americans when white people such Tom Hanks and Nancy Palozzi were present. But what FOX really exemplified here is their scientific illiteracy and how they infect everyone else with it. Biologically speaking, Barack Obama is equally as white as he is black, just to clarify the genetics of this. All the spin about him being black could just as easily show that he is white.
So now the scientifically illiterate politicians, representing a scientifically illiterate electorate (or what counts for one), were considering pulling the James Webb telescope (luckily now due to launch in 2018). This is the successor of the hubble telescope and it is said that it may be able to peer further into the universe and perhaps even see the moment when the universe was born. However, it cost $6.8 billion dollars, the same amount it cost to be in Afghanistan for one month.
Either way we are sinking money into a black hole. It seemed at this point that we just wouldn’t do anything for the good of humanity and intellectual integrity.
The $850 billion dollar US bank bailout is greater than the entire history of the NASA running budget. So when someone says “we don’t have enough money for this space probe” i’m saying that it’s not that you just don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of money that you are spending is warped, in some way, that you are removing the only things that give people something to dream about tomorrow. Some people still remember the 60’s and 70’s where people didn’t have to go more than a week before there is an article in life magazine that were titled “the home of tomorrow” or “the city of tomorrow” or “the transport of tomorrow”.
All that ended in the 1970’s after we stopped going to the moon. We stopped dreaming. only recently with these new pictures of Pluto have we even considered the possibility of dreaming again, 40 years later and yet still only a consideration.
I worry the decisions that governments now make don’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow has gone. They are playing for the next election cycles and that is mortgaging the actual future of this world.
beyond the Edge of reason 