Comment Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score 1) 213
I agree with you when you say that several people should have paid for this fiasco. Certainly a few highly prominent firings at the least, and some probes for negligent homicide might not have been out of hand. And I'm glad that Hubble's been useful, but....
As far as manned flight's usefulness in general, well maybe I an misperceiving your comments, If I am please forgive me, but if we ain't going to settle out in space, start colonizing it, and harvesting the mineral wealth energy abundance, and just plain breathing room it offers then frankly I couldn't care less if the moon is made of green cheese, the stars are little balls of light shining through from heaven, and the Sun revolves around Pluto. At the point that we decide that we don't want to exploit the rest of our system, then learning about it becomes nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It becomes knowledge that might make a few intellectual elites feel good, entertain and astound a few more outside that clique, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us. Pure knowledge that is NEVER going to be turned into practical application isn't worth the effort. It might get somebody a university chair somewhere and be good for settling some Oxford Dons argument with his chums, but beyond that I consider its utility pointless.
I think your other points are valid, but the perception I get of your opinion of the relative worth of pure science and astronomy verses manned flight and getting out into the solar system ourselves is completely opposite of my own. Again if I have misperceived it, I apologize, but I'm tired of intellectuals that think the government should be taxing money from people that could be spending it on their own needs, simply to satisfy the intellectuals curiosity on some sterile point about their particular theories of astronomical structure or origins. If that description does not fir you, then again I apologize.
The reason for colonizing Luna and Mars is not science. It is to exploit and use all of the wealth of our system, to expand the collective opportunities for the human race, to challenge our technological ingenuity and provide technological advancement for our society in the feedback, to harness the energy and abundance of all our resources, and in the end - with a little luck and a lot of hard work - give human kind a chance of surviving a single point failure hear on Earth. Hell maybe we can even move our dirty industries to space and clean old Mother Earth up.
If it ain't getting us that, then we're wasting EVERY dime that NASA spends on space and we ought to dump everything that isn't to do with improvements in aeronautical engineering and forget about the rest.
And now you know why I'm often called
The Wildman
As far as manned flight's usefulness in general, well maybe I an misperceiving your comments, If I am please forgive me, but if we ain't going to settle out in space, start colonizing it, and harvesting the mineral wealth energy abundance, and just plain breathing room it offers then frankly I couldn't care less if the moon is made of green cheese, the stars are little balls of light shining through from heaven, and the Sun revolves around Pluto. At the point that we decide that we don't want to exploit the rest of our system, then learning about it becomes nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It becomes knowledge that might make a few intellectual elites feel good, entertain and astound a few more outside that clique, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us. Pure knowledge that is NEVER going to be turned into practical application isn't worth the effort. It might get somebody a university chair somewhere and be good for settling some Oxford Dons argument with his chums, but beyond that I consider its utility pointless.
I think your other points are valid, but the perception I get of your opinion of the relative worth of pure science and astronomy verses manned flight and getting out into the solar system ourselves is completely opposite of my own. Again if I have misperceived it, I apologize, but I'm tired of intellectuals that think the government should be taxing money from people that could be spending it on their own needs, simply to satisfy the intellectuals curiosity on some sterile point about their particular theories of astronomical structure or origins. If that description does not fir you, then again I apologize.
The reason for colonizing Luna and Mars is not science. It is to exploit and use all of the wealth of our system, to expand the collective opportunities for the human race, to challenge our technological ingenuity and provide technological advancement for our society in the feedback, to harness the energy and abundance of all our resources, and in the end - with a little luck and a lot of hard work - give human kind a chance of surviving a single point failure hear on Earth. Hell maybe we can even move our dirty industries to space and clean old Mother Earth up.
If it ain't getting us that, then we're wasting EVERY dime that NASA spends on space and we ought to dump everything that isn't to do with improvements in aeronautical engineering and forget about the rest.
And now you know why I'm often called
The Wildman
