NASA's New Telescope Finds Exoplanet Atmosphere 124
celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"
Re:Inefficient use of wealth (Score:3, Interesting)
Galileo's scientific discoveries broke medieval Europe free of the shackles of Church doctrine, and over the next hundred years did more to improve the lives of the average European than any redistribution of the Church's tremendous wealth could have done. Not that the Church was going to actually do anything to materially benefit the population: that wealth was after all a necessary part of the greater glory of God. Oh, and also this: every pious person would get their reward in Heaven. You simply had to head out toward Polaris and take the first right after Saturn, then look for the Big Gate. You can't miss it.
The Kepler findings may be of the same sort. Any proof that life has arisen off Earth will have a major impact on fundamentalist belief systems. This would shift all kinds of intractable political arguments based on religious differences to new ground.
The question is not whether we can afford to do science in place of doing more of the same as what we have always done. The question is how can we afford to do more science in ways that will tell us more about our actual place in Reality, and thus lead us increasingly toward the benefits of an ever renewing Age of Reason.
Not that Reason is the be-all and end-all: there is a truth in beauty that has nothing to do with reason. And imagination and creativity are important, but irrational. But at the moment there does appear to be a deficit of reason in mankind's affairs.