Audacious Visions For Future Spaceflight 176
New submitter nagalman writes "There is a very powerful video out that takes the audio of words from Neil deGrasse Tyson, receiver of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and meshes it with powerful images of the history and successful outcomes of NASA. Through Penny4NASA, Dr. Tyson is pressing for the budget of NASA to be doubled from 0.5% to 1% of the federal budget in order to spur vision, interest, dreams, public excitement, and innovation into science and engineering. With Kansas stating that 'evolution could not rule out a supernatural or theistic source, that evolution itself was not fact but only a theory and one in crisis, and that Intelligent Design must be considered a viable alternative to evolution,' and North Carolina's legislature circulating a bill telling people to ignore climate science, maybe it's time we start listening to experts who have a proven record of success, rather than ideology that has only been 'proven' in the mind of elected politicians."
If you want to hear an entire speech... (Score:5, Informative)
...on this topic, it is WELL worth your time. I was fortunate to see Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in person recently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's well worth a little over an hour of your time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqJzHHkmJ-8 [youtube.com]
Re:not a panacea (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, I'm a bit skeptical about projects like flying to Mars, which are good PR, probably very good for engineering and technology, but not that exciting from scientific prospective.
I guess that depends on whether you think vastly more science done on the surface of Mars in real time (rather than a small amount staggered out over decades) is exciting or not.
People seem to forget the many lessons of Apollo. One of those lessons is that a knowledge person on site with relatively simple tools does a lot more and covers a lot more ground than even our best landers/rovers over the foreseeable future will do. Despite being mostly a national prestige project, Apollo got a remarkable amount of science done and radically changed our understanding of the early Solar System.
Some error in the summary (Score:5, Informative)
With Kansas stating that 'evolution could not rule out a supernatural or theistic source, that evolution itself was not fact but only a theory and one in crisis, and that Intelligent Design must be considered a viable alternative to evolution,' and North Carolina's legislature circulating a bill telling people to ignore climate science, maybe it's time we start listening to experts who have a proven record of success, rather than ideology that has only been 'proven' in the mind of elected politicians."
First, Kansas no longer says that. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
The Kansas Board of Education voted 6â"4 August 9, 2005 to include greater criticism of evolution in its school science standards, but it decided to send the standards to an outside academic for review before taking a final vote. The standards received final approval on November 8, 2005. The new standards were approved by 6 to 4, reflecting the makeup of religious conservatives on the board.[75] In July 2006 the Board of Standards issued a "rationale statement" which claimed that the current science curriculum standards do not include intelligent design.[76] Members of the scientific community critical of the standards contended that the board's statement was misleading in that they contained a "significant editorializing that supports the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design networkâ(TM)s campaign position that Intelligent Design is not included in the standards", the standards did "say that students should learn about ID, and that ID content ought to be in the standards", and that the standards presented the controversy over intelligent design as a scientific one, denying the mainstream scientific view.
[...]
On August 1, 2006, 4 of the 6 conservative Republicans who approved the Critical Analysis of Evolution classroom standards lost their seats in a primary election. The moderate Republican and liberal Democrats gaining seats, largely supported by Governor Kathleen Sebelius, vowed to overturn the 2005 school science standards and adopt those recommended by a State Board Science Hearing Committee that were rejected by the previous board.
[...]
On February 13, 2007, the Board voted 6 to 4 to reject the amended science standards enacted in 2005. The definition of science was once again returned to "the search for natural explanations for what is observed in the universe."
It must have been an unpleasant year and a half, but Kansas voters did fix the problem as quickly as they could.
It's also worth noting that the North Carolina bill forces only a particular planning agency (for NC ocean shores) to ignore certain climate predictions (and may have been in response to possible abuse of such climate predictions by the planning agency in question).
It's far more limited in scope than claimed in the summary above and while short-sighted may have been proposed in response to valid concerns about what the planning agency was going to do.