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."
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Why link together disbelief in evolution with disbelief in climate alarmism?
They are polar opposites, evolution is clearly a reaonable theory only opposed by those who would rather believe in some superstition.
Climate alarmism is a theory from the 1990s and very early 2000s that fewer and fewer people believe in and generally is only supposed by people after tax or research grants these days,
Re:Natural Selection is compatible with ID (Score:5, Insightful)
> The two theories diverge when it comes to the ultimate source of life which Natural Selection says evolved spontaneously as a single cell life form from which all other life evolved
Actually evolution and natural selection do not attempt to explain the origin of life. If that's something you're interested in, try looking up abiogenesis.
> and ID suggesting that our DNA may have come from elsewhere.
So it doesn't make any attempt to explain the origin of life and just moves the problem to some undefined 'elsewhere'?
> It seems to me that expanding the exploration of space is key to discoving where we come from and the answer may be something which would be considered very unscientific at this point in time.
Please give us your motivations for this belief.
> or prove there is none
Impossible to prove. Even if we could visit every location in the universe to see if aliens live there, they may have gone extinct without leaving any trace.
> and that under the right conditions life can evolve spontaneously in a previously sterile environment it would be short sighted to deny that life may have originated elsewhere.
1) We know the universe has a finite age of give or take 14 billion years.
2) We also know that no DNA from 'before' the big bang could have made it into this universe for the simple reason that early conditions were incompatible with the existence of molecules.
3) We know life exists now.
It seems to me that based on 1, 2, and 3 we have to conclude that life *must* have formed in a previously sterile environment *somewhere* at *some* point during the last 14 billion years. Attempting to explain the origin of life by introducing an (intelligent) agent only moves the problem to the origin of that agent.
not a panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not a panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
I am neither a scientist, nor american. I had a similar thought. IMO a Mars mission is pushing the limits on the logistics, while the majority of problems have already been figured. It would serve as PR stunt and create jobs in the field, while the benefit to science might be limited.
Instead of a Mars mission, I would like to see more Amercian effort in the ITER project and in the friendly competition with CERN. Those are the projects that are currently pushing the frontiers of science and engineering, that have the potential to create a lot of jobs while solving so many problems our world economy is about to face.
Re:Conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how do people come up with this garbage?
Have you ever heard the man speak passionately about science and astronomy? Who the hell is he 'entertaining', besides perhaps people who are interested in science and astronomy? The man is smart enough to get a doctorate in astrophysics from Columbia and be the head of the damn Hayden Planetarium. He does more to educate the public about matters of science than most actual science teachers. Yet for some reason you feel the need to put him down.
And with 'He's an entertainer.' no less. That's rich. Honestly, if that's what it takes to be heard in this country I say let him entertain. That does nothing to diminish his qualifications, intelligence, or ability to convey knowledge. Except perhaps to someone who can't see past the size of his or her own fragile ego.
My guess is you're either trolling or a complete moron.
Probably both.
What will doubling the NASA budget do? (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is not at the moment a space organisation.
They are a welfare organisation for aerospace.
For example - taking the budget for the Space Launch System up till the first couple of flights, and purchasing commercial launch from SpaceX gets you 85000 tons or so launched. (Assuming that reusability does not kick in)
Everything done in space by NASA is driven by launch costs.
The size of spacecraft has to be reduced, and they have to be more carefully engineered and built, which dramatically raises costs.
NASAs previous attempt to lower launch costs (X33) picked a major aerospace companies bid.
This company proposed, with NASAs encouragement to use three seperate fundamentally untried technologies on the one vehicle.
(Linear aerospike, conformal tanks, and metallic TPS).
SpaceX (for example) is building on their successful rocket launches so far, with the aim of reusing their rockets several-many times.
At the moment, space launch costs several thousand dollars a kilo.
The soon-to-be-launched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshopper [wikipedia.org] is a test stage, to test propulsive landing for the first stage - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE [youtube.com] is a video outlining this.
The absolute starting point for any space program has to be getting things into space. ...) means you have a welfare reason, not a space reason.
Doing this expensively, for political reasons (SLS,
A sane space agency should have very limited mission definitions.
'Fly safely to ISS, dock using this adaptor'.
Previously they've made a practice of making proposals that effectively pick from one of several large aerospace corporations.
By requiring technologies they've developed, for no good reason, rather than simple functional requirements.
A fundamental change in space could occur if SpaceX (or one of the other new entrants) gets reusability up and running.
The fuel cost for a launch is well under $10/kg.
Even if you 'only' get to $100/kg, from the current $5000/kg or so, that enables a dramatically different space program.
It becomes feasible to put a lot more people up, and have them debug stuff on orbit.
It becomes comparatively cheap to have massive redundancy in systems, based on comparatively inexpensive and massive designs.
You don't end up spending 220 million to design an air-conditioner.
You launch 5 candidate systems built by bidders for $10M, and see which one works.
Re:not a panacea (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I think the idea Dr. Tyson has is that a mission to Mars would get the American public interested in science again.
I don't know if you are aware that in America superstition and anti-intellectualism is winning more and more each day, among other issues highlighted by this 'evolution v. intelligent design debate'. Currently we spend more on war/defense (over 1 trillion dollars) in a single year than we have given NASA in it's entire history (somewhere around 5-600bn dollars over the course of it's 50+ year history).
These days not many Americans children dream of being astronauts or physicists or much of anything scientific. I'm sure there are some, but it's nowhere near where it was back when we were going to the moon.
The idea is getting the public excited via something tangible, like being the first to put a person on Mars would increase excitement/passion for science which would hopefully then increase ingenuity and critical thinking in this country, giving us the passion to reach for greater things, as well as improving education, providing more research/project money, and any number of side benefits this excitement/passion would have.
The cost of a mission to Mars would be small in the face of results like that. At least, Dr. Tyson believes so. As do I.
Re:not a panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with that view. While we're proposing fantasy budgets, instead of doubling NASA's budget from its current $18 billion to $36 billion, I think the promotion of science would be much better served (at a lower cost, even!) by doubling the National Science Foundation's budget from its current $7 billion to $14 billion.
Neil for President (Score:4, Insightful)
If only we could get quality people of this caliber to choose from. It would put an air of confidence around the future of the US instead of the corporate-sponsored Reality TV show it's turned into.
Go Neil!
The problem with 1% for NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conflict of interest (Score:2, Insightful)
uh, the first two people you list are string theorists (lol.) so is the third, but he's also a complete charlatan [scienceblogs.com] and quack [lovearth.org].
give me a fucking break.
Re:Conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Tyson... He's an entertainer. It's like getting John Travolta's opinion.
One's a scientist, the other is a scientologist. People who can't see the difference is what the summary is warning about.
Re:Natural Selection is compatible with ID (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't know what amount of time is required for life to spontaneously form in a given set of conditions. If we found it to be one day, in ideal conditions then yes, it's very likely it spontaneously formed here, daily. If it required several billion years for it to spontaneously form and take hold then I would say it's more likely it evolved elsewhere and that the primary form of creation is transmition.
We don't know how much other life is out there. If our Milky Way galaxy was found to be primary sterile?
There are many questions, and that's why Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguing for a bigger space program. We'd like answers.
Re:The most effective critics. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh what the hell, it's like pissing on a house fire of bias and closed minded rhetoric.
Truer words were never spoken
Tearing ourselves from disciplines of Astronomy and Physics for a second and focusing on the bit of Anthropology atheists prefer to ignore; man has ALWAYS believed in a higher power. We have scientific evidence of this.
I can't even imagine what scientific evidence you have to prove that belief in a higher power has ALWAYS existed. Hopefully, it's not the No True Scotsman argument.
Man has used "higher power" to explain things which are currently inexplicable and allow order in a confusing world. It makes the kids stop asking where the sun goes at night. It expresses our resignation to continue living when the hunt goes poorly, when storms flatten the wheat field, or when you get passed over for promotion. Personifying the "higher power" into a Thor, Nature, or Jesus figure adds the value of fun stories to tell the kids and satisfies mankind's inclination to anthropomorphize even inanimate objects. However, a "higher power" can also be "physical laws and properties." One of those higher powers allows cultural and technological advance; one of those higher powers encourages complacency and repression.
We know that abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE with are there for a reason. We can only theorize and therefore fork, but not discount at this point, Creationism as a possibility.
"For a reason" is that some mutation provided, at worst, no disadvantage to survival. Most of them don't. Each year, according to the CDC, "Major structural or genetic birth defects affect approximately 3% of births in the United States, are a major contributor to infant mortality." When you see abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE, you are looking at only the small fraction of changes that are not immediately fatal, and ignoring billions of people who died in utero or in infancy because of errors in gene replication. If you wish to argue that some creator goes about his work by slaughtering such a large fraction of his people, then I think your notion of "design" or "directed change" is indistinguishable from random. To make a distinction between "random changes" and "random changes because god said so" is a) unnecessary and b) a little silly. To infer a "reason" for every trait and quirk you display presupposes the existence of a plan and is circular logic (ie: we have trait X that allows behavior Y; Y facilitates survival; therefore Y is part of the plan, and X was planned to allow Y)
More importantly, the only evidence for creationism is a bunch of stories handed down by several generations of oral tradition before being collected into a convenient anthology. Oh, and I suppose, if you want to include your bit of Anthropology that atheists like to ignore, the observation that humans enjoy stories. The single greatest point of divergence between atheists and Christians is that Christians will appeal to any story in their favored anthology as literal fact worthy of as much weight as the observation that the sun rose this morning in the east. What if they're just stories? I mean, did Lazarus leave any evidence or documentation from his life after being raised from the dead: I'd think that's the kind of thing a whole community might have written about. Maybe earn him a trip to Rome to meet with historians and scientists. The literal veracity of the bible is a tenuous thread upon which to hang a whole theory of the cosmos.
Evolutionists and creationists are not even having the same discussion, but the creationists are very insistent on getting their irrelevant bit into the evolutionary conversation. It's like we're all talking about what to have for dinner, and some guy demands that we first agree that Viking ranges are much better than Wolf.