Like David Frum should keep their cramped little imaginations away from species-encompassing, aspirational subjects:
Mars Needs Robots
As NASA's Mars probe Curiosity sends amazing images from our planetary neighbor, let's reprise an old column from the Frum archives: Why manned space exploration is obsolete.
Here's the great thing about all these [unmanned] missions: They do not need to be engineered to zero defect, and no plans need be made to return them home. Unmanned space exploration need not worry about food and water or the effects of isolation and low-gravity on the human spirit and body.But once human beings are inserted, everything changes. Lives are put at risk. Costs soar. And for what?Most of the research purpose of sending human beings into space is to test the effects of sending human beings into space. The missions exist to test whether the missions can continue. This seems the very definition of futility...
Please stick to embroidering terrible Republican speeches and being relentlessly wrong about American politics, Mr. Frum, because while robots are fine tools and, one day, will probably possess a form of sentience which will make life on Earth much more interesting, if humans are destined for anything other than extinction, we are bound for the stars.
As such, discussions of how we should interpret each baby step we take out of our terrestrial cradle are best conducted by those whose rationality is leavened with poetry
and a sense of the true scope and direction of the human enterprise.
6 comments:
Yeah, bitches. Mars! Sorry, but I had to get my geek on (engineering undergrad, so there).
Coulter on Mouse Circus on Sunday - had to hit mute, literally, to keep my anger down. Dumbfuck skinhead shoots up a Sikh temple in my home state that same day.
But, ah, come early Monday morning a bunch of geeks from 340 million miles away - and with a 14 minute one-way signal delay; ie, it works on its own or FUBAR - nail the triple Lutz landing. Tears and hugs, well deserved.
Nerds rule, at least once in a while. Goddamn right.
Make that 154 million miles as of touchdown (not 340M, that's total traveled).
Sheesh, hell to get old.
This video, from webcast of the control center as it all went down, brought tears to my eyes. Well done, NASA, JPL - well DONE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E88d4e1gYh0&feature=g-logo-xit
-Mike from CA
..PS. And if all that wasn't enough: Not only were Nasa/JPL able to program all that incredibly critical, intricate and precisely timed stuff, which all occurred exactly as planned & right on cue, they *also* just _happened_ to be able to task another Mars space mission, a satellite not orbiting our own planet, to wander by that general vicinity at that particular time and from several hundred miles up capture a F*g photo of the thing while parachuting in its final descent: http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/us-usa-mars-idINBRE8721A920120807
words fail, at the sheer awesomeness of these achievements -
-Mike from CA
(ok I think I'm done w/ the breathless kudos to Nasa'd/JPL's achievements for now..)
Conservatism is the exact opposite of Science, reason, discovery, community, and humanity.
In other words, Conservatism is the exact opposite of NASA.
Shorter David Frum: "It's not worth it to drop a couple billion to put a robot on Mars, but a willing stooge or two in the Mideast is worth TRILLIONS!"
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