Forum Post: Long-term investment in science shall never be stopped or do we need NASA?
Posted 12 years ago on March 18, 2012, 9:11 p.m. EST by VamfimCreator
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This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The future of space flights and space exploration is uncertain today. State investment for NASA is being cut because of the deficit. As a result NASA is losing specialists and know-how accumulated for decades. The example of post-soviet Russia shows that once you loose your technostructure because of this or that reason, then it's twice harder to build a new one. (this logic was used when saving the financial sector)
Today's decisions for NASA are equivalent of exchanging your right hand with a piece of bread when you are very hungry. It may seem reasonable for the moment but what will you do after?
One can always ask: "What's the reason of flying to Mars when we have so many problems?" The answer is that an ambitious objective is often the best driver for science and technology regardless of rationality. Space exploration has opened the way for telecom, navigation technologies, medical, biological, material sciences. Whole areas of fundamental research in physics, astrophysics, physics of dark matter are based on data gathered by the single space telescope "Hubble".
America's status of a leader state was build on the values of freedom, including the freedom of mind. If we replace these values with the ones associated with brute military and economic dominance, this will lead to demoralization and a following decline.
Recall the huge mass of Hollywood films which are shown throughout the world and form the ideological base for America. What are they about? They are about the big country of freedom on which you can always rely. They are not about a state which you should hate and be afraid of.
America shall stay at the forefront of scientific advancement.
P.S. You could try to check out my new android game "VAMFIM" which speculates over the issue with NASA and the ARES program and tries to focus public attention on the problem.
Twitter: @vamfimcreator
All problems could be solved if we built a space elevator
P.S.: You may get more hits if you retitle the posting, e.g. "USA science sabotaged" or something more attention-grabbing. It grabbed me - but science is very unpopular at the moment.
Thanks!
I could hardly agree more, VfC. The USA... and China, Russia, Europe etc. ... have to get back into space.
The reason why they don't however lies in the underlying philosophical attitude dominant across the world.
This fundamental attitude, originally based in religion but now based in seeming secular teachings, claims that the universe is FINITE in space, time and matter content. It is thus subject to entropic decay and will reach a miserable final state.
This fundamental attitude and its teachings are NOT based on scientific facts but rather misinterpretations popularized by the media and centred today on the teachings of Albert Einstein.
If you really believe that we cannot (eventually) travel faster than light then there is NO point in space travel since the nearest star-system to ours is 4.3 lightyears. According to the Einstein-based nonsense a round trip would thus take at least 10 years, longer than round-the-world by sailing ship.
Hence, apart from the prodigious amount of fuel this would take (according to the Einsteinians, of having to push against the universe at nearly the speed of light) there would be little to be gained since there seem to be no habitable planets around that system.
Needless to say, the idea of people sanely spending their whole lives in spaceships as they travel to a far distant habitable planet (which begs the question of how this planet was identified in the first place) is essentially science fiction.
Hence if, as you and I both want: that the USA should "be at the forefront of scientific advancement but not at the forefront of initiating newer and newer wars" this is only possible if Einstein's fraud is attacked and dumped.
As for the US launching a war in Iran, Albert Einstein himself described the Palestinians as "bandits" and "outlaws". See his "Ideas and Opinions" - letter titled "Our Debt to Zionism".
Hence following Einstein the USA and others are sabotaging scientific advance and will thus initiate ever-newer wars!