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thebitterguyI hates it when people make sense about shit I like.
Cecil disses the space program.
Someone tell Spider Robinson. He'll comfort us with Heinlienien wisdom and grace.
Cecil disses the space program.
Someone tell Spider Robinson. He'll comfort us with Heinlienien wisdom and grace.
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Date: 2003-03-09 07:47 am (UTC)I dunno, I think options 3 and 4 aren't bad reasons to be in space. What's wrong with a Mars colony anyway?
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Date: 2003-03-09 08:37 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-09 09:50 am (UTC)And you shouldn't care.
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Date: 2003-03-09 11:06 am (UTC)Why is it important that we go to space? Why is important to learn Latin? Or read philosophy? Or study all that Deductive Geometry I struggled with in Grade 12--God knows, I've never used it since. But as children, we are told--and expected to accept as a valid argument--that learning for learning's sake is an important and necessary task.
If you were to apply Cecil's four-point criteria for space exploration to education, most of the people in North America could easily have left school after the fifth grade.
Yet, universal primary and secondary education (including such apparently 'pointless' subjects as biology, chemistry, languages, history, finite mathematics, and calculus) are considered among the cornerstones of Western society. However, beyond teaching children the skills to function in society, such as literacy and basic maths, universal education does not result in any useful results, such as new technology.
In fact, we could probably do without high school all together: to my knowledge there have been no advances in scientific knowledge acheived at the high school-level; and, at least as I remember it, school was not cool. Not in the least.
And think of the billions of dollars we would save.
Ah, you say, that's where you're wrong--without high school, wihtout those long and seemingly pointless hours spent cramming young, callow minds full of quadratic equations, Bohr models, and the dates of Confederation and the American Revolution, where would we get our next generation of doctors, physicists, computer programmers? Even those dreamers who whiled away the hours in History and Politics classes have their uses, becoming lawyers and television producers.
Perhaps, looked at this way, a thing does not require an immediate useful result, such as a technological spin-off, to have value?
The drive to space, whether during our parents generation or our own, is about more than those programs or products that can be directly linked to space exploration per se. It is about encouraging a quality of thought, a level of aspiration, a universal ideal that drives the human process forward.
If the only reason to go into space is indeed that we find it cool, then that is reason enough.
We are Homo Sapiens--thinking man. Our propensity for dreams, to seek that which is beyond our grasp, to desire to conquer the frontiers before us, is all that distinguishes us from the ape in the forest.
We should no more turn our backs on space, than Europe could ignore the siren's call of what lay beyond the Atlantic.
Discovery, as we have recently had tragic proof, can be a costly, destructive, painful process. But it is a necessary one. To choose not to do a thing because some believe it cannot be done, or because some believe their is no point to doing it, is unhuman, reductivist: it lessens us as a species, a people, a community of this planet.
And that is why the human exploration of space is vital.
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Date: 2003-03-10 08:20 pm (UTC):P
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Date: 2003-03-10 09:42 pm (UTC)That being said, I think 'because it's there' (or 'because we're human', as "crankygrrl") is plenty reason in itself. I think a much better question is 'Why NOT go to space?', and I personally need a better answer than "Um... 'cuz it's hard."
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Date: 2003-03-10 09:46 pm (UTC)As for why not, it seems the inexhaustible cash that gets poured into the gullet of the Great Galactic Ghoul could go to any number of things that'll actualy make life better for the 6.x billion people dirtside.