Friday, January 09, 2004
Humans going to Mars?
This story is gaining momentum - earlier mentions in the Guardian appear to hold water. Looking for a 'visionary' act, Bush may decide to spend money on another major project to gain the support of his people - it appears to be a political decision.
Is it good science, good socially, generally good? Yes. As argued before, exploration allows our quest for undertanding to expand, allows us to reach out and find out the good things about ourselves. And no - there are a lot of other things that you could do with the hundreds of billions of dollars it would cost.
But consider it like this: we first went to the moon with less computing power than is in my iPaq. So the computational and technical obstacles are probably less than they were then. Whereas working out how to spend billions of dollars on other projects like tackling world hunger is fraught with political and social problems (US imperialism, the pride of nations, the inequity of distribution) - it's got to be easier to go to Mars.....
This story is gaining momentum - earlier mentions in the Guardian appear to hold water. Looking for a 'visionary' act, Bush may decide to spend money on another major project to gain the support of his people - it appears to be a political decision.
Is it good science, good socially, generally good? Yes. As argued before, exploration allows our quest for undertanding to expand, allows us to reach out and find out the good things about ourselves. And no - there are a lot of other things that you could do with the hundreds of billions of dollars it would cost.
But consider it like this: we first went to the moon with less computing power than is in my iPaq. So the computational and technical obstacles are probably less than they were then. Whereas working out how to spend billions of dollars on other projects like tackling world hunger is fraught with political and social problems (US imperialism, the pride of nations, the inequity of distribution) - it's got to be easier to go to Mars.....
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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