Thursday
Back to the moon
US space agency NASA has said it plans to start work on a permanently-occupied base on the Moon after astronauts begin flying back there in 2020.
This is awesome.
Lots of people will say, "We should sort out things here at home, on Earth, before we go wasting money and resources and smarts traipsing about the universe."
To those people I say: shut up.
EDIT: unless one of those people is my mom, to whom I say, "I respectfully disagree."
There's plenty of room to do both. All the problems at home - poverty, climate change, injustice - are far more problems of will than of resource. All of the money and time in the world won't solve famine if we can't get our shit together and fairly distribute food and ensure security globally. Not going to the moon doesn't suddenly make that happen.
In the meantime, we would be ignoring the fact that the majority of reality is out there. We haven't seen it yet. Striving to know more is one of the key things about being human. There are a large number of scientific and practical discoveries that have been made solely because of space exploration. Launching and observing from outside the earth's atmosphere and gravity well would open up (pardon the pun) whole new worlds of opportunity.
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This is awesome.
Lots of people will say, "We should sort out things here at home, on Earth, before we go wasting money and resources and smarts traipsing about the universe."
To those people I say: shut up.
EDIT: unless one of those people is my mom, to whom I say, "I respectfully disagree."
There's plenty of room to do both. All the problems at home - poverty, climate change, injustice - are far more problems of will than of resource. All of the money and time in the world won't solve famine if we can't get our shit together and fairly distribute food and ensure security globally. Not going to the moon doesn't suddenly make that happen.
In the meantime, we would be ignoring the fact that the majority of reality is out there. We haven't seen it yet. Striving to know more is one of the key things about being human. There are a large number of scientific and practical discoveries that have been made solely because of space exploration. Launching and observing from outside the earth's atmosphere and gravity well would open up (pardon the pun) whole new worlds of opportunity.
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