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Rantings of a Sandmonkey

Be forewarned: The writer of this blog is an extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled sandmonkey. If this is your cup of tea, please enjoy your stay here. If not, please sod off

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Google Mars is here

This is sooo COOOOOOOLLLLLLL!

3 Comments:

At 3/14/2006 03:03:00 AM, Blogger Jordan said...

It's cool, but not "lets spend half a trilian to put two men on the cold dead planet" cool.

Seriously, I think America has completely lost it when it comes to Nasa. I love Nasa, but cancelling/delaying projects like the next hubble, astroid/comet defence research, space-elivator, and micro-gravity research and replacing it all with adventure that has no scientific benifit is crazy!

Other than figuring out how to put two people in a tin can for a year without killing each other, what are we going to learn?

 
At 3/14/2006 04:56:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

LoL
So you liked that link too, Sam - You must have geek tendencies! Coool. :)

 
At 3/15/2006 12:08:00 PM, Blogger Daniel in Brookline said...

I agree, it's extremely cool. Thanks for the heads-up, SM!

Jordan: it's not all about dollars and cents. There are intangibles, such as the sense of wonder and the sense of accomplishment, that motivate people to do extremely tangible things.

We're learning very important things in Antarctic research these days, for example, from climatology to biology to archaeological evidence going back hundreds of millions of years. All of this can potentially have tremendous impact. But none of it would have happened, had there not been a turn-of-the-century race to reach the South Pole first. It was the adventure that paved the way for everything that followed, and made our current work possible.

By all means, keep the pure science and research; they're crucially important. But don't neglect the adventure. The pure science must be accomplished by human beings... and human beings must be inspired.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

 

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