Kirbmarc wrote:gurugeorge wrote:
There's something quite depressing about that segment. Abraham Lincoln with zest for life and knowledge, versus young "comedians" from the Idiocracy who don't know and don't care.
Yes, it's pretty depressing. Nye tried his best to make Mars research appealing to people who don't care about anything but themselves and making themselves look like good little ideologues who toe the line. Hell, he even tried to say that their kids could dream to be the first person on Mars and they didn't care. He tried to get them more excited about technological progress and they didn't care.
There could have been plenty of jokes to be made about life on Mars, or about space in general. They didn't care, they had to bring in Trump and ISIS and how they don't give a damn about anything.
Well, this is where I beg to differ, slightly.
Yes, looking at the overall "Big Picture" of things, making life , human life, multiplanetary is important. Heck, right now, despite the "Universal Odds" being against it, we might be the only living creatures with intelligence in the Universe. Or Earth might be the only world to currently host life. I don't believe either of these things, but, if true, then a single event could conceivably wipe out all life in the Universe.
Thus, - and for other reasons like intellectual curiosity, economic expansionism, political plurality, even evolution - I view the exploration and eventual exploitation of Space as a logical imperative.
But this view is informed by a lifetime of space geekery. And its not widely known about or widely shared.
More to the point: Mars. NASA has spent about (right off the top of my head) 20 billion over 30/40 years on Mars probes. About half of the missions didn't reach the planet or something happened once they got to orbit. Of all these probes only two Vikings 1 and 2 ever tried to search for life. And this was all the way back in 1976/77 when I was entering Kindergarten and first grade. The results, as can be found all over the web, were initially against life in 2 of the 3 three experiments (which most scientists at the time took as conclusive no life), but since then new information about Mars soil and a reanalysis of a seeming biological pattern in the data have muddied the waters. The next mission to search for actual LIFE will be the European Space Agency/Russian collaboration due to take place in 2022 or thereabouts. So from 1977 to 2016, just what HAS NASA been doing on Mars?
One probe was sent to check for methane in the Martian atmosphere (biosignature). But other than that? Sending endless probes to try and find out if the planet has ever had water. Yes, that's right. Most of the missions since 1977 have something to do with water, and most of them can't even find out if there is CURRENT EXTANT water on the planet. I can't tell you how frustrated that made me reading papers and results that came out since the late 1990's that all involved Martian water and were (until very recently) all INCONCLUSIVE. Studying Martian geology. And sending back really cool (for space geeks) panaromic pictures of the rocky, frozen, Martian desert. Several landers have functioned as weather stations. The landers themselves, while often carrying increasingly sophisticated labs-on-chips and computers, are in many ways disgustingly primitve. Most are far smaller than a golf cart and weigh under 100 pounds. Curiosity is the exception: about as big as a gulf cart, and weighing almost exactly a short ton (2000 pounds). It's the rover that needed that strange landing involving a parachute and retropropulsion because its too big to land via any parachute alone in the thin Martian atmosphere. Why do I call most of the landers primitive? Because of their limitations. Curiosity, for example, even with an RTG generator (and not all Martian landers have that) can only travel 300 feet per hour. These vehicles take YEARS to travel a few dozen miles (if they survive that long). If they even tip over once, that's the end of the mission. They can't be repurposed for other scientific experiments, often can't dig into the soil at all (or more than a few inches), and - in part because of the Planetary Protection Protocols - are kept deliberately away from some of the most interesting terrain features we've discovered. And on top of all that, NONE of them possesses anyway to pass their samples back to Earth.
That's it. That's all the public has seen done on Mars since 1977, and the people likely to discover if there really IS life on Mars aren't even likely to be Americans now. NASA does have a plan to visit Mars with a manned mission - sometimes in the 2030's supposedly. I say supposedly because that is several Administrations away, and Congress the Presidency have been canceling programs and running NASA like a chicken with its head cut off since the early 70's. To Congress its a jobs program for their districts, which is why the expendable and totally too expensive to be flown (unless 4 to 5 billion per year was added to the current NASA budget...hah! Pigs will fly, first) Space Launch System is being built using old Space Shuttle parts and old space shuttle contractors. To Presidents NASA means a very few appointed positions , and a chance for a Prestige program or two. And since Congress often is of the party opposite the President, both sides often fight to cancel or defund the others programs. So NASA gets nowhere, esp the manned part of NASA, which is why humans have been futzing around in Low Earth Orbit for 40 years and why we can't even fly our own crew to the ISS anymore(though hopefully that changes next year with commercial crew).
Given the ascension of identity politics, the crappy economy , the seemingly endless wars and the fact that this election seems to be a choice between a large haired, large-mouthed idiot, and a conniving, above-the-law, identitarian warmongering psychopath (Hillary) is it any wonder those comedians couldn't give two shits and a giggle about Mars? Maybe ten, more likely 20 years ago when the Cold War seemed to end and things seemed hopeful and the economy was much better, I'd have taken your side of things. But now people are hurting, people are confused, people are scared, and it's not like NASA is dropping a colony on Mars anytime soon. In fact, if someone does set up an actual working colony on Mars before 2050, I'm willing to bet it will be Mr. Elon Musk and Space X. And though it pisses me off, it does seem like the glory of finally discovering life on Mars (or that there isn't any) will fall to the ESA and the Russians. I understand now why the average person in the USA doesn't care about that.
