REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (10/25/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC>
In Saturday's Peninsula Times-Tribune (formerly Palo Alto Times and
Redwood City Tribune) there's a nice column ("A personal view") by
Leonard Koppett, strongly advocating funds for SETI ($10/yr total,
i.e. a quarter cent/year worldwide, or 4 cents/yr if USA foots the
whole bill). He countered three major arguments against SETI funding:
Either-or, better things to spend the funds on? -- No, each bill is
judged on its merits, there's no either-or between spending funds on
SETI or on schools/hospitals.
Spend money on Earth, not in space? -- Space programs don't send money
to space, they spend it for personnel and resources on Earth just like
other programs. It just ends in another pocket, "to a computer
operator at NASA indtead of to a computer operator for some insurance
company".
Why waste money on research when there are practical things that need
doing? -- [I'll quote almost this entire paragraph.] "As we gain basic
scientific knowledge and experience, we develop potential
understanding of the mechanisms of the things that concern us most
directly: health, the manufacture of improved products for daily use
(and yes, weapons), the laws of physical nature. Biology and medicine
are not intimately involved with chemistry and subatomic physics, and
the new instruments, as well as the new theories, have made outer
space a laboratory for studying the particles and radiation on which
everything else is based. Deep-space astronomy has become a frontier
of nuclear physics. New knowledge is not 'wasted'."Webb@Cmu-20c@sri-unix (10/26/82)
From: Jon Webb <Webb at Cmu-20c> Well, I really don't want to restart the Tipler discussion, but suppose we detect no signals. Then we really know very little about whether there is intelligent life in the universe. All we know is that if it is out there, it is not noisy. Wouldn't it be better to spend the money on developing our own space expertise, in order to someday search for life directly, or maybe spread our own life around? There's only so much money people will be willing to spend on space-related things nowadays. Jon
REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (10/28/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> Let me propose this alternative. Instead of treating the itsy bitsy teenie weenie little bit of money we spend on space currently as a rare commodity, and having all the uses for it fight against each other like rats on a sinking ship [SETI, manned space station, unmanned orbiters of Jupiter&Saturn, solar missions, Mars rover, surveys of asteroids&Moon, more shuttle orbiters, Halley's and other comets, ...], why not find ways to get the public so enthusiastic about each worthwhile&inexpensive activity in space [4 cents per USA citizen per year is really virtually free!! Even $10/(yr*person) is less than the pizza budget] that people will demand more space activity and eager watch the results that come back from each new mission? One pizza per person per year will pay for an awful lot of space activity! P.s. it was sad the other night seeing the Nova rerun where somebody at JPL said matter of factly that we'd have a rover on Mars in 1986. So many many things have been cut in recent years, and so many other things have been threatened that we rave about what's not cut and totally forget what was cut a while back, like the Mars rover. Imagine time-lapse images from Mars on the evening news, 24 hours of roving collapsed into a 5-minute "Report From Mars" that is a regular nightly feature!! Wild Kingdom shows a half hour of nature stuff 5 nights a week. How about the same for Mars, say 15 minutes of time-lapse imagary mixed in with 15 minutes of discussion about what was found that day and earlier? People like lotteries. How about funding the whole Viking project by having people try to guess each day what will be found around the next bend in the <canal>?
arwhite (11/03/82)
It seems to me that every year we are better able to do things like search for life out there. If we were to discover it while it would be EXTREMELY important we really wouldn't get anything out of it in the short run. I think we should spend our money on the really important things like space travel so that next century we can spend an equivalent amount and turn out with a much better idea as to what is out there when we are using much more advanced technology.