Five Short Physics Lessons for Obama

Richard Muller offers "five short physics lessons for President-elect Obama." They're all good, and quite right, but this is the one I want shouted from the rooftops:

Conventional wisdom: Sending humans into space is indispensable.

The hard science: Manned space flight might be a great adventure, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that the presence of humans helps advance science. The greatest scientific achievements of the space program have been the unmanned missions to the planets and the use of remotely controlled instruments to measure the cosmos. All of our greatest space science has come from robots. Yes, Hubble was fixed by humans, but building a telescope that was safe for humans to repair was actually far more expensive than just building a spare one that could have been launched if things went wrong.

Message for Obama: Explain to the public that putting humans in space is not only very dangerous; it usually slows the advance of science.

(Via kottke.)

Wednesday, November 19, 2008 (4) (tags↓)
energy, globalwarming, politics, science, space, terrorism

Comments

Word. The cold war pissing match is over. The robotic missions are high yield and an order of magnitude cheaper. Bush, ever the long-haul pisser, couldn't get past the space-exploration-as-symbolism pron (man on mars, man on moon). Here's to hoping the purported pragmatist Obama can see past such piffle.

—dougie

What? Remote sensing and detection, and robotic sensing and sampling, and any process that requires repetitive efforts, will always be the first level of scientific exploration in a technological society. However, even the most advanced robots and sensors, in any conceivable future, will not be able to "discover" new concepts. Robots can act as the sensory organs for humans but space is such a vast distance, and physics so cruel with time, that "discovery" will require an intelligent human on the spot. Observations, conceptualization, hypothesising, theorizing, testing, analyzing, concluding, re-hypothesizing, etc., can be done on the spot, without the affects of space-time. AND, we will outgrow this little planet in the next 100 years!

—dr. dad

Richard Muller is a short-sighted fool. One cannot detangle the technological advancements that have been generated by sending Wall-E to clean up some planet, or by letting Ed White float around in zero gs. NASA's greatest achievements have not been the discovery of some random black hole parsecs away or discovering the mass of dark matter, but rather the random spin-off technologies that affect the daily lives of everyone. So, when NASA tries to make the trip to Mars more comfortable for a Rocketman, you can bet your vacuum-hose urinal that civilization will benefit in the not too distant future.

—Suave_Mandingo

I agree with Suave. Space exploration in itself is not too beneficial (right now). However, all of the new technology and inventions that come from the research for going into space are. Check out these links to see the things that have come about because we wanted to explore space.

Spinoffs from Space

Space Age Inventions

Other Links

Now I'm not saying that these things would not have been invented if we didn't have space exploration, but they were because we did.

—Robert