










now faces its own problems.

Comments     Threshold


RE: What ELSE Would One Expect...
By MrBlastman on 8/30/2011 12:40:48 PM , Rating: 3
First, in jest, never trust a man who switches teams. They can't be counted on. ;)


First off, Barrack Obama is a Christian.

Who cares? Our nation was set up to have separation of Church and State. It should always be this way as long as our flag still flies strong. I'm sick of politicians using Religion as a crutch to try and sway people to vote for them. I wish they'd all stop wearing it on their sleeve and instead, try and sway them with the results of their actions.


I think that we can table the Manned Space Program for a decade or so, with no big loss to science. Robotic space probes can do far more valuable science at a fraction of the cost. Worth every penny in my opinion. Manned Space flight is for politicians.

No, I don't think we can table it for a decade or so. What if one of the Great Observatories, i.e. Hubble or Spitzer etc., run into serious problems? How will we fix them? We can't simply let them rot--okay, we can, but arguably their contributions to the scientific community, particularly Astronomy, have been so paramount and tremendous we can not deny their worth to mankind. We can't fix them without human hands. It isn't possible. Nothing beats real eyeballs and hands working on the item, at least for now.

Space probes are great, they've told us a lot about our solar system and the planets within it. Voyager 1 and 2 have given us tremendous insight on things. The various probes we have put on Mars have also given us large amounts of information.

However, the farther probes move from Earth, the greater the delay for communications and commands to the probe between it and Earth. Then we have visual acuity issues coupled with mobility problems. We have great technology, however none of these possess artificial intelligence that can replace the human brain. When we bind our brains to limitations such as delays taking multiple minutes before any progress is had, it becomes cumbersome to achieve results of any great magnitude.

But, we have to consider the costs. It costs little to send disposable probes relatively speaking compared with what it would cost to send a crew of humans. Thus, we could send more probes instead. That alone could be enough to tell us to "stay on Earth."

With that considered though, Man has always been about exploring and reaching beyond their boundaries. We've never just sat in a spot and remained complacent for any great length of time. It is in our nature to expand our horizons and try and best our previous achievements. Putting a Man on Mars might cost a huge amount of money, it might allow us to get immediate but small-reaching results (versus lengthy, but far-reaching), the thing it would do better than any probe is providing inspiration to our youth to pursue the sciences (which we have a draught of) and give us more minds to tackle the greater problems.

RE: What ELSE Would One Expect...


