You can't defend that position, Chuck. Discussions about what targets are more important than others definitely are not "pointless" in our present economy. I'm sure NASA has many scientists talking about that very thing; whole panels probably. Why is it pointless what we explore? I can't understand that thinking. Just because astronauts are not going there in person doesn't mean we can't discover a great deal within our present budget and national interest. NASA has a whole fleet of Mars explorers in the pipeline, and a switch from Mars to Europa probably wouldn't be much more costly. You can throw up your hands and say it's all pointless, but I won't. ________________________________ From: Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> To: Utah Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2013 4:24 PM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Mar's Mission unlikely NASA says I never wrote that, Joe. My post was to the effect that discussions about what targets are more important than others in the short-term is pointless in light of a lack of national will and miniscule budgets. There is a natural progression of where we explore, how we explore it, and on what timetable, but that prioritization is always mucked-up by politics and personal agendas of people on the "inside" and those who want to do things before we are truly ready, either technologically, fiscally, or mentally. We go forward in fits and starts, often taking backwards steps because of the reasons I listed. A long-term plan would help smooth out space exploration immensely. Long-term means more than ten, fifteen, or twenty years. On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
It doesn't matter what we explore? That's kind of a defeatist attitude, Chuck. The question matters a great deal to people with a burning curiosity to know whether life exists elsewhere. Discussions about probes aren't silly banter. True, we might not be destined for space travel -- in which case the next step up the tree of evolution on our particular planet is a better-adapted cockroach. Why not at least try to learn about our surroundings?
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