Manned space exploration also causes people... to pursue degrees in science There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and e

Manned space exploration also causes people... to pursue degrees in science There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and every other former postdoc. Like the Moon landing itself, the shortage of trained scientists is a problem from 1958 which has long since been solved. What there's a shortage of is research funding that would put our existing pool of trained scientists to work in science. To fix that -- if, indeed, fixing that is a high priority -- we need money for science, not nostalgia trips or cargo cults. I went to school with astronomers. They did their work with the usual tools: Telescopes, computers, pencils, paper, and coffee. Commuter trips to low-Earth orbit, let alone the Moon, were not required. Even the planetary scientists are very successful as telecommuters: Robot probes worked pretty well in the Voyager missions of the 1970s and they work even better now. And I'm always entertained by the claims that manned missions to the Moon or Mars are some sort of important step toward "terraforming Mars" or "mining the asteroids for their precious, precious metal" or, god help us, "the stars". If going somewhere were a meaningful step toward terraforming it, I'd buy a ticket to Antarctica and plant some pineapples. And to say that Mars (0.00024 light years away, on average) is meaningfully closer to the stars (4 light years away or more) is literally like saying that one side of my house in Massachusetts is meaningfully closer to London, England than the other. If you want to carry out a plan to, say, terraform Mars, shouldn't you work on that? Maybe you could start with a cheap but useful theoretical model of terraforming? Then convince someone with money that the model is practical? Then build a pilot system that can, say, grow palm trees in Siberia without a greenhouse? [1] And only then bother to spend billions of dollars to actually take such a system to Mars? In the same vein, even if human travel to the stars were possible [2], the secret to interstellar travel isn't going to be discovered in space. It's going to be discovered by someone doodling on a napkin in Pasadena or Oxford or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then it's going to be prototyped on Earth, and then it's going to be tested with robots. --- [1] Not that this isn't several orders of magnitude easier to do. [2] Which it is not, for any reasonable definition of "human" and "travel": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...