11 ms·

Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out

20 points by robg 16y ago

jarin 16y ago
It's really sad to me that we give NASA less than a percent of our national budget. Along with the (now cancelled) Superconducting Super Collider, it's one of the few ways in which you can make huge leaps for humanity with a relatively small investment.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Actually, I think the investment vs leaps for humanity ratio is much better for "small science" projects than for big-ticket items like NASA and the SSC. Is it better to give $20 billion to building an SSC, or a million bucks to research on fruit flies and a million bucks to research on earthquakes and a million bucks to research on lattice gauge theory and a million bucks to research on whale mating and ... so on twenty thousand times? Do that and you'll get huge amounts of interesting research, or varying importance from "dull" to "hugely important". Smash some atoms together and you'll either find a Higgs Boson or not -- a single hypothesis either confirmed or rejected, big deal. NASA has done some great stuff too, but their greatest stuff has been in relatively small corners of their budget, like Hubble and Kepler.
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    I completely agree that the size of the budget does not determine the value of the science. In my mind, though, the huge value in NASA comes in fulfilling our species wanderlust. The entire history of our species is filled with exploration; it is hard-wired into our DNA. At this point, there are few places left to do that. On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. There is no scientific basis for this, I just want to be able to fly or jump across space. :)
    - jessriedel 16y ago
      > On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. Unfortunately, the Higgs has next to nothing to do with either of these. The fact of the matter is that it is very improbable that anything discovered at frontier accelerator (e.g., the LHC, SSC, CLIC) will produce anything useful for many hundreds of years, if not longer. Rather, these accelerators are built to learn about the universe for its own sake.
      - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
        I believe that many (maybe even all) scientists working on these kinds of projects feel this way. The people who ultimately fund the projects do not. It would be wise to remember that. The people who fund them do not expect a wormhole generator to fall out of them (gads, do people not have a sense of humor?). There is an implicit expectation that the knowledge for the sake of knowledge will have the potential to provide real, tangible benefits for the people who are really paying for these experiments. If that expectation wasn't there, scientists wouldn't bother justifying the expense[1]. Again, with no scientific basis, I am still hopeful that these experiments and the knowledge gained from them will result in a leap, perhaps in a way similar to the classical-to-quantum knowledge caused us to leap forward. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc
        jessriedel 16y ago
        >There is an implicit expectation that the knowledge for the sake of knowledge will have the potential to provide real, tangible benefits for the people who are really paying for these experiments. This is the thing that most laymen don't understand: in terms of potential for applications, the LHC (and the past 3 or 4 accelerators) are different than the pure, curosity-driven research which preceded them. In the past, scientists studied things because they were generally curious, but the things they studied were actually accessible at sensible energies and distances. That means that the knowledge they discovered was potentially useful, regardless of motivation. However, modern accelerators operate at energies which are inconceivably far from the real world. The chance that they produce practical knowledge is much, much lower (though of course not zero). >If that expectation wasn't there, scientists wouldn't bother justifying the expense. This is wrong. There are large incentives for scientists to not expend much effort making it painfully clear to the public how impractical the LHC is. >I believe that many (maybe even all) scientists working on these kinds of projects feel this way. The people who ultimately fund the projects do not. This is kind of true. Yes, if politicians and the public knew how unlikely it was that the LHC would produce anything useful, they would be less likely to fund it. But don't forget that the US federal government funded the Apollo program and still funds things like art.
- patio11 16y ago
  NASA has delivered no huge leap since satellites, aside from funding military applications at defense contractors (and while I have no problem spending billions to kill people more efficiently, I prefer to be honest about it).
  - btilly 16y ago
    You don't consider the interplanetary trips to be a huge leap? Or the discoveries of the Hubble space telescope? I (barely) remember when everyone was surprised to find out that Jupiter had rings. Let alone everything that we've found out about the moons. Even if you don't care about science, the proposed space shield has great practical value for humanity. I absolutely think we should fund it.
    - ceejayoz 16y ago
      Other neat things: extrasolar planet discovery, Mars rovers.
      - wlievens 16y ago
        Extrasolar planets are one of the major discoveries of the last century. I don't understand why most people don't consider that as one of the most awesome discoveries ever.
        jarin 16y ago
        I think a lot of people just assumed they were there, because of TV and movies. It's easy to forget that things like driving a rover around on Mars are EXTRAORDINARY FEATS OF ENGINEERING when you forget that not a single human being has ever set foot on a planet other than Earth.
        wlievens 16y ago
        Absolutely. In fact, I think you can extrapolate this to many other things. We've become so accustomed to the idea of the future that we're not noticing the fact that we've well entered it. XKCD regularly features this as a topic so I'm surely not alone with this feeling. I mean, we have a world-spanning information network that contains just about every bit of knowledge we can think of. We build devices the size of a thumb that can calculate more in a second than a thousand people could in a lifetime. We control these devices by touching a thin display that can show millions of different colors spread over a surface comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. All of these things were science fiction thirty years ago. Some of them were fifteen years ago. These are interesting times! But somehow, the democratization of science fiction has made people numb to this realization :-)
lukevdp 16y ago
"only 250-300 million added to the budget" Yes research is important. Yes exploration is important. But at least show some respect for tax payers. Asking for 250 million is the equivalent of asking 3000 people to work for nothing for a year.
- rimantas 16y ago
  This may help with some perspective: http://billpetti.com/2010/04/16/visualizing-the-2011-us-budget/ http://billpetti.com/2010/04/16/visualizing-the-2011-us-budg...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- yock 16y ago
  That's a little sensational, don't you think? Virtually every morsel of our federal budget can be put in the same terms, and many are orders of magnitude larger than this.
  - lukevdp 16y ago
    Yes, fair points and I understand it's a tiny slice of a massive pie. Maybe I respect tax dollars too much, but I did get a somewhat annoyed reaction about the way spending tax dollars was so flippantly worded in the article
    - yock 16y ago
      You're ascribing a lot of authority to an article. It really bears no indication of the deliberation, or lack thereof, on the part of those setting the budget.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    In fact, I think that every single item on the federal budget should be put in exacly these terms. Every $1000 the government spends could in principle be returned to the tax payer from whom it was taken. If you can't say "this money is better spent on this government action than, say, a steel worker with a family who has 25% of his income taken as taxes", then it shouldn't be so spent. That said, I think asteroid deflection is easily worth the money.

20 points by robg 16y ago

jarin 16y ago

It's really sad to me that we give NASA less than a percent of our national budget. Along with the (now cancelled) Superconducting Super Collider, it's one of the few ways in which you can make huge leaps for humanity with a relatively small investment.

hugh3 16y ago
Actually, I think the investment vs leaps for humanity ratio is much better for "small science" projects than for big-ticket items like NASA and the SSC. Is it better to give $20 billion to building an SSC, or a million bucks to research on fruit flies and a million bucks to research on earthquakes and a million bucks to research on lattice gauge theory and a million bucks to research on whale mating and ... so on twenty thousand times? Do that and you'll get huge amounts of interesting research, or varying importance from "dull" to "hugely important". Smash some atoms together and you'll either find a Higgs Boson or not -- a single hypothesis either confirmed or rejected, big deal. NASA has done some great stuff too, but their greatest stuff has been in relatively small corners of their budget, like Hubble and Kepler.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  I completely agree that the size of the budget does not determine the value of the science. In my mind, though, the huge value in NASA comes in fulfilling our species wanderlust. The entire history of our species is filled with exploration; it is hard-wired into our DNA. At this point, there are few places left to do that. On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. There is no scientific basis for this, I just want to be able to fly or jump across space. :)
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    > On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. Unfortunately, the Higgs has next to nothing to do with either of these. The fact of the matter is that it is very improbable that anything discovered at frontier accelerator (e.g., the LHC, SSC, CLIC) will produce anything useful for many hundreds of years, if not longer. Rather, these accelerators are built to learn about the universe for its own sake.
    - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
      I believe that many (maybe even all) scientists working on these kinds of projects feel this way. The people who ultimately fund the projects do not. It would be wise to remember that. The people who fund them do not expect a wormhole generator to fall out of them (gads, do people not have a sense of humor?). There is an implicit expectation that the knowledge for the sake of knowledge will have the potential to provide real, tangible benefits for the people who are really paying for these experiments. If that expectation wasn't there, scientists wouldn't bother justifying the expense[1]. Again, with no scientific basis, I am still hopeful that these experiments and the knowledge gained from them will result in a leap, perhaps in a way similar to the classical-to-quantum knowledge caused us to leap forward. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc
      - jessriedel 16y ago
        >There is an implicit expectation that the knowledge for the sake of knowledge will have the potential to provide real, tangible benefits for the people who are really paying for these experiments. This is the thing that most laymen don't understand: in terms of potential for applications, the LHC (and the past 3 or 4 accelerators) are different than the pure, curosity-driven research which preceded them. In the past, scientists studied things because they were generally curious, but the things they studied were actually accessible at sensible energies and distances. That means that the knowledge they discovered was potentially useful, regardless of motivation. However, modern accelerators operate at energies which are inconceivably far from the real world. The chance that they produce practical knowledge is much, much lower (though of course not zero). >If that expectation wasn't there, scientists wouldn't bother justifying the expense. This is wrong. There are large incentives for scientists to not expend much effort making it painfully clear to the public how impractical the LHC is. >I believe that many (maybe even all) scientists working on these kinds of projects feel this way. The people who ultimately fund the projects do not. This is kind of true. Yes, if politicians and the public knew how unlikely it was that the LHC would produce anything useful, they would be less likely to fund it. But don't forget that the US federal government funded the Apollo program and still funds things like art.
patio11 16y ago
NASA has delivered no huge leap since satellites, aside from funding military applications at defense contractors (and while I have no problem spending billions to kill people more efficiently, I prefer to be honest about it).
- btilly 16y ago
  You don't consider the interplanetary trips to be a huge leap? Or the discoveries of the Hubble space telescope? I (barely) remember when everyone was surprised to find out that Jupiter had rings. Let alone everything that we've found out about the moons. Even if you don't care about science, the proposed space shield has great practical value for humanity. I absolutely think we should fund it.
  - ceejayoz 16y ago
    Other neat things: extrasolar planet discovery, Mars rovers.
    - wlievens 16y ago
      Extrasolar planets are one of the major discoveries of the last century. I don't understand why most people don't consider that as one of the most awesome discoveries ever.
      - jarin 16y ago
        I think a lot of people just assumed they were there, because of TV and movies. It's easy to forget that things like driving a rover around on Mars are EXTRAORDINARY FEATS OF ENGINEERING when you forget that not a single human being has ever set foot on a planet other than Earth.
        wlievens 16y ago
        Absolutely. In fact, I think you can extrapolate this to many other things. We've become so accustomed to the idea of the future that we're not noticing the fact that we've well entered it. XKCD regularly features this as a topic so I'm surely not alone with this feeling. I mean, we have a world-spanning information network that contains just about every bit of knowledge we can think of. We build devices the size of a thumb that can calculate more in a second than a thousand people could in a lifetime. We control these devices by touching a thin display that can show millions of different colors spread over a surface comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. All of these things were science fiction thirty years ago. Some of them were fifteen years ago. These are interesting times! But somehow, the democratization of science fiction has made people numb to this realization :-)

lukevdp 16y ago

"only 250-300 million added to the budget" Yes research is important. Yes exploration is important. But at least show some respect for tax payers. Asking for 250 million is the equivalent of asking 3000 people to work for nothing for a year.

rimantas 16y ago
This may help with some perspective: http://billpetti.com/2010/04/16/visualizing-the-2011-us-budget/ http://billpetti.com/2010/04/16/visualizing-the-2011-us-budg...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
yock 16y ago
That's a little sensational, don't you think? Virtually every morsel of our federal budget can be put in the same terms, and many are orders of magnitude larger than this.
- lukevdp 16y ago
  Yes, fair points and I understand it's a tiny slice of a massive pie. Maybe I respect tax dollars too much, but I did get a somewhat annoyed reaction about the way spending tax dollars was so flippantly worded in the article
  - yock 16y ago
    You're ascribing a lot of authority to an article. It really bears no indication of the deliberation, or lack thereof, on the part of those setting the budget.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  In fact, I think that every single item on the federal budget should be put in exacly these terms. Every $1000 the government spends could in principle be returned to the tax payer from whom it was taken. If you can't say "this money is better spent on this government action than, say, a steel worker with a family who has 25% of his income taken as taxes", then it shouldn't be so spent. That said, I think asteroid deflection is easily worth the money.