Space Ping
Posted on 01/04/2005 2:04:22 PM PST by tricky_k_1972
I'm one engineer who is solidly conservative.
I find it interesting that so many of my colleagues are libs, but then again this is a blue state so I guess it's to be expected. They still have no idea that I don't share their political leanings, so it's funny to listen to them talk. I simply refuse to discuss politics or religion at the office.
Yep, send robots to Mars for terraforming. Then when the plants start growing and water starts flowing again, we can sit back, look through our telescopes and marvel at how the planet turned from red to green.
Ahhhh...It's Beautiful!
But don't start sending any humans..it might cost as much as a couple of years of welfare payments and since I don't get to go, I don't want anybody else to go either.
I'm a scientist and a liberal, but while doubtful at first, I'm starting to come around to this point of view. We've made a lot of purely scientific progress in the last couple decades, a lot of new theories about the nature of space/time and matter and how they interact, GUTs, etc. The more time I spend thinking about this, the more I think that it's high time to kick the tires on some of these ideas and let the engineers go to town for a while.
At the same time, I understand why scientists who make a living off of gov't funding would be a little nervous at the tone surrounding this initiative.
I find at my employment that it is the managers, and particularly the manager wannabees that are the libs.
course I work in Reliabilty, and the ILS guys are mostly prior service.
We develop better ways to kill people and break things.
I'd crotch kick a scientist any day.
I'm a scientist and I have not observed this at all -- far from it. Except for academic tenured scientists - they're a different breed.
Oh man would I love to see where you work. It's like a dream job come true.
The manned program, having broader aims than just information return is a captive to politics. Privte enterprise would seem to be the only way for manned spaceflight to go in a new direction.
I am both.
LOL!
Welcome to FR. Hopefully the tent is big enough for you...or at least the FR circus is entertaining. I have always tried to keep the big picture in focus. Our society clearly should be spending more on R&D than we do on entertainment, but of course, we don't. That said, getting humans off this rock permanently qualifies as an overriding goal. We have all of humanity's eggs in one fragile basket. A large impact, human created "Andromeda Strain", or some other disaster could make us extinct. We also need to consider the incredible resources that we will find which dwarf the recoverable resources of this planet. Finally, contacting alien intelligence will allow humans to take quantum leaps in technology and culture. All of this may take hundreds of years, but like I said, I always try to see the big picture.
Surpise, surprise, surprise... Left wing, tenured, university professors think the President is wrong. Who'd of thunk it?
The best section in this article (in my opinion) is:
In a sense, this conflict between scientific and engineering research is a conflict in priorities. Scientists explore the nature of the universe, discovering such knowledge as how the solar system formed or whether life is possible on Mars. The APS report is therefore a lobbying effort by scientists to focus government money toward this type of research.
Engineers develop technologies that make lives better, such as freeze-dried food and infrared sensors -- technology that was developed for space travel and has become ubiquitous since. Hence, the effort to build a new and better spaceship to transport humans to the moon is guaranteed to reshape the technology around us -- as did the space program in the 1960s.
Though both science and engineering are necessary for any civilized society to prosper, perhaps the United States has decided that the time has come in its space exploration endeavors to give priority to the engineering, and let the science follow when it can.
We need balance. Pure science is great, and unfortunately Utopian. The far end of pure science must be balanced with the opposing far end of application. In my opinion they should, combined, receive ~85% of the taxpayer funded "science" funding. The remaining ~15% should be directed toward taking today's scientific breakthroughs and turning them into next years applications.
Science needs engineering as much as engineering needs science. One without the other will become stale and pointless. The "balance" of the past is repsonible for many of our great leaps forward. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, the governmental suppport has been too one sided for pure science.
Bell labs - some of the greatest - are a perfect example of that balance, pure science tied together with a need for applicability (well, then they got thumped by regulations, but that is a different thread).
Just my thoughts...
Some are more conservative, but it is fun to listen to one of the liberals rant and rave about Bush and his invading Afghanistan and Iraq and then ask them how many of the weapons systems they designed were used in these two wars?
I've never understood how some in the 'hard' sciences can be liberal. All the data shows that socialism kills people and ideas.
I just don't get it. Maybe it's just due to all that time in grad school. Maybe it's cause engineers deal with 'stuff' and scientists deal with 'ideas'--but even with that, liberalism is hostile to unorthodox ideas.
Try this thought exercise: Name one thing with the word 'people', 'people's' or 'public' in it that is worth a damn.
Try: Public Beach vs. Private Beach; Peoples Republic vs. Republic....
I thought engineers were scientists but scientists are not necessarily engineers.
How much of my tax money would this cost?
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