Friday, July 7, 2006
On Wednesday, North Korea launched a barrage of six missiles,
ranging from "bottle rockets" to the fearsome Taepodong 2, which
was to be capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. It plopped into
the Sea of Japan, after traveling about one thousandth of the way
to our mainland. In a televised news conference, President Bush,
said this is an example of why "we need a ballistic missile
[defense] system." Others might say it shows that our current
missile defense system is perfectly matched to the threat.
Tuesday, the shuttle Discovery was launched to the ISS, which is
about one thousandth of the way to the moon. Still earlier, on
Monday, a half-mile wide asteroid, 2004 XP14, missed Earth by
only 269,000 miles, passing outside the moon's orbit. The only
casualties of the week were 528 children admitted to emergency
rooms for burns on their bare soles from stepping on burned out
sparklers dropped in the grass (my figure is as reliable as the
shuttle).
Destroying an embryo is equivalent to an abortion, according to
Cardinal Trujillo who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for
the Family. Pope Benedict XVI has not commented. As quoted in
news@nature.com , Cesare Galli of the Laboratory of Reproductive
Technologies in Cremona, Italy, the first scientist to clone a
horse, said: "I don't think scientists involved with embryonic
stem-cell research would care if they are excommunicated or not."
He may be right, but the question of when life begins has serious
legal implications. Conservative Christians believe that the
instant the male and female gametes fuse to form a single zygote
cell a soul is assigned. Presto! Evidence of the soul is
lacking, but a soul is said to be the essence of a person that
survives the body. Our DNA can survive the body, but a person is
more than their DNA. We are defined by memes as well as genes.
Scientists argue that without a central nervous system to
register pain and record memories, an embryo is not a person.
The most compelling question in science is whether there is life
to which we are not related. From the beginning of the space age
the search has focused on Mars. It's been 30 years since Viking
1 & 2 landed to search for life. NASA's Mars Exploration Program
in 2006 is, as it was in 1976, to understand whether Mars was,
is, or can be, an abode of life. What is missing, and has been
missing for three decades, is a sample return mission. What the
NAS didn't say is that the most exciting discovery in the past
decade is the abundance of extra-solar planets. What is needed
to study those planets are space optical occulters.
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