Friday, Febuary 05, 2010
Anyone who still dreamed of a Moon base for human expeditions to Mars and
beyond had a rude awakening this week by President Obama's FY2011 budget
request to Congress. This is an asking budget; its significance for space
lies in what it did not ask for, namely a human mission back to the Moon.
Incredibly, Apollo 11 made the first moon landing with vacuum tube
electronics. Astronauts are now equally old-fashioned. Congress will hotly
debate these matters in the coming months, but there won't be an
appropriation bill before October. International obligations make it
difficult to withdraw from the ISS but that may well be the last human
outpost in space, at least for a very long time. The asking budget calls
for increasing NASA science by 11 percent. NASA will be free to do science,
which it does very well.
The administration believes research will increase the long term prospects
for employment, which is almost certainly true. Science was therefore
exempted from the domestic spending freeze. NSF would receive a boost of
more than 7% and global climate research would increase by 21% across eight
agencies. The scientific community must now demonstrate that the
President's trust is not misplaced.
The latest is a lengthy article in GQ demanding to know why America is not
doing anything about the cell-phone hazard. At the top of the article is an
eye-catching photograph of a pack of Marlboro's next to a cell phone. Well
cell phones are a hazard, and rude and intrusive as well, but they don't
cause cancer. They're a hazard because they distract people who are
operating huge machines that can travel 100 mph. Go to
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu , click on "search", and type in
"cell phone". You will get a list of 38 issues of What's New going back to 1993
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN93/wn012993.html
that deal with cellphones.
Last week in his State of the Union address the president called for
increased generation of nuclear power and offshore drilling for oil and
gas. Who could argue? On Wednesday, however, the president sought to
increase production of corn-based ethanol and spur development of
technologies to capture carbon dioxide from burning coal. Researchers have
reportedly engineered a bacterium that can convert biomass directly into
diesel fuel, but it would be a serious mistake to become dependent on food
crops as fuel without firm plans to reduce fertility rates throughout the
world. It seems impossible to find a single politician willing to utter the
word "population" in public. All the evidence from the depletion of ocean
fisheries to global warming and the Pacific garbage patch, are clear
warnings that the population of Earth already exceeds that which can be
sustained without further degradation of our beautiful home, Earth.
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