You probably heard this by now but the NASA chief made some comments about Global Warming that have people up in arms.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2007/05/nasa_chief_questions_need_to_a_1.html
While I think we have some issues with our climate, I think the NASA chief makes some good points but more importantly, I don’t think this is NASA’s fight. NASA didn’t cause any of these issues and NASA can’t fix them if they are indeed issues we have any real control over. NASA’s job in all of this, IMO, should be to continue working on figuring out how we can get people into space and to other planets long term in a reasonable manner including developing the needed technology and energy sources which also help us here in the meanwhile on Terra. This is not because we should just leave a destroyed planet behind, but because global warming isn’t the only issue with staying here. There are all sorts of other issues plaguing us such as over population and a demand that exceeds our capability to safely harvest natural resources not to mention our inability to coexist with other humans who don’t share our religious beliefs, etc. On top of that there are any number of natural disasters that could could occur at any point such as Calderas (Super Volcano), large meteors, the sun kicking out solar flares too massive to be fully dissipated by the Earth’s natural radiation barriers or the magnetic poles shifting, etc. It is like anything important, you need to be redundant. Depending on one and only source for anything is a sure way to have a big issue eventually and I would say the Earth is a pretty serious single point of failure for the human race.
One thing is very clear from the studies of earth long ago is that stuff changes, stuff that changed massively and quite catastrophically well before humans could have caused the changes and stuff so massive humans couldn’t possibly have caused the changes such as changing of the magnetic field strengths and polarities. As the scientists will readily admit, it isn’t about if these serious things will happen, it is a matter of when. We are, from all current accepted evidence, the first dominant species on the planet that has the ability to get off the planet and avoid a species ending natural event, how sad would it be if we didn’t capitalize on that.
Who needs to be fighting this fight? Big business and governments globally. Trying to change what we are doing that could be influencing the climate globally is going to take huge changes in how we live and do things as a whole, not in small individual groupings. The infrastructure that needs to be put together for this stuff needs to be done by the governments and big business globally, you can’t drive an alternate fuel vehicle if you can’t get from Point A to Point B because there are no mechanisms to fuel the vehicle along the path.
Interestingly enough… a lot of the work NASA does has helped and likely will continue to help in the move towards alternate energy sources… And that is just a side benefit. Look at solar as just an example of something that NASA has helped tremendously with. They have proven it can work well and helped advance that area of energy production. If NASA had a budget that was greater than 3%-4% of the Defense Budget imagine what they could have accomplished by now; I could have possibly have taken a vacation on one of Saturn’s moons and sat back and enjoyed the view. Also, you get people whining about what NASA is doing in that it is too dangerous because they have a few people occasionally getting killed, how many people has the Defense Budget help get killed? Why is the death of a single astronaut so much worse than the death of a single soldier?
I am not saying we shouldn’t have a Defense Budget, but not sure we need to spend quite what we spend. I mean I love things like the FA-22 Raptor, it is beautiful and amazing technology, but it seems some of the main people we are fighting are barely up above the stick and rock and throwing stages unless they can purchase something. If all the developed countries stopped building this shit, the “bad guys” wouldn’t have anyone to buy it from.
joe
