
Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/26schweickart.html
======
jarin
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
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
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
> 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
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>

~~~
jessriedel
>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.

~~~
wlievens
Are you saying the Apollo program was entirely impractical?

------
lukevdp
"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.

~~~
yock
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
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
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.

