Does NASA Need More Money?

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• published: 14 Mar 2013
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Join The PogoTribe on Google+ http://bit.ly/P35J5G twitter http://twitter.com/delicioussteak email danbrownuniverse@gmail.com Intro by Rob Scallon http://www.youtube.com/user/robs70986987 /// /// /// TRANSCRIPT: [PREVIOUSLY ON POGOBAT] What do you think about NASA's lack of funding? Do you think that programs like Penny4Nasa are effective? What do you think is the best way to raise increase interest in this vast universe? TALK MORE ABOUT SPACE! PLEASE! Love the vids, keep up the good work :) Thanks for the email Marken. [INTRO] I already know that I'm going to get so much flak from you guys for this... and don't get me wrong, I love Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he's brilliant, he inspires wonder, he's Earth's last best hope should we discover a long island sized asteroid coming our way, and I recognize that I'm no expert on this--I'm open to your ideas as to why I'm dead wrong... but I'm inclined to think that moving much of space exploration from the public sphere to the private sphere makes sense for the moment. It makes all sorts of sense to me that in the 60s and 70s the American government was all sorts of about exploring space. It was the height of the Cold War, we were hard at work improving ICBM technology to make sure that whole "mutually assured destruction" thing was still hangin' out like a sword from a horse hair. I mean, when you're developing rockets that can carry the biggest weapons ever made halfway around the planet, it doesn't take much to angle that rocket just a little higher and start shooting things into space. Nowadays though the dominant force behind putting human creations into space is not defense--it's industry. It's communications satellites, GPS, some have floated the idea that we might try to mine asteroids. We may well reach a point where we make some discovery, or International relations evolve to the point where it once again makes sense for government to lead the charge on space, but I think the right people to be leading this chapter are the Richard Bransons and SpaceX's of the world. This is a time for tinkering, and government isn't as well equipped for tinkering as the free market. The time for a coordinated push that might involve government support should come if and when said tinkering leads to a breakthrough. We wouldn't have invested in the interstate highway system without the automobile, why invest a great deal in space now when our role there is still so open ended? If there's a scientific realm we should be considering a coordinated push towards, I think more short-term potential lies in the incredibly small than the incredibly big, and to illustrate that point, here's Stephen Fry on "Nano." [CLIP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70ba1DByUmM] Much of the desire to invest more in space comes from this idea that our very existence depends on expanding to other planets, but I think there's some danger in that idea becoming a cop-out for not bothering to figure out how to live sustainably on Earth. I mean I obviously don't know exactly how it might shake out, but the idea that we might approach the cosmos with a "Manifest Destiny," "This is ours to plunder and pillage" mindset sounds like a sci-fi movie that doesn't end well for humanity. I think that a better fix for our long-term sustainability woes than colonizing space would be the development of nanotech that allows for full immersion virtual reality matrices where we can explore any cosmos or plane imaginable. And even if that strikes you as far fetched, even if you'd rather go the space colonization route, it still makes sense for our primary focus right now to be on the Nano scale. I mean, how on Earth... so to speak... do you think we'll ever terraform Mars without a swarm of self-replicating nanobots that convert Carbon Dioxide to Nitrogen and Oxygen? I mean, seriously--people sometimes! [END]