What else are we going to do? Continue making better and cheaper widgets on Earth for the next 5 billion years? Why not have some fun and explore.
Hi rowenwood, Believing that a serious question like you has been indecently answered by a "nothing" only reply, my apologies. I'll try to expand a bit on this. Our darling NASA is of course only one of these hydra monsters we sometimes recognize by the name of "bureaucracy". In fact bureaucracies is something that every citizen taxpayer as well as tax beneficiary understands intimately. It has been explained in detail to the people by great professors, still memorized as "Parkinson's Law" somewhat augmented by "Peter's Principle". (For the more learned kind, books exist like "Bureaucracy: Or the State of Total War", written by von Mises kind of predicting Hitler's adventures 10 year ahead of the fireworks). Ok, let's get back into space. Good old Kennedy of course started the ball rolling. Of course the poor guy panicked because of the Russian toys whirling overhead already and, not very responsible by nature with the good people's money, thought up NASA with the Moon thing. Big triumph, I don't have to tell you, they still play it regularly on TV. What did we get back from this? This also has been explained many times to the good people, but little nononsense never quite got this. He understood that they managed to bring back a few pieces of black stone or so, some of which got stolen en sold for lots of money. Other benefits have been the expansion stimulated by this of certain sectors in the real estate business. Further we got the shuttle thing which was going to reduce greatly the expense for the great people paying for this, due to the fact that they would from now on still only fly with refurbished equipment. (More clever people know about the figures on cost overruns - too big for poor nononsense to put into his head). The rest of the story we know. The first mishap around, we the great people have only understood after the great Physicist Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, talked to us directly on TV to cut the hoolahoop into pieces spun together by the NASA greats. After the present mishap, the people have to do without the Great Late Professor Feynman. However, as nononsense understood, they even will have to abandon (scrap) that beautiful Hubble attraction of which nononsense loved those pictures so much. The Space station under construction and again paid for by the great people is not in jeopardy though. Our space buddies, the Russians, managed to save a soapbox from their immense scrap yards of that kind of stuff and they promised to keep on flying provided the great people keep on paying for it. Now little nonsense got very scared about reading about planet-X stuff and so. Some wrote on Internet that NASA is looking at it with its Hubble thing. I first didn't believe any of it as I'm a clever sensible guy,in fact I never truly believed in UFO's either. However to my surprise I read, in the NYT I believe a couple of weeks ago, about how NASA is cataloging all rocks flying above nononsense's little head. I was surprised that they hadn't done this yet knowing something about the money we paid them already. Now it seems that by about 2008 they will have done the job. What even got me more scared is that in fact some of these killer things, you remember those poor dinosaurs, are at times spotted at once out of nowhere. So what if they would spot one tomorrow that they didn't know about. Of course little nononsense knowing himself to be rational immediately put the idea to rest till I read a few lines further about how these great NASA people were working already like hell to protect their patrons, the great people paying for all this. Little nononsense is now 100% convinced that those guys are dead serious given the details. Firstly they thought of making one of those really mighty atombomb gadgets that they would launch towards the incoming piece of nogood rock. As they hired som really clever guys at NASA in the meantime, one of these said that this would not do any good. After the explosion of the killer rock, the pieces would still be falling onto nononsense's little head. So they started to think about this again till they found that they really had to built a thousand or so of those smaller atom bombs. Each would blow away a little piece of the bad incoming rock and jettison it into space in a direction away from the earth. As nononsense immediately understood, this will also change a bit the trajectory of the bad rock and they would calculate the placement of these little bloodsucking bomblets so that the bad rock will just miss the great people's planet. Reading all this in a great newspaper, nononsense was 100% reassured. However something started itching when he got thinking about the big scrap yard of mainly NASA's that keeps on whirling overhead. If it were only the big space station, I can still buy their argument that when it "re-enters into the atmosphere" it will with high likelihood plunge into an ocean. But what if you have thousands, nay ten thousands pieces of junk that by necessity have to fall back onto earth? What's the story on that stuff? Anyhow, nononsense will keep on reading his newspaper and he promises to clarify his ET fellows on this if he hears something new. What about going to Mars to find life. Nononsense is all for this. Imagine there would creep something around on that planet. We cannot only limit our protection to "Planet Earth". That would be immoral and darn selfish. What would the UN say about our great people, what would France say? Wouldn't that possible poor life on Planet Mars also be threatened by those ugly killer rocks. It's high time we find some life on Mars before it gets extinguished. Nononsense also thinks that it would be cheaper for the great people to pay NASA to do the job now at once for protecting both Planet Earth and Planet Mars with their atom bomblets. Industry sources have assured them that they will definitely get a modest discount. That's all, be good and watch overhead, :eek: nononsense
Of course not. It is just innovative way to get to the taxpayers pockets which is the primary purpose of every governement .Make no mistake about it.
One answer to the question is what is the purpose of searching for life on Mars is:.To continue to answer the ageless question of whether we are alone in this universe or not, beauracratic bloat notwithstanding. What is the purpose of finding finding life on Mars is a different question and I am not sure if you intended this nuance or not.
Hey slamma, Where did you get the idea that this question is "ageless"? You're dreaming. They just piped that between your ears only a couple of years ago. Before that, people have only been interested in the man in the moon. Besides, if you count on NASA to get you the answer, forget it.
You're right nononsense, I realize I only did get this piped in between my ears just a few years ago. We have only been interested in the universe as a result of NASA. Thank you. THe Intellectual tradition of the west is a fraud. How much is a hit of acid these days?
Hey slamma, If you believe that your: "The Intellectual tradition of the west" can be resumed in dreaming about "being alone in the universe", you better start looking a bit better