I want to be excited about
the Rosetta Mission and the Lander Philae connecting with a comet moving at
40,000 miles per hour, but I’m not.
I torment myself: I am not a good citizen, not
adventurous enough; I have no worldview. I don’t care about the RIGHT
THINGS. Conceivably I am just an old
crank. All of the above may be true.
I understand why the
international scientists of the ESA—European Space Agency--who have been
working on this project since November of 1993, were jubilant over yesterday’s
landing, some of them in tears. It has been a lot of work.
The Rosetta Mission was
created to help us to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system.
The ESA, according to online sources, is “convinced that comets played a key
role in the evolution of the planets,” bringing much of the water into today’s
oceans, for example. The ESA has been and continues to be a collaborative
effort involving eight countries, including the United Kingdom and the United
States.
I’m all for international
collaboration; it really gets things done. So does a budget of some 1.4 billion
euros. The American cost that I could find—and it wasn’t so easy—was
approximately 275 million dollars. (It’s possible that that figure was just for
the Lander Philae itself.)
So why am I complaining? As
interesting as it is—and I cop to that--I have a negative attitude about space
exploration. Remember how we were going to the moon—hooray!-- and going to cure
cancer? What did we do? We went to the moon. Cancer still eats us alive or should I say, dead?
My priorities are different. What I want is an
ESA- quality budget and at least an eight-country collaborative focus on how to feed the millions of starving people all over the
world.
I want a highly trained scientific group devoted
to the development of clean water systems for those who have none. The solar
system can wait. It has waited this long hasn’t it?
Does it have to be either/
or? It would seem so. The Rosetta Mission has glamour. Yesterday’s successful
landing offered us an opportunity to say, “Look how clever we are!”
While feeding the poor? What
is that? So ordinary, so mundane that we just don’t do it?
OK. I’m a crank.
Meanwhile, according to
today’s Telegraph, “Scientists say
full contact has been reestablished with the Rosetta probe, but it is stuck in
a crater where it cannot get enough sunlight for its solar panels.”
Not nearly
enough sunlight.
And so? We will see.
***
I usually post on Mondays but this could not wait.
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