Google News passed along some scientific group's press release, calling for more funding for efforts to find alien life.
As a purely scientific act, I can see reasons to be interested in such an inquiry. But are humans capable of purely scientific acts? To our everlasting credit, the answer is yes. There are humans capable of giving up their lives in the pursuit of non-income generating knowledge. Did you know that Nicholas Tesla did not patent his invention of "alternating current"? Edison had come up with direct current, which didn't work over long distances. Tesla came up with alternating current, which did. And then gave away the invention. He could have become the richest man in the world. Did he give it away because he was a good man, or because he was just dumb?
I have a suspicion that the people who want to find alien life are a combination. Knowledge for the simple satisfaction of knowing it, along with, Holy Shit, the Aliens have the cure for cancer and all the ills that plague mankind, so it's good we were able to find them!
Getting from point A to Point Z without having to stop at any of the other letters is the kind of pipe dream that used to fuel the old numbers games, and currently fuels lotteries and casinos, and has always and forever fueled religions. Hoping that there really is a Santa Claus and that we can get something for nothing is what makes us different than animals.
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5 comments:
I think the space race is increasingly irrelevant, and best left to the explorative minds of Hollywood's best and brightest in crappy sci-fi films, so the only taxpayer money they're getting is most of a $12 ticket.
Tesla is a fascinating character, and did end up suing Marconi, who ripped off his coils and numerous other things, then patented it. Naturally, Tesla was right, but only won when Marconi's family wanted the U.S. government to pony up some cash, then suddenly - "No, wait, it's Tesla's again." Of course, by then, Tesla was crazy and broke, so it didn't do him much good. It's kinda like the U.S. Supreme Court decreeing today that I did invent Betamax after all, so profits from all future sales of Betamax home players will go directly to me.
It's not about the space race. Lots of people are prejudiced against the space race.
It's about finding intelligent life somewhere out in the Cosmos, so we can cure all our ills and have super powers.
What happened to Tesla will not happen to Joe Blow working for Boeing, Northrup or whoever else in the big field of air and space travel. He'll just get a tremendous allotment of cash, land and life-long royalties.
I believe it's more of a race to create our own 'alien life' on another planet where we can experiment without restrictions or gravitational harnesses. We're working on (and getting close to having) bio-energy. Now we need to figure out how to travel within a beam of light.
As for this happening in our lifetime, I doubt it, but it will occur eventually... -Unless Islam takes over our planet.
Why not go for it? We're going to spend money willy-nilly anyway on all kinds of things and as always (through all of man-kinds' time on this planet) not everyone will benefit.
Look, I've seen what's in space, and it's Carl Sagan, Zod, and a bunch of alien races that look like humans in cheap makeup. Plus, as anyone who's seen the documentary Cocoonwill tell you, the aliens will find us, with powers so magical, they'll make us think Steve Guttenberg deserves to star in movies.
What if you don't know the alphabet?
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