At 01:22 PM 7/15/97 -0500, Neil Rest wrote:
>CMUNSON <CMUNSON@AAAS.ORG> wrote:
>>While NASA's line in the budget may not look big, it benefits indirectly
>>from the huge miltary/industrial complex.
>
>Then why start by picking on NASA?
>
>>All I am saying is follow the money trail. Space programs require heavy
>>capital expenditures, which are only really possible in industrialized
>>countries.
>
>"follow the money" usually involves hard numbers. With all due respect,
>all you provide is hand-waving.
>
>>The space program may have developed velcro for those $150 Nikes, but it
>>ain't providing housing for the homeless in my neighborhood.
>
>Just about everyone knows that neither velcro nor idioticly priced gym
>shoes have nothing to do with the space program. I, for one, find the low
>quality of your bluster and rhetoric borders on insulting.
>
>Neil Rest
Having a bad day, Neil? As Chuck explained at the end of his message:
>our real targets should be set on the military, but I want to point out that
>the space program is very intertwined with the military.
This seems like a reasonable assertion to me. The reason he's "picking on
NASA" rather than the military is that someone had already broached the topic.
I also have my doubts about the wisdom of the space program. It's true that
there are many things we can learn from it, but it seems unlikely to me
that the returns are going to approach the investment. Other investments
(such as quality education) have a much higher cost to benefit ratio for
society as a whole, so it seems that we ought to redirect our spending
accordingly.
Paul Feyerabend, an outspoken critic of the scientific establishment, said
(in _Science in a Free Society_) re: the US moon trip of 1969:
"Of course, our well-conditioned materialistic contemporaries are liable to
burst with excitement over events such as the moonshots, the double helix,
non-equilibrium thermodynamics. But let us look at the matter from a
different point of view, and it becomes a ridiculous exercise in futility.
It needed billions of dollars, thousands of well-trained assistants, years
of hard work to enable some inarticulate and rather limited contemporary to
perform a few graceless hops in a place nobody in his right mind would
think of visiting - a dried out, airless, hot stone."
He overstates it a bit, but in essence I have to agree with him.
Regarding high tech in general, I just finished _Woman on the Edge of
Time_, and thought that one of the less convincing aspects of the future
utopia was the casual presence of gadgets like the "kenner." I suppose by
that time humans may have found better ways of making logic chips & the
like, but as it stands now the manufacture of semiconductors is anything
but environmentally friendly. How would it fit in to their society? (I say
this fully aware that my life would be radically different without my
computer, which allows me to do great things like participate in this list.)
For the most part, I really liked the book. Mattapoisett approximates my
own ideals of gender, sexuality, social fabric. I didn't quite know what to
make of the ending, though. Was it implied that by killing the doctors
Connie was helping to pave the way for Mattapoisett? I suppose at the least
it prevented the experimental brain surgery from being carried out... As
Luciente says, "We all fight when we're back to the wall... or to tear down
a wall." Perhaps if everyone learned how to direct anger appropriately,
things would change for the better. Those who have read the book, what do
you think?
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Loop Guru, Duniya; Shonen Knife, Brand New Knife
"...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected;
the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and
servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
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