I like to think about the differences between the Romans and the Greeks. The greeks had a lot of science, but little engineering. They were astronomers, but they didn’t built aqueducts. The romans were the other way around, they did lots of building and practical engineering, but they didn’t go any farther into science than they had to to make the project at hand work.

Neither of these ideals works very well.. I agree that we need to focus more on the fact that a goodly portion of the world doesn’t get the food and housing they need. However, we can’t give up the future. Technology that is helping people today may have begun as a seemingly fruitless scientific exercise hundreds of years in the past.

Remember how much money the defense department gets? somewhere around 400 billion? I bet a few things could be streamlined, a few bureaucrats canned, and a few more missiles retired, and we could free up a large amount of money that would be better spent on both the space program, as well as domestic concerns.

Resist the temptation to believe that space droids are just for fun. Sure, they are presented as such to draw attention, but the science is serious. Lots of technology trickles out of the JPL, including odd things, like the Ecosphere that Billy gave me, it is a little glass ball filled with air, water, algae, bacteria and shrimp. It is a closed ecosystem that needs only to be kept between 60 and 80 degrees, and be given a few hours of light per day. The shrimp go about their lives, reproduce, feed on the algae, etc. The algae feeds on the sunlight and nutrients put into the water by the bacteria that eat the shrimp waste. Just like a mini-earth. They live for years, some as long as 18 years (and still going) with no input or output besides the light of the sun.

Anyway, the technology trickled out of the JPL as part of an ongoing study on how to create facilities that recycle everything, and can maintain life for its inhabitants on an input of sunlight alone. One obvious goal is life in space, but the techniques they use for saving energy, growing food, recycling wastes and minimizing pollution will eventually benefit everyone.

Anyway, I can’t remember where I read it, but there are already plans for recovering waste that has been tossed into space. The next few years will see a big change in how we get stuff into space. In the past it was just ‘huck it up there, damn the pollution or jettisoned ballistics or dead reactors, just get it up.’ But now all sorts of new launch vehicles are being developed that don’t drop their booster rockets like the shuttle or ballistic stages like the Deltas. Then we can really get to the task of cleaning up the trash.

Also, we are a lot better at tracking satellites now than we were in 1978, we’d probably have a lot more warning now, and we’d probably even be able to take care of it before it crashed, like we did with Mir.

“On Jan 24 1978

The nuclear-powered Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite plunges through Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrates, scattering radioactive debris over parts of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Much of the satellite lands in the Great Slave Lake; only about 1% of the radioactive material is recovered.” via daily rotten. bummer for canadians.

According to Yale prof. Ed Tufte there are 34 nuclear reactors in orbit. That kinda freaks me out.

I sort of have an ideological opposition to the space program. I like science but I think we should consider other priorities. Comets are really cool but 1 billion people live on less than 2 dollars a day. I think it’s a bad idea to start spreading pollution off planet BUUUUUTTTTTT galaxy droids are neato. I can see both sides.