Re: NASA Mars mission funding - better spent on paleo?

[Adam <adam@crowlspace.com>]

Hi Guys

I'm a space-nut so the current discussion kind of hurts. But the 
advantage of palaeontology and astronautics are they both teach us 
things we never knew and let us know worlds we wouldn't otherwise know. 
That might not seem super-practical immediately, but then hominids 
wandering over the next mountain-range never seemed practical either. 
But space is still horribly over-priced and palaeo horribly underfunded, 
except when drilling for oil. Both stir the imagination with worlds far 
away and long gone, and that's not a small thing - but some money 
funnelled from stupid wars and the global death trade wouldn't go astray 
in either activity.

Adam

David Marjanovic wrote:

> > Look at it this way; you are on an aeroplane. The pilot and co-pilot 
> > both
> > collapse into unconsciousness for some unknown reason. One of the 
> > flight crew
> > asks "is there a doctor onboard, or anyone who knows how to fly a 
> > plane?"
>
>
> I'm a _SCIENTIST!_ If anybody can land this machine, _THAT'S ME!_
>
> (Sorry. Inside joke. And... he does manage to land the plane very 
> nicely --  on its roof.)
>
> > Palaeontology seems to be one of those 'curiosity' desciplines (like
> > archaeology, astronomy or history), which can all discover 
> > fascinating things
> > about the past, but are all some-what lacking in practical benefits 
> > to society.
> > We should feel lucky we get any funding at all.
>
>
> This is almost the case, but not quite:
>
> - Oil geology -- biostratigraphy, in other words.
> - Palaeoclimatology. What happens when we get 500 ppm of CO2 in the 
> air, and what happens when it gets 1 °C or 5 °C warmer than it is now? 
> Well, what happened last time?