It looks lonely to me – Mars. The scientists are ecstatic that the Phoenix landed and is functional. It’s got a baby back-hoe attached to start digging, looking for water [ice] under the surface. There’s something kind of neat about a 420 Million dollar back-hoe digging for ice on Mars.
As special an accomplishment as it is, it says something about us that’s kind of strange. We can spend that kind of money mounting a program that looks for signs of life on Mars, but we don’t have a NASA-like think tank working on global warming. We don’t have a NASA-like think tank working on the problems of our dwindling energy resources.
NASA grew out of ARPA that put up our first satellite and built the Internet. ARPA was preceded by the Manhattan Project which built our first bomb. We know how to tackle big scientific projects, but our target choices leave something to be desired.
If we had the money for planet exploration and for life on earth I would be all for it. We are at war in 2 countries and in debt up to our eyeballs, people are without health insurance and many are losing their homes and we need to spend more on the global warming crisis and Bush doesn’t want to give the soldiers $ for college when they come back from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are exploring the planets. I beleive in space exploration but we can’t do it at the moment but we are.