![](\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/mars1.jpg\")
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
NASA grew out of ARPA<\/strong> that put up our first satellite and built the Internet. ARPA<\/strong> was preceded by the Manhattan Project<\/strong> which built our first bomb. We know how to tackle big scientific projects, but our target choices leave something to be desired.<\/p>\n 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Given our history of being able to strong arm nature with scientific expertise, we should be on the front end of resolving these problems instead of trapsing around the world flexing our military muscle or sending a back-hoe to Mars. Everybody already knows we can do that. We’d be better placed throwing money at something we need – something the world needs…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"