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Five New Neptunian moons
cyclop writes "It's a new time of discoveries in the Solar System. Just when Cassini discovered two news moons on Saturn, old Earth-based astronomy strikes back by revealing five small bodies around Neptune. The faint moons seem to have eccentric and inclined orbits, and to have been captured by Neptune."
regardless, even smaller space telescopes can still do some things better than ground based. I'm all for advancing and utilizing BOTH techniques as much as possible. More science == good. 8D
Moo.
well thats a valid argument, but it has a flaw. the money spent on science is unlikely, if pulled, to feed and clothe the poor. its more likely to be funneled into defense projects.
the other problem with the "money better spent" on feeding the hungry and clothing the poor argument is that its simply impossible to practically do that. there are too many hands the money and food must cross, and corruption is a given. Sure, we must try, but not at the expense of that which furthers other industries. And science isn't the biggest waste of money. What about the millions paid to sports stars? that should be given to the poor. How about the millions you spend on entertainment? surely you could sacrafice a little fun for someone to eat. maybe you should sacrafice all your fun. work hard and only keep what you need to live. not live comfortably, or happily, just live -- donate the rest to the unfortunate. It's a slippery slope. Sadly, feeding and clothing the poor is simply not an easy problem to fix -- diverting funds from science research is surely not the answer.
Moo.
Fortunately, we're talking about results from an American satellite and telescopes in Hawai'i and Chile. Since your country contributed nothing to any of this, you can rest easy and stand proud.
Research always pays off. Always. Sometimes it just adds to the amazing amount of negative knowledged we have (i.e. well THAT doesn't work...) but more often than not even failed experiments pay big dividends (both financialy and scientifically) in the long run. Did you know that nylon was a failed experiment? It was poured down the drain 3 times before someone realized what they had. The adhesive on the back of Post-It notes is another failed experiment (i.e. an adhesive that didn't stick permenently), but with this one 3M kept the the info on the books and when somebody had the bright idea for the post it note that adhesive didn't have to be re-invented. I'm sure other examples abound.
Besides, charity is best left in the private sector. I prefer to see charities that are not administered with the compassion of the IRS or the Post Office.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
But I really see research into moons as being a waste of money that could have been better spent feeding and clothing the poorest in the world.
a sc.html). So dividing that $5 billion amongst just the poor in the United States gives every poor person about $144.50 every year.
So we'll take the $5 billion dollars we spend annually on space exploration (most likely, a gross over-estimation) and distribution it evenly amongst the one billion people in the world who live in poverty and hunger (most likely, a gross under-estimation). So every poor person in the world gets an annual $5 gift courtesy of the US government.
Whoa. Huge dent in the poverty and hunger levels there.
So let's say that $5,000 USD is an acceptable living wage for most of the world. Now you can only help a million people.
Oh, by the way, in 2002 the number of people living in poverty in the US, as defined by the Census Bureau, was 34.6 million people (http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/income02/prs03
Again, whoa, huge dent in poverty and hunger levels. Twelve bucks a month is not going to make a difference in poverty levels.
Money is not the solution to feeding starving peoples. They don't need money, they need food. And there's already more than enough of that to go around. The reason why they don't have that food has very little to do with them not being able to afford it, and very much to do with their own leaders deciding that guns and palaces are a greater priority than food, roads, supplies. Look at China. It went from having some of the worst famines in history to being a net food exporter in just one generation. How? Not by handouts from the West, but by deciding it could no longer allow political ideology to rigidly get in the way commonsense economic policies.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.