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iPod Generation Indifferent to Space Exploration
An anonymous reader writes "CNN tells us that today's young adults are no longer excited at the possibility of space exploration: 'The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars. The space shuttle program is slated to end in 2010 after construction of the international space station is completed with 13 more shuttle flights. The recent 13-day mission by Discovery's seven astronauts was part of that long-running construction job.' As a result, NASA's budget will include a greater amount of public relations spending."
They'll care about it when it's practical for some of them to take a trip into space or to the Moon.
Youth, by nature, tends to be more shortsighted than mature adults. We'll also likely see a change as that generation ages.
You mean "everything" I can agree.
"iPod generation"? WTF? How is that name relevant to...well, anything?
Anyway, I'm in that age range. I can tell you that space exploration is as exciting as it ever was, but I'm indifferent (or, rather, have negative feelings) towards NASA doing it. Wasting all kinds of money on projects that are either never finished or are spectacular failures that could be used for more useful things.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
To the fact that most kids these days are clued up to the vastness/emptyness of space, the barreness of Mars and the Moon and the difficulties of actually getting anywhere, nevermind finding and colonizing other planets. A trip to Mars or the Moon then seems like an utterly insignificant step towards the space exploration and technology they see in the movies etc. They know it has to be done but the cool stuff comes much much later and most likely not in their lifetime.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
After Apollo 11 landed on the moon and the US beat the Russians to it no one cared about what NASA didi after that. No one was interested in space exploration in the first place, it was all about beating the Russians.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
...the iPod generation seems indifferent to science and engineering in general, and seems more interested in applied technology.
I'm within the age-group that they specified, but I enjoyed building Tesla Coils, playing with all kinds of electrical and electronic equipment, pyrotechnics and the like.
These days, a lot of kids in my age group aren't particularly motivated towards building anything.
They'd much do things on the computer. Hell, most of them do not even consider Lego Mindstorms to be vaguely interesting.
Then again, I bet every generation feels this way about the newer generation. Who knows?
Don't forget that our current mode of space exploration is something that this generation has grown up with. I remember the first shuttle launch. To a teenager today, shuttles have been flying their entire lives, so to them there's no real novelty to captivate a large audience.
So can anyone tell me, what, if any real and important science is taking place on our beloved space station? And please don't tell me 'research on long term effects of zero-G'. We're only confirming finding from 20 years ago.
Absolutely nothing interesting has happened in the manned space program since we first repaired Hubble in orbit. Since then we've done nada, nothing, zilch, zero, bupkiss of interest to much of anyone, be they John Q iPod, or a PhD in astrophysics.
The manned space program has become utterly irrelevant. NASA can spend as much money as they want trying to get people excited about 'crystals' grown in microgravity, but we have heard it all before.
Do something new and different. Send people someplace they haven't been before. Or maybe let's get people living, I mean really living, on the moon. It is not impossible with today's technology. It just takes more imagination and political will than NASA currently possesses.
> The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to
> 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars.
Erm, that's it? that's all we get?
How big was the sample? how were they chosen? was it ten people chosen from a Big Brother audience? what questions were they asked? how exactly do you decide what "indifference" is?
What a complete load of tosh. An utterly unsubstaniated story.
That is the nail!
For a large number of us the concept of putting a man on the moon (let alone in space) is practicaly pedestrian, as opposed to in the 60s when it was a truely amazing (and NEW) thing.
I grew up with the knowledge that space flight, and going to the moon were things we have done, and we did them a LONG (to a 7yr old) time ago.
I for one still am interested in what we are doing in space (I am 23, just for ref), however it isn't the type of thing that it was when we first started.
Now most of us are more interested in what is happening at home (Earth), and understandign that better.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Require Science Fiction reading in HS...lots of it.
I see a lot of posts about how we have far more important things to worry about than space exploration - wars, poverty, famine, global warming, disease - and that we should ignore space and fix these problems first. I've got bad news for you folk - they ain't gonna get fixed if we drop the space program.
Now, being an ex-NASA guy, I feel fully justified in saying that the Administration is not a bastion of efficiency or efficient use of science dollars for science sake. Manned spaceflight will probably never be as cost effective as robotic exploration or remote sensing. Still, it can be a very valuable resource for the inspiration of younger generations to go into science and engineering. Both of those fields are critical to advancement against the world's ills of poverty, famine, globla warming, and disease. Since science doesn't pay as well as non-productive professions like accountancy, law, and real estate sales, we need some way to inspire the next generation to do something other than make enough disposable income to buy the latest iPod. NASA fuels both interest and the work they do has far reaching impact for science (and not just pens that write upside down and expensive mattresses).
What we do need is a real mission and real results. Without that, the popultation is going to see NASA for what it currently is: a rudderless agency spending lots of money to do very little real science. Sadly, with the pork included in its budget, NASA will never garner the excitement and focus it has had in the past. Plus with the contractor mentality it will never have the in-house expertise keep and propogate the corporate knowledge that allows for efficent and consistent advances in aeronautic science.
Right now the NASA beurocracy and the year-to-year funding methodology by congress has doomed the agency to its current fate - mundane and uninspired. I would love to see a rebirth of the agency, but I'm not holding my breath.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"and get orders of magnitude more scientific data"
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
I'll vote for sending people to Mars, thanks. Scientific data and photographs are cool and all, but actual real meatbags on other planets is way, way, way, infinitely, indescribably, ineffably, superbly more exciting.
Why bother with exploring space if we're not going to go there?
That's just me, though.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
A manned mission to Mars and settling Mars are two entirely different propositions; even if we managed to pull of dozens of manned landings on Mars, we'd still be far away from any sort of settlement.
Why bother with exploring space if we're not going to go there?
Who said anything about "not going there"? Eventually, we will settle on Mars. But for now, we're talking about near-term strategy for space exploration, and robotic spacecraft are not only the fastest way for gathering scientific data, they are also the fastest way towards a real manned space program.
If we're going to go ahead with a manned trip to Mars, the project will likely get killed before it ever gets executed, and manned space exploration will be held back by at least half a century.
I disagree, perhaps YOU were, but the 60's were the rise of pop, it was when music started following the form it does today with an actual "recording industry", my folks huge collection of LP and 45's refute your account, as does the rise of Elvis in the late 50's and the Beatles in the 60's, both of which could be seen as the birth of modern music.
Regardless, I don't see what people's choice in music have to do with it.
I think literacy might play a role though, and not only in taste of reading, but actually reading. As probably does level of education. Both of which we're abject failures at now, starting around when the "iPod generation" was in school. I grew up loving science classes, and reading old pulp Sci-Fi, and I am an aberrant in the real world. Most people my age would rather not read a book, much less care what a bunch of disattactched men in lab coats are rambling about in vaguely confusing terms. I'm sure their is a high level of correlation between level of education and elective literacy and interest in space travel.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Nah: it'll be limited by human conceptions of what the universe ought to be. I'll bet that the real universe has parts that are more interesting (and frightening) than we could have ever imagined them to be. And this won't change the fact that we'll be just as screwed if the Earth somehow gets rendered unfit for habitation.
-b.
And for your next vacation would you rather go to Hawaii, or merely receive a nice color picture of Hawaii?
Humans go to exotic and remote places themselves not because they merely wish to collect data from it, but because it is in the nature of our species to explore in person. A manned presence is not merely a necessary prerequisite to the acquisition of data; it is an end unto itself. The conquest of Mt. Everest, for example, had nothing to do with seeing what was on the top of the mountain. It was about pride in the accomplishment. NASA sent a handful of unmanned probes to the Moon that went largely unnoticed by the public. But when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, the entire Earth stopped to watch. To what do we owe that difference?
There are different kinds of space science. No one mode of exploration suffices. Those who study stellar radiation, for example, have no need actually to be there in person. In fact, unmanned probes do far better at collecting the kind of data best suited to that kind of science. But planetary science cannot be satisfied with mere telepresence. Planetary geologists need to be there. Sure, they'll do the best they can with the technology available at any given moment, but ask a planetary geologist whether he can do his job better through a little robot, or actually there in person.
The Soviets in the late 1960s and early 1970s explored the Moon remotely and with unmanned sample-return missions while the Americans sent human astronauts during the same period -- albeit likely at considerably greater cost. The Soviets got one badly placed retroreflector, a handful of grainy telemetered photographs of random terrain, and about ten ounces of undifferentiated lunar dust.
Apollo, in contrast, got a set of precisely-aligned retroreflectors and precisely-placed scientific instruments. Astronauts took 20,000 high-resolution photographs of terrain they selected according to on-site observation. They brought back 800 pounds of lunar surface material chosen according to geological significance, photographed in situ, core-sampled, and carefully-documented. The quality of the Apollo data is simply orders of magnitude greater than any achieved through unmanned technology -- all because there were trained humans there doing the science in person.
We meatbags have high-resolution color stereoscopic vision with a broad dynamic range, better than anything we can currently put into a spacecraft. We have highly capable means of locomotion that adapts to a variety of terrain and can achieve safe speeds up to several meters per second on planetary surfaces. We have a pair of manipulators easily better than anything we can currently deploy in space. And all this is controlled by an on-site computer capable of storing and applying PhD-level expertise as well as displaying helpful exploratory qualities such as curiosity and intuition. The computer is highly-adaptable and well integrated with the sensory apparatus. Even if manned exploration were only about data collection, meatbags are still much better at some useful forms of it than our little six-wheeled proxies.
It allows the OP to feel superior. Simple!
I think you summed up my feelings more eloquently than I would have. I think the problem here is that Slashdot caters to a geek audience, and geeks tend to find the idea of a robot probe more interesting than most non-geek people do. To most people, even the Mars rovers and the Voyager probes were just curiosities. I think the general attitude is "well, if we can put a man on the Moon, of course we can put a robot on Mars...duh."
It doesn't matter what NASA does with robots -- they could send them to Pluto and have them building robot cities and making little robots and god knows what else -- but most people would still regard the high-water-mark of the space program as July 20, 1969. There is a fundamental difference between robotic exploration and human exploration, and it doesn't matter what kind of pictures you take or what kind of data you bring back, if it's not a person, it's just a bunch of geeks dorking around with expensive R/C toys.
The day we put a person on Mars, people will be gathered around their TV sets, the same way they were in 1969. But no number of robots or probes are going to engender that kind of interest.
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