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NASA Astronaut Dick Gordon, Pilot of Gemini and Apollo 12, Dies At 88 (astronautscholarship.org)
sconeu writes: Dick Gordon, pilot of Gemini 11 and command module pilot of Apollo 12, has died at the age of 88. Gordon was also slated to command the cancelled Apollo 18 mission. "Dick Gordon is an American hero, and a true renaissance man by any measure. He was an American naval officer and aviator, chemist, test pilot, NASA astronaut, professional football executive, oil and gas executive and generous contributor to worthy causes," said Curt Brown, board chairman of the Orlando-based Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and an astronaut and veteran of six space flights. "He was in a category all his own." The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation has a touching write-up that details Gordon's childhood and career successes. You can read the full article here.
It's not about bragging rights. It's more about what the title-tag of the image says: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
Eventually, we will have to leave this planet if we are to survive as a species. Now, you may argue that this day is far in the future, and I can only hope that you'd be right, but at some point we have to take that first step. And let's be honest here, considering the amount of steps it's going to take, we might as well start today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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I've always found this line of reasoning unconvincing. It's basically a consequentialist argument, but the connection between the desired outcome and the desired course of action is tenuous as best.
To see why, let's imagine you are King Priam of ancient Troy. One of your advisers tells you that in several billion years the Earth will become inhabitable and that the Trojan culture will not survive unless it develops a way to live in the heavens. Meanwhile news of a Greek invasion fleet assembling in Aulis on the Euripus Straight...
The point is that the eventual certainty of extinction has to be weighed against scenarios of more imminent extinction; scenarios you're in a much better position to do something about. We are so far from having the technical means to survive our planet it makes no sense to make that a priority now. And we're not really in much of a better position to deal with the future uninhabitability of the Earth than the ancient Trojans were.
There are better arguments of space exploration; one of which is that science and its engineering spinoffs are now essential for human survival in a way that was not true even a hundred years ago. -- you'll notice that the predicted Malthusian population crisis never materialized. And we are nearing a point where we will be able to handle a number of more imminent civilization-ending phenomena, like asteroid impacts and global pandemics.
But fundamentally science isn't utilitarian; it's an aspect of our cultural evolution that purely as a side effect enables our culture to survive events that would have destroyed our more purely pragmatic predecessors. Things like computers and weather prediction aren't the exclusive product of market forces; they rely on fundamental advances in mathematics and physical science that were undertaken for centuries before they had any practical application.
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