Precisely. Muchos gracias, mi amigo!Testify Sister Dana!
I had a similar argument the other day replete with a crazy tangent into sexist la-la land with the claim that rocket = phallus, NASA = mean old men, luna = women, science = sexual assault. I kid not. When I called my crazy friend on that, I was informed that women simply could not be sexist.
There was the exact same numerical failure, quoting billions of dollars to fly the rocket of evil, NASA's annual budget is around 17 billion, total. By comparison, Iraq is costing about 12 billion a month. Then there was the big problemsto solve here on earth/starving children nonsense. Mind you there was no answer to my question on what the odds would be of those 17 billion being put toward feeding the starving if NASA were shuttered.
I'm all for treehugging, eating local and organic, reducing carbon footprints etc but a lot of these folk don't seem to have the least clue of just how much their lives are materially and spiritually improved by offshoots of the space program and the research done with the meager dollars given to the dream of discovery.
Cheers mi amiga,
PSA
Oh, and PSA's crazy friend - women can definitely be sexist, as you proved beyond reasonable doubt. And it is women like you who have, at times, turned me into a misogynist.
Sometimes, I despair of my gender. At least until I find the same fuckwits infesting the other gender, and then simply turn to despairing of humanity instead...
I've been hearing that old "we dastn't go into space until everything here on Earth is perfect!" thing since the 1970s. I was sick of it then, and I'm sick of it now.
ReplyDeleteUnderneath the simplemindedness, however, there is a point to be worried about: Given how corporatism has taken over here on Earth, how are we going to prevent it from being the dominant theme in space colonization? Space should be a frontier where people are free to create new societies, not societies beholden to (and hopelessly entangled with) interests back home.
To put it in slightly more catchy but oversimplified terms, how do we prevent Microsoft Moon?
(...by which I mean something along the lines of: big corporation makes deal with UN to set up moon base involving a multinational coalition, in exchange for exclusive rights to mineral exploitation and certain other concessions for 20 years, which they then succeed in renewing indefinitely via the usual lobbying.)
(...which is far from being the only way things might get screwed up; imagine "the Fox Interplanetary Information and Commerce Network", upon which all small-to-medium prospecting operations depend for conducting business across the farthest reaches of the solar system. I'm sure I could come up with worse, given time.)
The bad thing about that is, I think that's pretty much the definition of the crazy in the science fiction story novel I'm writing.
ReplyDeleteYeeeah.
Still, though, for the foreseeable future, space colonization is going to be corporate. I can't quite think of another way to pull it off otherwise.