Pluto

[DaffyDill]

The expensive extremes in life often lead to advances for the the rest of us eventually. The original space race between the US and USSR led to advances in food sterilisation and packaging, communications and weather data, joysticks, laptops, all sorts of things. The same can be said for war, and even expensive sports. Medical advances during wartime trickle down to become common in hospitals, the technological advances from Formula One car racing such energy recovery systems, aerodynamics etc end up being used in new car manufacture a few years later.

Without the layout of big dollars to begin with, our lives today might look very different.

[Snarkylark]

Wow, ya, I agree it's crazy what we spend on sports! Puts it into perspective, for sure. I agree, science and exploration are good things.

[guitar_villain]

I agree with the "no bad science" point. How many things have been discovered accidentally? I can think of penicillin and (I think) vulcanized rubber, to start with.

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Honestly, most things in science are discovered by accident in that it's pretty rare to find exactly what you're looking for. An old aphorism goes something like "science isn't Eureka!, it's 'that's weird'".

If you're looking for more famous things found by accident, Teflon was discovered when a couple of scientists wondered why a company had shipped them an empty bottle of gas, and Penzias and Wilson spent months trying to get the pesky source of noise out of their radio antenna before starting to think it might be a real radio signal of the big bang. Darwin didn't go looking for evidence of natural selection- it was the result of decades of stringing little bits of evidence together.

And a favorite of my class- a couple of folks studying the small molecule NO in biological systems found out it had a bunch of interesting side effects beyond what they originally thought. They ended up winning a Nobel prize and even though Pfizer didn't get the heart drug they were looking for, they ended up happy with a ton of money in the form of Viagra.

[zebra #13]

A visual for the Vikings link above, lol!

[Nic]

What do you all think of New Horizons landing on Pluto? Do you think space exploration is a wise use of billions of dollars? What do you think they are hoping to discover and why? I'm curious because I don't follow it very closely but it just seems like a lot of money and for what?

NASA gets less than a half percent of the annual US federal budget. In fact, there is a campaign to try to bump it up to 1%. ---> penny4nasa.org/mission/

And if you don't like the idea of Pluto, do you like GPS? Bc NASA was first in the US to get a satellite into orbit and have the technology to communicate which lead to the version of GPS many of us now enjoy.

It's easy to write off NASA activities as folly, but I think many would be surprised at how NASA has directly impacted our daily living.