In the Shape of Things to Come.
This Mercury Messenger robot snapshot of Earth and Moon in the brightness of reflected sunlight makes me relax for the scale of our ambition to describe what is and how it got here. Also makes me snicker at the closed-mindedness of the Washington ops. Take a breath, guys. Look up! What's your policy noise to that? What are POTUS and his evasiveness to that? The part of the Obama administration that grinds me the most each week is the arrogant blindness to NASA, and the uses of NASA. The Obama team does not comprehend how NASA is the stuff that dreams are made of. Sure, NASA is pork. But it is well-worth-it pork, to get our eyes up on the planets. And someday we will have folk looking back at Mother Earth just like this. Where did we come from? Those two companions in the night sky. And what about the galactic center (below)? This is where the Sun came from, that convergence of dust shoved around by clumps of dark matter and held to be ever-expanding (at faster speeds?) because of the mysterious, unperceived presence of dark energy. We are destined to get out there, perhaps physically, perhaps with information download (homo sapiens are energy-consuming information uploads).
"What does Earth look like from the planet Mercury? The robotic spacecraft MESSENGER found out as it looked toward the Earth during its closest approach to the Sun about three months ago. The Earth and Moon are visible as the double spot on the lower left of the above image. Now MESSENGER was not at Mercury when it took the above image, but at a location from which the view would be similar. From Mercury, both the Earth and its comparatively large moon will always appear as small circles of reflected sunlight and will never show a crescent phase. MESSENGER has zipped right by Mercury three times since being launched in 2004, and is scheduled to enter orbit around the innermost planet in March of 2011."
When I look up through my 10" Meade Telescope - I often am reminded of how small minded most are. The Moon is pure joy to peer at. Why are we not there with a small base? Why did we waste so much time in low Earth orbit? Why are we going to an asteroid and not putting a permanent self sustaining presence on the moon? If you are in the north east Jupiter is starting to show its brilliance!
“Where did we come from?” I add, Where are we going? Both questions are entirely legitimate. Both require a modestly broader view to understand and formulate a response. Not only are we shutting the door on the physical universe, but we’re closing our eyes also to time (history). I’m not even talking ancient history. I’m talking just three years ago. Who would have thought then that we would have a Marxist Muslim president running the country (into the ground)? (Yes, I said it!!!) So when Mr. Doakes says he didn’t vote for Obama, I am compelled to ask, Who the hell did?!
Just yesterday I was sent a video of Muslims stoning a young girl to death. There were roughly a dozen young men eagerly participating. The rest were busy taking videos. It reminded me of the beating death of Abelino, the Ecuadorian dishwasher, in a wealthy suburban enclave on the Jersey side of New York City, which was also video taped. At the time I thought this the height of depravity.
I have since altered my view somewhat. The video that was sent me was so graphic, it literally turned my stomach. No human being on earth could have committed so serious a crime as to deserve the punishment that this (what looked like a) 14-year old was subjected to. And yet, no one decries it. No one condemns it. Abu Ghraib was the big story in the headlines day after day during the Bush presidency - American prison guards draping women’s underwear over accused terrorist’s heads. Then there was the relatively gentle art of water boarding. And now there are tomes of restrictions our soldiers have to deal with about how to treat the enemy. It’s no wonder that so many of our own have been dying needlessly, snared by endless regulation demanding tea and sympathy - on the battlefield no less.
True gratuitous brutality is routinely ignored. Every adherent to the Muslim faith should be outraged and condemn the stoning of women in the name of their god. Yet, they are silent. In fact, they demand that all nations adopt shariah. Where are the women’s groups? Where are is Amnesty International? Where is our president? Where is every human being who still manages to maintain a shred of conscience to draw a line in the sand and say this cannot be tolerated in the 21st Century? Where is the UN?
Everyone participating in such a stoning should be hunted down and hauled off to The Hague for prosecution and punishment. Otherwise the phrase 'crimes against humanity' rings empty as a bell. But nothing of the sort ever happens. Instead, the men wearing the white hats are condemned to suffer death by a thousand cuts while the brutality of shariah advances even to desecrate the sacred cemetery of 3000 killed on 9/11.
Still, we watch as our enemy advances - and we say nothing. In fact we encourage his advance. We condemn ourselves instead of him. In another three years, we will look around and see the stain of slowly bled goats spreading on American soil, and we will ask ourselves, How has it come to this? We will read increasingly about honor killings, beheadings and shariah based banking, and we will ask again...
Now is the time to stop it. Just as Barack Hussein Obama should never have been elected senator.
I’ve altered my view of those who video tape such Islamic horrors as the stoning of women, the deliberate amputation of healthy limbs, and public execution in the market square. Rather than a gratuitous wallowing in blood, I now see it as a cry from hell - a warning. “This is how it is here,” they desperately try to tell us. “Please don’t let it happen there. Even if hell on earth is here, we can still maintain the hope that we can escape it. If the whole world should be consumed by this sort of savagery, there will be no where left to run; nothing to do but to strap on a suicide belt in the hope of saving as many as possible from the inhumanity of this, our most horrific experience."
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/
More importantly than mere pork, NASA is pork for red states, those inbred redneck ingrates who don't understand why they should embrace the welfare state wholeheartedly. Thiokol has laid of people here in Utah; Utah State is looking at laying off people associated with the space program. Then there's Johnson and Kennedy and Red Stone Arsenal. Rahm will think of some AGW use for Ames and Glenn and Goddard. First the moratorium, now the all out assault on NASA, killing the sexy programs and making the agency look ridiculous with that dimwitted timepleaser running it.
Peter, am I the only one who smells civil unrest in the air? Unpleasant as it is to think about, and more unpleasantly it is to mention, it has become something more to me than an idle "worst case scenario' daydream. NASA defrocked is an embarrassment, except to those who think small, like Rahm et all. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero...(Horace). Instead of looking at life in the broader scence it's all "hay, pass the buck; fifty years from now who will even care. Let's get ours now".
Kinda off-topic, kinda on-topic: William Patterson's biography of Robert Heinlein is out. Patterson would be an awesome guest for Mr. Batchelor's show.