Viewed from a scientific results perspective, the Apollo progam was a very low "bang for the buck" undertaking. The cost of the progam in 1960's dollars was 24 billion dollars, an amount that has been estimated as about $194 billion dollars in 2020 dollars. Nothing of any scientific interest was discovered. If you doubt this, just try to name a single thing that was ever discovered by Apollo astronauts. You will not be able to think of anything.
President John Kennedy made the Apollo program one of his top priorities. He should have instead made civil rights that type of priority. Kennedy failed to advance civil rights at a time when the US was ripe for progress in this area. Thankfully his successor Lyndon Johnson pushed through great progress in civil rights, and the results were monumental achievements such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The same Cold War rationale given for the Apollo program could have been given for passing civil rights legislation in the early 1960's. A strong argument could have been made about the necessity of fixing civil rights to deprive the Soviets of one of their major anti-US talking points, involving racial injustice in the US.
The rationale for the Apollo program was basically a Cold War rationale, not a scientific rationale. It was all about "winning the Space Race" to try to show the superiority of US capitalism over Soviet communism. This rationale now seems very strange to thinkers in the twenty-first century. Why did people think that you could show capitalism was better than communism by landing men on the moon?
Now NASA has a new program called Artemis, with a giant new type of rocket. They plan to land more astronauts on the moon. Why would someone want to land more people on this lifeless rock, about the dullest place imaginable?
NASA has a page trying to justify the Artemis project, but it fails to make any convincing case for it.
"We will explore more of the Moon than ever before with our commercial and international partners. Along the way, we will engage and inspire new audiences – we are the Artemis Generation."
There's no need to explore the moon with astronauts. The moon has nothing interesting, and has already been thoroughly mapped with unmanned probes and telescopes. The prediction about audiences being engaged seems dubious. During the last two moon landings, TV audience ratings plummeted. People quickly lost interest in moon landings after a few successful moon landings had occurred.
We have on the same page an unconvincing video. We have an astronomer claim that the moon is a "treasure trove of science." That's baloney. Science with a capital "S" can be defined as facts obtained by observations and experiments, and science with a small "S" can be defined as the process of searching for truth by systematically observing and doing experiments. In neither sense is the moon "a treasure trove of science." In fact, no important scientific discoveries came from NASA's manned missions to the moon. There are no treasures of any type to be found on the moon: just dull lifeless rocks.
We next hear the untrue claim that the moon "holds opportunities for us to make discoveries about our home planet, about our sun," and our solar system. No, it doesn't. We won't learn important new truths about the sun or Earth by landing more people on the moon. The rest of the video is just PR fluff with no more weight than a moonbeam. NASA has failed to present a compelling online rationale for the Artemis project. What we are given has the intellectual weight of a cornflake commercial, and sounds about as truthful as some used car salesman's pitch.
Equally unconvincing is an article on www.nbcnews.com entitled "Why putting people on the moon (again) is so worth the expense." We hear that a woman and a person of color will be sent to the moon. Much better to spend the Artemis money helping women and people of color so they can help pay their soaring rents here on Earth. We read this: "The last stage of the three-part plan for Artemis is to set up a moon base, possibly by 2034, that will serve as a test run for sending humans to Mars." You don't justify one boondoggle (sending people to live on the moon) by insinuating that it will help with another boondoggle (sending people to live on Mars). And sending people to the moon is not a decent "test run" for sending people to Mars, just as sending people to Vermont in the winter is not a test run for sending people to live in Antarctica.
Conditions on Mars are very different from conditions on the moon. One of the biggest hazards in building a Mars base is the presence of dust storms that might cause astronauts and their bases to be plagued by fine dust. You can't do a "test run" for that by putting up a base on the airless moon, which has zero winds. The idea that you need to spend tens of billions building a moon base as a "test run" for a Mars base is fallacious. Spending only 1 percent of such funds, NASA could create on Earth a Mars simulator that would properly simulate conditions on Mars (including dust storms).
On another web page we read the first Briton in space (Helen Sharman) give some unpersuasive reasoning claiming that the Artemis program will help humans on Earth. We read this:
" 'Sending people to the Moon means we’ve got to invest in radiation protection,' Dr Sharman says. 'This gives us an understanding of how we might protect people on Earth who are undergoing cancer treatment. And it may help us to deal with a radiation incident on Earth, be it intended, say in warfare, or an accident such as Fukushima.' ”
This statement is an insult to the intelligence of everyone who reads it. Americans have understood the simple facts of radiation protection since the earliest days of the Cold War, in the late 1940's. Those facts are very simple: the more matter you have between yourself and some radiation source, and the denser the matter, the better you are protected. It's good to have three inches of steel, and if you don't have that, two meters of dirt or two meters of solid walls will work as well. The idea that we need to go to the moon to understand the very simple matter of radiation protection (something we have understood since the 1940's) is preposterous.
Sharman uses the "spinoff" reasoning that has so long been used to try to justify the Apollo project. NASA let spread legends that it had invented Teflon (invented in 1941 before NASA existed), and the powered drink Tang (invented a year before NASA's birth). In the Chicago Tribune we read this:
"One widely held myth is that NASA, during the race to the moon, developed miniaturized computing circuits and personal computers. In reality, the first tiny transistor-laden chips were developed more than a decade before Apollo astronauts landed on the moon."
And personal computers were invented by small private companies such as MITS and Apple in the 1970's, not by NASA. Sharman says, "AI, robotics, automation, miniaturisation and sensors came out of the Apollo missions," which is a give-you-the-wrong-idea kind of claim, because none of these things were invented by the Apollo program, and Apollo did not involve substantial advances in AI or robotics or automation. Apollo involved manned landings, not automated robotic landings. The long wikipedia.org article on the history of artificial intelligence (AI) does not mention the Apollo program or NASA, nor does the 24-page paper here.
NASA is a privileged fiefdom where people have somehow got the idea that they are entitled to many billions of dollars per year in funding, even for projects of very little value (like some billionaire's teenage son who believes he is entitled to a $5000 weekly allowance). If billions have to be spent on space, rather than wasting billions on low-value boondoggle projects (such as Artemis or a Uranus orbiter or NASA's poorly-designed recent Mars mission), it would be better to spend such funds on useful space projects such as some system for protecting our planet from the very real danger of asteroid collisions or comet collisions that might make our planet all but uninhabitable. Or money could be spent on something that might have a big economic impact, such as space-based solar energy satellites or asteroid mining.
As for doing scientific work producing important discoveries, that will never come from the Artemis project. There are 1000 unfunded scientific projects that are not being done which would all give more important results than anything Artemis will produce. Many of these projects are not being funded because scientists are afraid to do research that might upset their cherished beliefs, and because so much money is being wasted on very expensive boondoogle projects such as Artemis. We should cut a large fraction of NASA's budget, and reassign part of that to something like a National Discovery Administration, which would have a goal of funding many small research projects, all high "bang for the buck" research projects, mostly projects researching important unanswered questions of life and mind. Carried out with sufficient scope, in a way that disregards research taboos that are keeping us in the dark, research into minds can involve a hundred important mysteries related to our welfare and fundamental questions about who we are. Minds are vastly more worthy of investigation than dull lifeless rocks such as the moon.
The Artemis project of returning astronauts to the lifeless moon is a prominent example of what you might call "dead end science." There are many examples of dead end science, including:
- physicists wasting endless hours writing speculative papers on impossible-to-verify versions of string theory;
- cosmologists wasting endless hours making impossible-to-verify speculations about the universe's first second (utterly unobservable because of the extreme density at such a time);
- biologists endlessly shocking the feet of rodents in memory experiments that tell us nothing because they are so poorly designed;
- neuroscientists doing endless MRI scans of people looking for neural correlates of thinking or recall that fail to show up in appreciable variations in signal strength (the variations generally being no greater than we would expect to occur by chance);
- physicists endlessly colliding together particles at nearly the speed of light in super-expensive machinery, trying without success to find evidence of their beloved but groundless theory of supersymmetry;
- neuroscientists endlessly doing intricate studies of brain wiring hoping without success that such wiring analysis will shed light on how humans think, imagine and remember (things that can never be explained by wiring arrangements);
- biologists wasting ending research dollars looking for genes for some mental condition or mental problem, with predictably failing results because genes merely specify low-level chemicals rather than high-level mental states;
- evolutionary biologists gluing together scattered bone fragments (not even known to have come from the same organism), and trying to pass off their speculative adhesive constructions as important evidence of our ancestry;
- cosmologists building super-expensive machinery to search without success for dark matter or dark energy;
- finally, according to a scientific paper, "investment in functional neuroimaging as a research tool in psychiatry dwarfs that of other recent innovations, with more than 16,000 published articles over the past three decades...yet, it is sobering to acknowledge that functional neuroimaging, in particular modalities such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG), plays no role in clinical psychiatric decision making, nor has it defined a neurobiological basis for any psychiatric condition."
Perhaps scientists keep going down such blind alleys over and over again because they lack the imagination to conceive novel experiments that might reveal new truths about reality or human nature, or because they are afraid of what such experiments might reveal (results suggesting their cherished assumptions are wrong).
During the 1980's we were told that the Space Shuttle launches were justified, because NASA was proving the feasibility of reusable space vehicles. But a page on CNET tells us, "In this world of reusable rockets, the Artemis vehicle isn't one." This is progress? Don't be fooled by the first search result you get after typing "Is Artemis reusable?" The first result will be a wikipedia page that mentions reusability, but is talking about a different rocket, Elon Musk's Starship rocket. It seems that the Artemis launch system (called SLS) will soon be technologically surpassed by some reusable rocket Elon Musk is developing, one that is not part of the Artemis project.
No comments:
Post a Comment