Among my Facebook friends, there was a lot of chatter about the new movie ‘Interstellar.’ Most of my FB friends are nerds, all right. Mostly they liked the movie, although they complained it was kind of long. A recurring sentiment was to the effect of “I hope this movie sparks a new interest in space exploration.”
No, it won’t. The political class made the choice a long time ago. The constituency that grows is the constituency that is fed; and the political class chose to feed the FSA [i.e. the people who want welfare, Obamaphones, and other Free Stuff]. NASA’s budget is a third what it was in the 1960’s, in the same period, the budget for welfare programs has skyrocketed to over a trillion dollars per year.
The Democrat Party has embraced a Skinner Box theory of governance; voters have been trained to pull the level for Democrats and get a reward. Since President LBJ initiated the “War on Poverty’ in 1964, the Government has spent $22 Trillion on welfare with no reduction in the poverty rate. We could have built self-sustaining colonies on Mars for that amount of money; but instead, the political class decided it was more important to give this woman an Obamaphone. And instead of aiming for Mars, NASA’s mission is to enhance the self-esteem of Mohammedans.
The Democrat Party, while labeling itself the ‘Party of Science,’ is fundamentally anti-science. ‘Science’ to them is just an empty rhetorical device. Global Warming necessitates vastly expanded Government and commensurately limited freedom because “Science says the Earth has a fever.” And it’s science that dictates that a foetus isn’t a human life until it passes through the birth canal.
The constituency for Free [Stuff] from the Government is enormous and can never be sated. The Constituency for space exploration is quite small, the constituency that really understands science is even smaller. One movie, no matter how well made or compelling, will not change that equation.
Proof reading is your friend 😉 (eg did you type this on a mobile device?)
That said I think you’re right in that the democrats have their constituents well trained.
Keeping their constituents ignorant but pulling that lever for the treat is to the democrats advantage.
Forget NASA. The lunar missions were the first (and last) time that the government had any hand in technological and scientific innovation. It’s time we forgot about NASA and turn our attentions to private enterprise as the motivator of space exploration.
Henry David Thoreau was right: the best thing government every did to help something develop was to get the heck out of its way.
“‘Science’ to them is just an empty rhetorical device.”
Exactly right. The Democrats are only interested in science that advances the expansion of the power of centralized government.
Once NASA became the Science-Engineers Dept. for Full Employment in the late 1960s, you knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
Twenty-thousands highly-paid middle-aged Civil Service techie-types just to refurbish ONE space shuttle for one launch once a year?? It was supposed to be a DC-3 space-truck, not a gold-brickkers gravy-train.
The best-and-brightest saw that handwriting on the wall even when I was in college in the mid-1970s and became chemical engineers for the oil industry or software engineers a decade later. We knew then that “space” was doomed in our lifetimes, and the we had been betrayed…
The same year NASA got a Diversity coordinator was the last year man walked on the moon. Now SJW are gunning for tech companies for only hiring Asians and whites.
I did like the movie but at 3 hours having your boyfriend go to the bathroom before the movie & not getting a big drink is important if he didn’t do well in science. Its one of the few space movies that gets the detail of no sound in space/vacuum correct.