"Brendan" <Bry### [at] comcastcom> wrote in message
news:pan### [at] comcastcom...
> On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:36:31 -0600, somebody wrote:

> > Going to the moon was bad science (well, not even science, just a
> > technological tour de force).
>
> There was plenty of science that resulted from the Apollo missions like
> the collection of lunar samples that could be radiometrically dated and
> used to calibrate the crater counting method of determining the age of
> cratered areas. Now we have estimates of the ages of cratered worlds
> much further away than the Moon without having sent sample collection
> mission to all of those worlds yet.

And the benefit to mankind of  "having the estimates of the ages of cratered
worlds much futher away from the Moon" is what exactly? :) In your eagerness
to counter my point, you are emphasizing it.

> We also shouldn't be shortsighted and not worry about how things will be
> 300 years from now because it'll be our descendants who will be around by
> then. I won't want them to figure out stuff that we could've easily
> figured out and then stereotype us as lazy bums who wasted those
> centuries by not doing that research to give them the results sooner, like
> how people today see Dark Ages Eurpoe.

They will have better technology than us. Let *them* lazy bums figure out
things if they *need to* at that time. They will be able to do it much more
efficiently. If knowing the "estimates of the ages of cratered worlds much
futher away from the Moon" is of no practical benefit to our generation, it
is crime to our contemporaries to waste present resources on such pursuits,
when we could make a dent with those resources in the suffering of *already
existing* people.

> We'd have to expand into space eventually if our kind or our descendants
> are around long enough because the Sun is heating up slowly during its
> main sequence lifetime, which has been predicted to make Earth
> inhospitable to modern types of ecosystems within a billion years, long
> before its red giant phrase. It'd be difficult through.

You hopless romantics are completely missing the trees for the forest. While
thinking about a future billion years from now (!??), you miss what we could
be doing for ourselves and for our fellow people. Africa is at most 10 hours
away, not a billion years. And I am sure there's suffering right at your
doorstep too.

Who needs to care about a billion years from now? Do you think Etruscans
worried about us? Even if they did, could they have anticipated anything at
all about our lives to have made useful decisions *for us*? And that was a
little over 1000 years. Isn't it presumptuous of you to propose to help a
species billion years your technological superior? Do you honestly think we
can anticipate, or even *help* descendants of humans (if they will exist and
if we can call them humans), billions of years down the road? And even if we
could help them, why should we, especially when we could be helping
ourselves instead? Do you realize you yourself will cease to exist in much,
much, much less than a billion years and it won't then matter at all, much
as it did not matter about Etruscans before you were born?

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