wiredfool

Archive for January 17th, 2004

Careless

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they have made. . . . (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

I was amused and excited about the Moon and Mars missions that Bush announced. While it seemed a naked jobs ploy for Florida, Texas, and California, it did inspire. I’ve been reading a lot of SF lately, including the Mars Trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson — that sort of mission grabs the imagination and takes it off the planet.

But the other side is that the manned missions have nearly no additional funding. So the Hubble Space Telescope, a source of some pretty amazing data over the last decade, will be abandoned within a few years as it’s systems degrade. There won’t be a replacement on the scene for another decade.

It seems careless to not maintain an instrument that has given us so much good data, when the technical, monetary and human resources exist to do that maintenance. But I’ve realized that it’s not so much carelessness as premeditated instrumenticide.

Everything that has a price that this administration proposes is a method of killing off something that they don’t support. Everything.

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