When I was 7 years old, Kennedy announced that we should send a man to the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade. 5000 companies put almost a half million people to work. Not just in the large corporations, but work was farmed out to smaller subcontractors to accomplish a "United Effort" to be the first. We watched in school and at home the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions as we progressed. The Discovery Channel had a feature on that showed a synopsis of how it was done. Ron Howard and Tom Hanks produced From the Earth to the Moon series on HBO. In 1974 Congress decided we were wasting too much money sending guys to collect a bunch of rocks. We have poor people to care of here on earth. Here we are 34 years later. We still have poor people. What happened to all that money?

To see the benefits of NASA you can logon to http:://www.discovery.com/nasa and see the benefits in our every day lives.

Now I read in the Washington Post this article.

washingtonpost.com

This is certainly disconcerting. I know that the circle jerk of fault will start but I guess what I'm asking, is it worth it to go back to where we lead this endeavour or just sit back and watch?

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Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war - John McCain

The essential claim of the Fundamentalist is that he knows the truth - Andrew Sullivan - The Conservative Soul

If the opposite of Pro is Con then the opposite of Progress is Congress - Anonymous

NASA is still the leading space agency in the world and the most experienced (not to mention a bigger budget to work with), I don't see where your getting the idea we're watching from the sidelines just yet. As for China they've got a ways to go before they even begin to catch up. The only real space agencies that even come close to NASA would be a ESA/RKA cooperation and both would rather work with NASA than go it alone if need be. Obviously there are going to be some challenges, especially throughout the five year gap after the shuttle is retired. The biggest problem though is we have a population that is used to space travel and spoiled by it that they've already been bored by it.

Of course it remains to be seen if manned spaceflight continues in the US, because it could easily be killed off during that five year gap and is already threatened with the horrendous hassle the Ares program has become thus far. Not to mention the brain drain after the shuttle program comes to a close. Of course it really comes down to one question, is manned space flight worth it. After all from a scientific standpoint you'd think no, space probes after all can do any job more efficiently and not to mention these robots cost less as well.

At the same time what we know is that eventually yes, we're going to have to leave this earth of ours to ensure the survival of the human race. Sure were talking about maybe millions and millions of years until the need is there that we know of but eventually yes we're going to have to leave the earth (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out, nor let asteroids do it for us. Though personally I think humanity is tougher than asteroids/nuclear warfare).

Anyway, in the meanwhile I think we should certainly have some kind of manned space flight and that the US should lead instead of trying to remember how to have a manned space flight program somewhere down the line. So, we'll see what happens.

By the way, I'm fully aware that the human race is horrible at caring about future generations in the first place, I mean we could hardly care about the world that the generation after us inherits not to mention the countless ones into the future. So, that's a problem. We're selfish creatures, but I don't know if we care enough about the survival of the human race down the line. I'm even sure several of us even wish we'd all rapture off this earth or just die off.

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If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later. . . .bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species;. . . .that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch;. . . .that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest. . . .the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad. ~ Michael Crichton

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This is who we were. . .
"A republic, if you can keep it." ~ Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, in answer to "What have we got?"

232 years later, this is what we have become. . .
http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/war-...a-we-rule.html

I know this is gonna sound crazy, bizarre, and konspiracy-like, but IMHO the most significant factor holding global space research back is not lack of $$ (although that's certainly a factor).

Rather, I believe the reason mankind hasn't yet taken to the stars is due to a kind of artificially induced scientific ignorance, stemming from interference by people/creatures, etc. who have traveled back in time and deliberately (yet covertly) thwarted efforts by humans to discover the theoretical breakthrough

that would make warp drive (i. e. superluminal travel within general relativity) possible given the substances known to man.

Why would these creatures do this? Because once you have warp drive, you also automatically have the ability to travel back in time (those well-versed on relativity know this), and if mankind had that ability in this day and age, with short-sighted warmongering pols running loose all over the place,

bad things could potentially happen to the timeline, i. e. if some bonehead pol/maniac decided to (covertly) authorize a trip back in time to alter history more to his liking. I. e. mankind doesn't currently have the ability to enforce a temporal directive, and so, can't responsibly handle warp technology, if it were to exist today.

There is, of course, the possibility that any alterations made to the timeline do not affect our existence because such alterations will merely fork new parallel universes, or that alterations to the timeline are fundamentally impossible. If either of these are the case, then my theory goes out the window.

Otherwise, certainly (however bizarre it sounds), it has merit.

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Life only becomes meaningful at its extremes

-- S

Interesting theory.....

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Greetings and Felicitations,

Where did you get this wonderful idea? You can't travel back in time to change things. If you travelled back in time to change an event then it wouldn't have happened in your future. If it hadn't happened then you would not need to go back to change it. And so forth. And so forth.

The future doesn't exist in the time stream other than a cloud of chaotic possibility.

As far as warp drive is concerned. I will refer you to: Alcubierre warp drive.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

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I considered the possibility that traveling back in time to change past events is impossible. . .

But it's only a possibility. If there's no forking of parallel time lines, then if events are altered in the past, the current world could change, but none of us would be aware of it. The past could be being altered right now and none of us would know it. Alterations that could affect the time line in a way that creates inconsistencies (i. e. going back in time and stopping your birth) may either be prohibited or allowed w/the appropriate changes (i. e. w/you being removed from the universe) or allowed w/parallel universes being forked. To be honest, I don't know.

However, the Alcubierre Drive (assuming one could be built) allows a ship to travel back in time (even though it prevents time dilation effects), because anything traveling faster than light in one reference frame implies reverse time travel in others (according to GR).

With an Alcubierre metric in place, probably wouldn't be hard to setup a scheme to travel back in time on Earth.

Also, if the future is merely a cloud chaotic possibility, then the whole universe (in all times) should be a cloud of chaotic possibility, since every point in time in the universe was at one time the future.

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Life only becomes meaningful at its extremes

-- S

Greetings and Felicitations,

The operative word is: was. Time does not operate by the same rules. We live in the moment and the future is past the moment. Until it becomes present it is nothing more than a possibility. The future is beyond our perception because it hasn't happened yet. We can project possibilities but we cannot see the future despite the best wishes of psychics and prophets.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

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True, but the future is relative, i. e. to the dude living in July 18, 1687, the future is July 19, 1687. To us, it's the past.

This relativism is also created by spacetime curvature and the speed of light limit--different frames of reference in which a creature in one region of the universe will perceive as the present something that already happened, i. e. when we see something happen a million light years away with our telescope,

what exactly happens a second after that is chaotic possibility to us, but to a being nearer to that point in space, possibility, the past.

You brought up the Alcubierre Warp drive, which presents a theoretically valid geometry of spacetime that allows FTL travel, i. e. reverse time travel in specific frames of reference (one of which may be our own). So if that's possible then the past is also chaotic possibilities

assuming a single timeline, since if a person goes back in time--which someone could if he figured out how to create an Alcubierre-like metric, then the present, as we know it, is a chaotic variable--could be anything, depending on the effects of what that time traveler did.

And I really don't think you believe what you said about time.

What you described as the "rules" under which time operates in fact only refers to the human perception of time as linear and sequential. Time is just another dimension (which may contain its own subdimensions, i. e. up, sideways, in/out) that can be perceived and represented in several ways.

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Life only becomes meaningful at its extremes

-- S