This argument reminds me of theists asking, "without a god, what is there to keep you from being amoral and running around killing people?"
Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic external levers. We have agency, understanding, and drive to have empathy and to create.
You've probably heard it before, but research and progress go hand in hand, and science is not synonymous with unpractical. For example, data from NASA missions that track water over the globe are used by climate scientists, yes, but also farmers, local water management agencies, and the military. These projects that account for less than half a penny of each dollar spent by the US govt. have a wide range of audiences and uses.
But who would have had the idea to make the technology? We don't know what's possible until after we do it. Science research pays dividends in knowledge and technology that we didn't know to look for otherwise.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Many strings were attached, many changes were made to work that had already started. It's a mess to be sure, and NASA was not the only cook in the kitchen by a long shot. I'll just leave this here, people can make of it what they will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
If it were cutting back, I can see your point. This, however, is a gutting. The proposal is a nearly 25% cut in one year to a funding level not seen since 1961. Talent will leave, institutional knowledge will leave, and rapidly. Knowledge transfer will not happen and projects beyond those explicitly cut may falter (people work on multiple projects).
Keep in mind, NASA accounts for ~0.4% of the national budget. We're not saving a ton of money here, just killing expertise and ceding space excellence to other countries
Tax cuts aren't what people are waiting for to grow their families. It's parental leave, childcare, affordable healthcare, and the feeling that the system their kids will grow up in isn't getting actively gutted in favor of the rich and religious zealots.
The audiologist I went to said tinnitus is anything you can hear that doesn't have an external source. In his case, he's always been able to hear his own heartbeat.
I saw one of those billboards on Ventura Blvd. the other day and wondered what kind of PR scam it was. Who pays for those things? Billboards are pretty expensive around here.
There is a lot of handwaving going on here. The below, however, is an egregious misunderstanding of how percentages work. That, or it betrays very sloppy work. Doing it right would actually make the specific case they make stronger.
"There are also potential opportunities to leverage the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is 35% faster than in a typical glass fiber."
This is just wrong. The speed of light in a fiber is ~2/3 slower than in a vacuum. That means that the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than in a fiber, not 35% (~1/3) faster!
> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?
Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.
> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.
> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).
An act can be illegal. I don't see how a person can be illegal. Being in a country illegally is an act, not an inherent property of a person.
Trying to say a person is illegal seems like a non-starter for useful reasoning because it seems to absolve people of responsibility for their actions, since nothing can be done about who a person inherently is.
If there's bias, I think it comes from people being concerned that there are people coming into various govt. offices, demanding and receiving write/read, non-logging accounts on systems containing sensitive information. The access DOGE staffers are being granted absolutely warrants extra scrutiny of their conduct and security practices.
Agree. I've been trying to be more proactive in supporting companies and institutions that are doing important work. That includes news organizations that I was previously using archive.ph to read.
Vote with your dollars (and of course vote with your vote!).
I don't think this is lost on anybody, even if it's not the main mission. SMAP also provides a near-real-time data product which may interest people in this area.
A wonderful example of the useful, sometimes unintentional secondary effects of doing science. SMAP as a mission is firmly in the Earth science category, so very much in the crosshairs of the current administration. The data is used for Earth science and climate research and has many agricultural and water management applications.
For example, water management districts can tell if the local soil can accommodate the water from an upcoming storm or if the water will stay on the surface and cause flooding.
You didn't cite a source there, but aside from finished products, American companies that make things domestically source many materials from China. I remember a few years ago a news story about a company that makes crab pots being impacted because the steel wire they use was imported from China. There are a lot of secondary impacts.
Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic external levers. We have agency, understanding, and drive to have empathy and to create.