How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the NASA
In Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, it introduces the topic of evolution by saying it is of such importance that if aliens landed on Earth, the first thing they’d ask about humans is “have they figured out evolution?”
(Right: That’s what we don’t want to happen.)
But I contend there might be a different and more important milestone: blowing up asteroids. Can humans protect themselves enough to continue advancing their technology?
Why is blowing up space rocks important? Well, if you recall my 14 Reasons We May Be Alone in the Universe blog post, it’s actually kind of important that, up to now, we haven’t been able to. Reason #13: Bolide Impacts.
Huge bolide impacts can be evolutionary “pumps,” and the global change can challenge life into finding new ways of adapting and becoming complex.
In other words, maybe humans wouldn’t have developed if the dinosaurs had been allowed to dominate the Earth all this time.
But we’ve come to a point where humans have developed, and we’re all born with this funny instinct to, you know, survive. And huge bolide impacts could be a - to use a politically correct term - “survival inconvenience.”
This is High Priority, People
Bolides zoom through the solar system all the time. Just last January, the asteroid TU24 came within about a half a million kilometers of Earth. It’s not crazy to think there’s one out there that is on a potential collision course with Earth.
The way I see it, even if there’s a .0001% chance that human life is annihilated by a bolide impact in the next century or so, the total catastrophe we’d see is big enough to justify our best efforts in making sure we’re ready for asteroids and other solid objects in the universe. And there’s a chance we won’t know about such an asteroid until it’s pretty close.
How much is the survival of the human race worth to you?
More than $100 billion? More than $1 trillion?
NASA’s 2008 budget is $17 billion. The budget for interest on national debt alone in 2008 is $261 billion.
Global Catastrophic Risk Conference
Of course, a bolide impact is just one way humans could go instinct, and it’s an important enough problem that experts were supposed to meet today in London to talk about what could happen in the future.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
Technology has the potential to be so good that we might be able to genetically engineer bacteria to eat disease and poop nutrients. Problem is, if we ever create artificial intelligence that can infect humans, what’s to stop it from wiping us out?
We already have technology like that. After all, nuclear energy is great. Nuclear bombs aren’t.
There are other problems that advanced technology - even at a level when we can protect ourselves from bolide impacts - present to ethics and the most profound views on human consciousness. I plan to address some of these soon. But, for now, humans need to keep working on being around long enough to see their technology do great things.
Even though he has faults, you can still say John McCain is Pro-life and calls himself a “strong supporter” of NASA, and that wins him a lot of points by me.
Visit the BPN Political Discussion Boards
Did you like this post? Subscribe to the BipolarNation feed.
You can also receive the latest BipolarNation.com posts delivered to your e-mail inbox! Subscribe here.
The BipolarNation Robots Say You Might Also Like These Posts:
