Re: [CASSINI] Re: A note from "Pro-Space" -- A reponse to that note
Flower Child (nternet@c2i2.com)
Sat, 24 Oct 1998 17:28:02 -0700
M. Bond, President Anti-Stop Cassini / Pro-Space movement, said:
>Why oppose space exploration and travel???
Dear M. Bond,
One reason to oppose space exploration and travel at this
time is that we really need to concentrate more of our resources
which the space program has been using and wants more of, on
allowing the younger generations, the homeless and ill-housed to
obtain stable, perhaps innovatively smaller, housing and
cohousing blocks. We need to achieve universal and preventive
health care without all the bookkeepers, scorekeepers and middle
agencies involvement. We need to work consciously on enrichment
of the quality of community in all our communities, which range
from the still and perfect looking 'successful' neighborhoods to
the inner city 'war zones'. We need to understand why, say a
scientist or astronaut, cannot go a half block from his or her
car in a typical downtown with safety, after returning in good
health from space journeys of millions of miles/kilometers. We
need to solve as quickly as possible why ten times more funds are
spent incarcerating minorities as in providing for their
educations and integration as full status citizens of this
nation. We need to solve the prohibition-like problems of the
drug wars. We need to move into better balance economically with
the Third World by innovative reductions in resource per capita
use, so we can finally meaningfully sit at the same table
internationally and make progress with the peaceful and
beneficial cooperation among nations, among citizens in this
world, which we can't do as long as we are living off other
people in those countries by paying off their upper classes to
obtain their people's cheap resources and labor in a continuous
stream. We need to stop cheering for gross and more gross
product, and be happy as pollution is reduced, as demand for
forests, minerals, fishes, and other nations' resources (minerals
and cheap labor), etc., goes down and we achieve a more peaceful
world here on Earth with a future which does not have a dire drop
off at the end, while we work to more evenly distribute
necessities from the smaller more peaceful 'pie.' We need to
reduce the work day to four hours to improve our nation's health,
to allow families to be with their children as they grow, to meet
their neighbors, to reduce tensions in a society which has been
rushing around too fast with angry tempers. As scientists and
engineers, I suppose you know how possible this could be by
offering smaller houses which don't take half a lifetime to pay
for, by seeing that plain and simple goods and solutions are
there in the marketplace for selection (such as they are in the
Third World), how through planning and innovation, alternate
transportation (such as safe and separate bike, hike, and moped
pathways through and between communites) and small industry and
foodstuff fields located near housing, and how through Internet
collaborative work, online goods ordering, and general resource
sharing, we could reduce resource and conventional highway use
and its many costs, solve our dumpster and landfill problems, how
ideas, tools, machines, industrial systems and now computers to
drive them enable a half day workday in a fair system?
As opposed to taking pictures further and further out into
infinite space, or getting bigger and better space stations
(which would become battlestations from a non-peaceful global
community), we really need to take some of the brains in the
field and point them at Earth, which admittedly wouldn't need a
telescope, and we all then can figure out why things have gone so
badly while our piles of material goods have risen to great
heights and the processing faster and faster of limited Earth
resources hasn't resulted in something for everybody, not even
the minimums they need, while pollutions and world tensions have
increased worldwide. Help us develop systems which are in
balance with the planet, and which don't result in loss of
control over our lives and over our country and our dear
homelands, as has occurred in the present situation. Further, I
believe we should solve our human interaction problems here on
Earth before we "infect" the rest of the universe, and outer
space becomes the stupidity of mankind at a new level of
technical expertise. In fact, I believe that until we achieve
balance and peace here on Earth, we don't have the proper base
upon which to mount meaningful, full scale and successful
exploration and colonization at extraterrestrial locations.
Thank you,
Charles Wilson
http://www.c2i2.com/~nternet
>At 11:38 PM 10/23/98 -0400, mwbond@m9.sprynet.com wrote:
>>
>>Just wanted to let you know that me and a few friends of the
"Pro-Space
>>" Movement sat around and watched the glorious launch of the
space
>>probe you all oppose launch successfully into outer space.. It
is good
>>to know that our Congress won't let people like you stop this
important
>>mission..... How else would they power the experiments on
board,
>>Voyagers and Pioneers had nuclear reactors... (That was a
friends
>>question)
>>
>>We decided after the launch, to form the Anti-Stop Cassini
group. and
>>since we are at a major University, we have instant access to
the
>>academic and Scientific field. We think we will be able to
watch
>>Cassini as it passes the Earth. I invite you to go out and
watch as it
>>passes the earth headed for Saturn. Should be a neat site. You
people
>>have already reduced the space budget so badily that the next
mission
>>will have to be launched in three parts, think of it, because
of your
>>lobbyings, instead of one ship with one reactor, we now have
three
>>ships with three reactors... A good move on your part.
>>
>>Why oppose space exploration and travel??? Me and the Anti-Stop
Cassini
>>group will probably never know.
>>
>>M Bond
>>President Anti-Stop Cassini / Pro-Space movement