Even with the problems announced today with "Spirit" (see AP news: Problems delay rover's trek, January 9, 2004) I find it rational and intelligent to continue the program and advance to a manned program in the near future. Neh sayers are harking back to the luddites of the past, who felt any progress was evil, indeed, to some, it meant participating in an evil Babylon. Today in The Melbourne Age an op/ed piece by Ann Applebaum of The Washington Post entitled Mars: meaninglessstep for man, giant waste for mankind and in The Australian today is another op/ed with a contrary view by Set Shostak of the SETI Institute entitled "Life on Mars is a siren song in the human drive to know". With President Bush making an announcement on the 9th US time, it appears the debate about manned space exploration is on the way

For years I have watched as the US put up a mighty effort to get a man on the moon, and then, after a few flights, nothing. It came to an end and the bean counters began to cut costs and re prioritise programs out of existence. The only nation that can do such a thing is the USA. I would rather see its economy being driven by an advanced space program than by the military industrial complex that appears to be running things now. The cost in lives is often put up as a reason we are unprepared or shouldn't go forward, Whereas many like me, see the sacrifice of such gallant men and women as a spur to achieve what they had achieved, step beyond our world. This gravity well should not keep us here, we can, have and shall move beyond it, not as a select few, but as a major expedition and migration sometime in the future. Mars is the next step after the Moon, a logical step and one we can learn a lot from as we move ever closer (metaphorically speaking) to it. Other nations should take part on agreat co-operative venture, that will unite our world more than any battle in the middle-east.

Secondly the great technical advancements required wil flow through to the ordinary citiznes over a short period of time like the efficient insulation developed for the space program became the thin walls of our refrigerators that sit in our kitchens. I'm sure there are many others that escape my memory at this time. Further, learning to build reliable space transportation systems and manage them safely will benefit a wide range of technically advanced production programs. One thing that comes to my mind right now, is the Columbia and Challenger disasters. NASA has probably learnt many things from the reviews, but one that I believe is essential is, "listen to the engineers", they know the machine and what it can and can't do. So, if an engineer is not comfortable with a launch or de-orbit burn, listen guys!!!

Some reading:

• The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at Nasa
• Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
• Implementation of the recommendations of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident report to the President (SuDoc NAS 1.15:108646)
• Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The First 100 Missions
• Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon

Mars: meaningless step for man, giant waste for mankind

January 9, 2004 Only robots, not humans, should explore space - if it has to be explored at all, writes Anne Applebaum. The first colour pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have now been published. They look like - well, they look like pictures of a lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show craters and boulders; red sand. Death Valley, the most desolate of American deserts, at least contains strange cacti, vicious scorpions, the odd oasis. Mars has far less than that. Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above minus 18 degrees, and can drop more than 100 degrees below that. Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, is not the kind of place to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there is the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut travelling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body. "Space is not Star Trek, " said one NASA scientist, "but the public certainly doesn't understand that." No, the public does not understand that. And no, not all scientists, or all politicians, are trying terribly hard to explain it either. Too often, rational descriptions of the inhuman, even anti-human living conditions in space give way to public hints that more manned space travel is just around the corner; that a manned Mars mission is next; that there is some grand philosophical reason to keep sending human beings away from the only planet where human life is possible. One actual Star Trek actor, Robert Picardo, the ship's holographic doctor, enthused this week that "we really should have a timetable to send a man to Mars . . . Mars should be part of our travel plans." Naive, perhaps, but fundamentally not much different from President George Bush's grandiloquent words after the Columbia disaster: "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on." Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, is not the kind of place to raise your kids. But why should it go on? Or, at least, why should the human travel part of it go on? Crowded out of the news this week was the small fact that the troubled international space station, which is itself accessible only by the troubled space shuttle, has sprung a leak. Also somehow played down is the fact that the search for "life" on Mars - proof, as the enthusiasts have it, that we are "not alone" in the universe - is not a search for sentient beings but rather a search for evidence that billions of years ago there might possibly have been a few microbes. It is hard to see how that sort of information is going to heal our cosmic loneliness, let alone lead to the construction of condo units on Mars. None of which is to say that it is not interesting or important for NASA to send robotic probes to other planets. It is interesting in the way that the exploration of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is interesting, or important in the way that the study of obscure dead languages is important. Like space exploration, these are inspiring human pursuits. Like space exploration, they nevertheless have very few practical applications. But space exploration is not treated the way other purely academic pursuits are treated. For one, the scientists doing it have perverse incentives. Their most dangerous missions - the ones involving human beings - produce the fewest research results, yet receive the most attention, applause and funding. Their most productive missions - the ones involving robots - inspire interest largely because the public illogically believes they will lead to more manned space travel. Worse, there is always the risk that yet another politician will seize on the idea of "sending a man to Mars," or "building a permanent manned station on the moon" as a way of sounding far-sighted or futuristic or even patriotic. President Bush is allegedly considering a new expansion of manned space travel. The Chinese are embarking on their own manned space program, since sending a man to the moon is de rigueur for would-be superpowers. The result, inevitably, will be billions of misspent dollars, more lethal crashes - and a lot more misguided rhetoric about the "inspiration of discovery," as if discoveries can only be made with human hands. - Washington Post This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/08/1073437408328.html

Seth Shostak: Life on Mars is a siren song in the human drive to know

09 Jan 04 The Australian (op/ed) One hundred and seventy million kilometres away, the mechanical innards of NASA's Spirit rover have begun to hum in the brittle cold of the Martian air. The rover is a synthetic geologist on wheels, small enough to fit in your kitchen, and the entire world is relieved to learn that it has managed to elude the silent death that has claimed so many of our envoys to the Red Planet. For Americans, the boost to NASA's confidence, badly eroded by the loss of shuttle Columbia, is surely a good thing. If Spirit and its sister rover, Opportunity, perform well, the Bush administration may support a major new space initiative, perhaps a return to the moon or a human expedition to Mars. In my opinion, those would also be good things. But such judgments, coming from a scientist, may seem obvious and self-serving. The American taxpayers will rightfully ask why it's important to shell out $US800 million ($1.043 billion) to send a pair of cybernetic skateboards to another world. One answer is to cite the widespread interest in, and global value of, science. For two centuries, Mars has beguiled us with its Earth-like appearance. Venus is closer, but Mars is charismatic; it is sufficiently similar to our own planet to warrant the hope that it once spawned life. And the possibility of discovering life beyond Earth is a siren song to anyone with curiosity, even if, as is surely the case for Mars, that life is no more sophisticated than bread yeast. NASA's approach to learning whether microbes ever populated the Red Planet is to look for signs of ancient lakes, rivers, or oceans. Spirit will explore a flat-bottomed crater that may once have held a body of water nearly the size of Spencer Gulf. Its mission is to find evidence for this erstwhile lake by examining the rocks littering the crater floor. If Spirit discovers that water once ebbed and flowed on Mars, the next question is: how long did it do so? Long enough to germinate life? NASA will send a string of robot explorers to address this question and to ultimately seek out microscopic Martians. The carrot that hangs before us is deliciously seductive: if another world -- the next world out from the Sun -- is proved to have supported life, that would imply that the cosmos is drenched with living things. We could conclude that planets with life are as common as phone poles. That's the science, and it's exciting. But science is no more than curiosity imbued with logic. Surely, in a world awash in political upheaval, epidemics, and poverty, curiosity is a dispensable luxury. It's not. Curiosity is hard-wired into our behaviour because it has survival value. For 300 millennia, it has driven us to exploration and understanding. The former has encouraged the discovery of new resources, and the latter allows us a comfortable life in a pitiless world. Humans display many behaviours that separate us from the beasts. Art, music, poetry -- the list is easily formulated. Curiosity, neither incidental nor trivial, is on that list. In simpler times, it drove our ancestors to wander across the mountains and, on occasion, to find a valley that was better than where they started. Today, scientific curiosity turns up answers to questions that previous generations could barely ask. The Spirit rover is a small actor in a long play with a large cast. It is aptly named, for it represents not only the best of our enterprises, but an essential quality of our being. Spirit is mechanical in construction only. It is quintessentially human. Seth Shostak is senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California

Still No Weapons of Mass Destruction

In todays (8 January 2004) Melbourne Age a front page article Detailed plans, but no smoking gun, Barton Gellma, of the Washington Post reports from Baghdad about the true state of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, a state that is far from what our leaders in the Coalition of the Willing told us. All this from the US's own Arms Inspectors Report. Gellma says in part

"But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in Washington and London before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and had built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorised interviews, investigators said they had discovered no work on old germ war agents such as anthrax and no work on a new pathogen - combining pox virus and snake venom - that led US scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months."

"A review of evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment less capable than US analysts judged before the war."

So what are we lesser mortals supposed to think of the whole episode that is "Weapons of Mass Destruction"?

A Reuters report today (8 January 2004) says:

Weapons Report Sound: Tabassum Zakaria A prewar United States intelligence report that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was based on 15 years of information, and the hunt should continue, a senior US intelligence official has said. Stuart Cohen, vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate report on Iraq's banned weapons, said he was not surprised that stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons had not been found. "He's (Saddam Hussein) had 15 years to hone his ability to hide this stuff. The footprints of these weapons are very small," Mr Cohen said. "I believe that our work was well-grounded. We know he (Saddam) had it, he used it, you don't unlearn that." Critics have said the National Intelligence report was produced under pressure for a Bush Administration that wanted to go to war against Iraq. Mr Cohen dismissed this. The report said that Iraq would not have nuclear weapons until "very late" in the decade, Mr Cohen said.

So we are lead to believe that the Richard Butlers UNMOVIC were totally hoodwinked by Saddam and his weaponeers (as the Washington Post article refres to them) hiding everything from them., to the extent they still have. Perhaps the example of the plans for a longer range missile being hidden is enough to keep looking, or the fact that chemical and biological weapons have a "small footprint". But what of the Nuclear Weapons. It's clear that Saddam intended to build a weapon in his glory days and did prepare for such, but he was a long way from manufacturing the parts and the UN Inspectors made it impossible to hide such an activity, not to mention the US and others satellite surveillance. So how do we explain the absence of the Nuclear Weapons?

There is no doubt in my mind that Saddan intended to build Nuclear Weapons and, failing that, chemical and biological agents of various kinds. That much is clear. What is also clear, the US and UK kept such a tight eye on Iraq that any such activity would have been subject to a bombing run or two. They ran such activities ever since the earlier Gulf War, and with impunity. So the Iraqi Army and Air Force were inadeguate to the task. Ground Troops still had to deal with loyalists, but were generally swift in wiping up the resistance. I can't see Saddm using such weapons against the US. It certainly used them against Iran and the Kurds, and the Sunni in the south. The US, remeber, made a threat against any nation that thought it could use chemeical or biological weapons against them, a nuclear strike!

I think the propaganda campaign has gained a life of its own, and now more rational analysis is being applied without fear of retribution from the over zealous, and we are seeing something approaching the truth. Maybe it is not "The OIl Stupid", but it certainly isn't WMD's either. Regime change is definite, and I fro one support that, even when Saddam was a friend to Rumsford and Cheney, do you remember those days?

This is just a test of an IM Miranda Blogger plugin

Filling The Gaps

This is a review by a non-paleontologist and non-biologist, just by someone interested in science since he was a child in the 60's. All my life I have followed the marvels of Space science, the moon shots and Aviation in general, since subscribing to the Eyring e-mail list, I have found I lack basic knowledge in the fields required to discuss Evolution. Now I have finally done something about it, although some of you may have given recommendations as to what to read, my local library limits me, so I am starting with Stephen Jay Gould, whose recent passing was noted on this very list.

Dinosaur in a Haystack, Reflections in Natural History, (Stephen Jay Gould: 1996 Random House and various issues of Nature magazine)

This is a review of a collection of Essays published in Nature Magazine before 1996 I should imagine. I would have liked the editors to include the original publication dates in Nature with each essay. The essays themselves revolve, sometimes loosely, on the topic of evolution; he always relates it back to that somewhere in the essay.

For someone like myself, a complete novice in the fields discussed by Gould, his style of writing is informative without the jargon that sometimes cloud the specialties us humans undertake from the mere mortals in the lower classes. Gould explains: "I will, of course, clarify language, mainly to remove the jargon that does impede public access... I will not make concepts either more simple or more unambiguous than nature's own complexity dictates."

I am happy he has done just that, in his 7th in this series of essay collections, the first one published in 1977 (Ever Since Darwin). All the essays revolve around that topic I am trying to understand, �Evolution.� I decided to start with Gould, because of his readily available material at my local library and his prominence in his field. The continuing argument between theology and science on "the origin of man" and hence the oxymoronic term "creation science" was coined by the proponents, or at least, the more prominent proponents of the biblical literal view of the world. Being a Christian, I felt I should find out the truth!

Now, back to Gould, two essays gained my interest for clearly pointing out two points of discussion between Old School and New School on the one hand and between Evolution and Creationists (a better word, don't you think?).

The first is �Dinosaur in a Haystack,� the second, �Hooking Leviathan by its Past�.

Dinosaur in a Haystack

Observation follows theory or is it theory follows observation? Gould explains how at the time of Erasmus Darwin (Grandfather of Charles Darwin), the Geological Society banned theoretical discussion. It was felt that observation was essential, when sufficient data was collected, and then theories could be entertained. When Charles Darwin came to the discussion some 30 years later, he then indicated the necessity for theory before observation. After all, how we look at the world is based on a theory, what we go out in search of is based on theory, etc. The two are dependant on each other and cannot be separated without making each meaningless.

Thus we come to Gould�s paleontology field and the theory of The Late Permian Debacle, and how an asteroid hitting the Earth caused it. The great extinction at this time was a matter of how extant it was amongst the fossil species and, of course, what contradicted it. The evidence pointed to a gradual extinction of the animals over geologic times. The new theory required additional evidence. Gould tells us about the ammonites ( a name which sounded like a Biblical tribe) and how they had appeared, given the current evidence and how a more thorough look, in the field, at the fossil record (needle in the haystack) might bring up ammonites closer to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (225 million years ago).

The problem is described as this, the rarer animals in the virtual slice of time take at a geological cut, cliff face, or whatever, may be distributed randomly and infrequently through it. Thus, it is conceivable that they did expire at the KT event, indicated by a layer of mud, literally dividing two epochs of time, rather than at the latest recorded disposition in the strata. If the above is true, then a more detailed look, excavation, needs to be made. The end result was the finding of the ammonites near the boundary, and thus dispelling the gradualism of the neo-Darwinists amongst the palaeontological world.

We know the fossil record is incomplete and sparse, so some logical; indeed, rational analysis is needed to flesh out theories. This means, sometimes, hard work, which makes the armchair theorists obsolete in a heartbeat.

Hooking Leviathan by its Past.

Or, another case of filling in the gaps!!!

He starts the essay with a serious error by Darwin himself, who speculated that the North American Black Bear, swimming with its mouth wide open catching insects, could easily, over a serious long time, evolve to something approaching a whale. The origin of the whale thus is introduced.

This is case where the creationists insisted that evolution was inadequate to explaining life; in this case it was the origins of the leviathan of the deep, the mammalian whales that confused these poor people.

�Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.� Are you a �creationist incubi�?

Gould takes us through the discovery of the very intermediate fossils that prove the evolution of whales, where it had been inferred, now it is established beyond a doubt. With Gould�s now famous explanatory skills we are taken for a journey of exploration in Pakistan (Science knows no national boundaries) where 1983 produced Pakicetus, a discovery by paleontologists Phil Gingerich (University of Michigan) and N. A. Wells, D. E. Russel, and S. M. Ibrahim Shah, found it buried in ancient river sediments, where one would expect to find it. The find was only the skull, but further field work produced the remaining body 10 years later. An excellent essay, and one that will remain embedded in my cranium for sometime.

I am currently furthering my reading in this field of paleontology with a taxonomic dalliance into Eugenics, lead by the 3 essays under the heading �Disparate Faces of Eugenics� in this same book to Gould�s 1981 book �The Mismeasure of Man�. I highly recommend Dinosaur in a Haystack, and if that is any guide to the style of Gould�s work, his other writing should be quite enlightening.

Clifford M Dubery

This is just an introduction of sorts, giving a short picture of where I am coming from. so to speak.

I am a resident British subject in Australia, and will continue as such until this great nation becomes a Republic. A member of the Australian Labor Party in the Karingal Branch, currently actively assisting in the State Election Campaign of re-electing the incumbant Bracks Government with an increase representation in both houses, particularly a majority in the Legislative Assembly, a majority in the Legislative Council is unlikely in this term or the next.

I live in Frankston, a great place to live, the only claim to fame I can think of at this time is the site for the film of Neville Schute's book "On The Beach" with Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire. Gardner is reputed to have said about Frankston, or was it Melbourne, "What a nice place to make a movie about the end of the world", in a dead pan look. I have lived here most of my life, my family is here and the seaside atmosphere is pleasant and cool, which you can appreciate when the summer is at its height.

I have six children and a talented wife Claire, and enjoy watching them grow and teaching and talking to them when they need an answer from the old man, who is touted by the wife as being a "walking, talking, encyclopaedia", which only leads to some disappointment when the children grow older and discover I don't kow everything, and never have. Sigh!!

I love reading and do so a lot, according to my wife. My interests lie in the areas of Politics, Foreign Affairs, Science Fiction, Archaeology and Natural History, Aviation and Space Flight. Sometimes other subjects catch my eye, like biographies of exceptional minds and literary geniuses. I also enjoy a certain amount of TV, especially Star Trek, currently in its Enterprise iteration, I enjoyed X-Files, Heart Beat, and some National Geographic specials,especially those on Ancient History and Archaeology. I am subscribed to a number of e-mail lists on subjects as diverse as Paleantology and LDS Politics (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) which is a group og Mormons discussing politics. I have a deep interest in my Genealogy and Family History, so if we have any lines in common, let me know and I can invite you to my MyFamily.com website.

That will do for now, except I should explain, I always endeavor to look at things is rational way, sceptically at time, especially with extraordinary claims, which can be irritating for some.