I used to see this fake graph all over the place in my New Atheist days. It’s troubling because…well, look at the Y axis. No units? How do you quantify “scientific advancement” to a single dimension, anyway? Also that dashed line extrapolation implies that science naturally rises ‘upwards’. “Christian” Dark Ages implies that there was one single unitary factor to the social, economic, and military changes that occurred after the fall of Rome, and that there was no technological progress between 300CE and 1300CE. It’s a bad graph.
How about this one?
Now that’s a quantitative historical trauma! And we get to live through it (I hope we live through it.)
Trump is going to cut NASA’s budget in half, while making some contradictory plans.
President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors. The plans, released today, call for a “leaner” agency that will land “the first human ever, an American, on Mars.” But they would effectively end NASA’s long-standing role as the world leader in space science, researchers say—if the U.S. Congress follows through on them.
Putting an American on Mars is the dumbest goal ever. It’s not going to happen without a solid foundation in space science, which he is destroying. This sounds like a Musk plan: stupid, ill-founded, and doomed to failure.
Trump is demolishing biomedical research.
The Trump administration and Congress are eliminating billions of dollars of funding for medical research while also gutting the scientific workforce. Specifically, they are:
- Terminating more than $2.4 billion in active grants and obstructing new awards.
- Radically altering budget structures and reducing future funding.
- Eroding expertise and ending training programs.
Our best working estimates calculate that the NIH alone has cancelled more than 1,500 grants so far, representing a loss of more than $2.4 billion (PDF) in previously-committed medical research funding, with more expected. When delays (an additional $2.3 billion) are factored in, the total value of lost research funding approaches $5 billion.
The changes to grants management have been rapid, large-scale, and chaotic. In the past, grant terminations have typically been associated with misconduct and extraordinarily rare: from 2012 to 2024, there were fewer than five such terminations. Since February, however, hundreds of researchers across the country have received termination letters telling them that their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This specific phrase references an obscure update to the Office of Management and Budget rules from the first Trump administration that allows them to unilaterally sever grants in service of the president’s political agenda. This executive branch maneuver is called “impoundment” and it functionally overrides Congressional authorization and appropriation.
Some of the terminations are blatantly ideological; a result of DOGE-directed screening and searches for flagged keywords like “women,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” “diversity,” or “COVID.” The attack on “woke DEI ideology” targets research focused on HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, addiction and mental health, health equity and systemic racial disparities, and more. Other terminations have nothing to do with the subject of the research, and instead must be understood as part of the administration’s attempt to strip universities of their independence.
Here’s a tally of many of the scientific budget cuts.
• National Science Foundation (NSF):
o The budget proposes $3.9 billion for NSF, which is $4.9 billion below (55%
decrease) FY 2025 enacted. The budget request proposes cuts for climate, clean
energy, “woke social, behavioral and economic sciences” and “programs in low
priority areas of science.”
• National Institutes of Health (NIH):
o The budget proposes $29.116 billion for the NIH, a $17.97 billion reduction (38%
decrease) from FY 2025 enacted. It also proposes reforms to the NIH, including
consolidating programs into five new focus areas:
▪ National Institute on Body Systems Research;
▪ National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research;
▪ National Institute of General Medical Sciences;
▪ National Institute of Disability Related Research; and
▪ National Institute on Behavioral Health.
o NIH research would align with the president’s priorities to address chronic
disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating
research on climate change, radical gender ideology and divisive “racialism”.
This new structure retains the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health
(ARPA-H).
o The budget provides $27 billion for NIH research.
• Department of Energy (DOE):
o The budget proposes $7.092 billion for the Office of Science, which is $1.148
billion below (13.9% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $888 million for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
(EERE), which is $2.572 billion below (74% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $200 million for Advanced Research Projects Agency–
Energy (ARPA-E), which is $260 million below (56% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
o The budget proposes a $1.311 billion decrease for the NOAA Operations,
Research and Grants program. Since the final FY 2025 continuing resolution did
not provide the specific funding level, the base level is unknown. The budget
cites a termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant
programs, which are not aligned with the Administration’s policy-ending ‘Green
New Deal’ initiatives.”
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):
o The budget proposes $5.069 billion for NASA Science Mission Directorate, which
is $2.265 billion below (30.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $1.034 billion for Earth Science, which is $1.161 billion
below (52.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $569 million for the Space Technology Directorate, which
is $531 million below (48.2% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
Don’t forget: 47% decrease in the budget of the department of agriculture, and a 30% cut to the department of the interior, and eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science! On the bright side, the defense department gets a 13% increase. Also keep in mind that these are the quantitative changes — we haven’t even started examining the qualitative changes in where the money that is left is going, thanks to agents of chaos like RFK jr and Bhattacharya.
There’s no hiding the fact that these cuts are ideologically driven.
In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — began an ideological purge of its grants. Without warning, hundreds of research projects — many of which had been underway for years, representing thousands of hours of work and billions of dollars in investment — were abruptly cancelled without a scientifically valid explanation. The NIH cited only vague connections to “gender identity” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), or other now-forbidden topics such as vaccine hesitancy and COVID, as justification, claiming these projects no longer aligned with “agency priorities.”
These funding cuts raise serious ethical concerns for study participants and risk many life-saving findings going unpublished. The NIH has undermined research on life-threatening diseases that affect us all like cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer’s — and dangerously implies that some patients are more worthy of care than others. These actions stifle scientific progress and put lives at risk.
It’s amazing how electing one man can so profoundly change the course of history…and not in a good way. Here’s the real march of progress:
Does anyone really doubt the Congress will do what Trump demands and tells it to do? Its seems liekit s just a rubberstamp now that wields virtually no actual power and has no willpower of its own to oppose the
POTUSDictator.Nah. Putting an American on the Sun would be even dumber!
(Trump : Its okay, we’ll go at night..)
More seriously though, of all the planets in our solar system Mars is definitely the most reasonable one to try to land humans on first. I don’t think trying to send people there is “dumb” at all – as JFK said of our planet’s Moon “We do these things not because they are easy.. “ But Mars is certainly easier than Mercury or Pluto or Venus, etc..
“Welcome to the new Dark Ages”
Read a comment somewhere that there were only 2 countries in the history of mankind who deliberately went dark on facts and science, Nazi Germany and Lysenko Russia.
I have to say, I don’t quite get this part of the fash billionaire takeover of the USA. How exactly does Trump plan to make America great by killing off science and research? Or is this really just some petty narcissist’s quest to dismantle the country that saw him bancrupt casinos and convicted him of 34 felonies, plus a few gazillionaires wanting to pay even less tax and get less oversight of their crimes? And I note not one of them has a hospital wing named after them.
No. Sending a person to Mars is DUMB. Dee-You-Em-Bee DUMB. Send robot probes.
Bite me, we could send a man to Mars tomorrow! Just put a corpse in a capsule, launchy coasty, navigate, navigate, parachute and bingo bango, rather, bingo BANGO ’cause soft landing ain’t required. Same end point of a corpse on Mars. What’s the big deal???
Sending an American to Mars does sound like a pretty dumb idea. Sending all of them, though…
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? There are probably others.
China is planning an orbit-only crewed mission to Mars before 2050, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 2049. There’s no talk about landing taikonauts on the red planet, which, ironically, would make it red in another way. The thing that impresses about China’s approach to space exploration is its careful planning and methodical nature. It is so unlike our own slapdash approach. Every time there’s a new administration, plans change or are curtailed. With Trump’s indiscriminate cost-cutting, the future of NASA’s Space Launch System is uncertain. As for Musk and SpaceX, does anyone actually believe that he will ever send people to Mars, much less colonize it? That’s a ketamine fueled fantasy. The first man to reach Mars will be likely be named Chen, not Clark.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4978/1
Our old, sclerotic American empire is being challenged by a newly energized, vigorous competitor. It reminds me of Spain and England in the 1600s. Spain stopped being a world power after the defeat of the Armada, and England took the lead and went on to colonize much of the planet.
The American people don’t care. In fact, I bet they are reveling in the fact that those godless nerds who have been denying Jesus and telling them what to do (Y’all think yur smarter than me?!) with their huge science words have to go out and get a “real job” like them. No amount of education or “science communication” was going to prevent this. Americans are just too stupid.
I fucking loathe our filthy species.
Mao’s China was another.
They initially bought into the Lysenko version of biology and had the worst famine in history due to failures in their agriculture. Which killed tens of millions of people. The death toll has been estimated at 30 million.
I’ve posted this before many times.
What Trump and the GOP are doing with the science and medical research cuts is destroying the future of the USA.
Our lead in science is how we ended up as the richest and largest economy in the world.
Importance of science to the USA
Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a week ago) position in the world.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
I suppose it is time once again to dust off an old study on how science is the main driver of our society.
.1. US GDP per capital has increased about 9-fold in the last century.
.2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.
Our lead in science Research and Development funding explains our lead in the world in terms of the world’s largest economy and…largest military. The military is well aware of the value of science and has a good incentive for spending money on research and development. Better weapons means fewer soldiers dying in battles.
The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
@PZ Myers : We’ve sent robot probes already. As you well know already.
We can do both.
Everyone remembers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.Some of us can name the rest fo the Moonwalkers too, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, John Young, Gene Cernan, etc.. Apollo did a lot of great science. Science we’re still learning from & being inspired by even now see :
Source : https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/apollo-11-scientific-legacy
Who now recalls the Rangers or the Soviet Luna probes before them?
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_program &
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_programme
That NASA funding graph is misleadingly level. In 2004 George W. Bush announced his reorganization of NASA to focus on a Manned Mission to Mars – the funding for which came from cutting almost all other NASA missions, many of which focused on climate. Which, I insist, was the point.
We elected one man isn’t accurate. We elected the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 and they went in like commandos when they got Trump elected.
Grover Norquist gave a speech that is still on YouTube where he said the Republican party didn’t need someone with ideas or plans. They just needed someone who could get elected and then sign what they put in front of him, because the R party already knew what to do.
Reagan, Bush 2 and Trump all fit that bill perfectly.
If anyone thinks that the buffoon in the oval office has 1/1000x of the mental capacity to pull off the current catastrophe they need help.
StevoR @2:
Right. They did those things to beat the Soviets.
@ Reginald Selkirk : Yes. The one that infuriated me most was Obama cancelling the Constellation program :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
just after it had flown its first successful test flight. Problem is each USA admin wants to change the direction and be remembered for that rather than sticking to one plan. No admin seems to want to keep doing what is already underway.. Thus the country as a whole never gets a consistent program that keeps going until it actually flies and, more importantly, lands. The USoA could’ve been back on our Moon and maybe landed people on Mars already by now if it had actually prioritised it & picked and stuck rather than chopped and changed continually.
Hmmm, the New Dark Ages. I think I remember someone using that phrase in a comment a number of times recently. OH, yes, it was me. But, PZ has backed up that assertion with incontrovertible facts!
And, while people will argue about all the spacey stuff and exalting the money grubbing billionaires bludgeoning our economy, I am still waiting for human society to become a civilized entity that values all lives and is responsible with our environment. And, THAT’S NOT HAPPENING.
I want the Democrats – those are currently complaining that they can’t do anything and those who are running for office – to start publishing the legislation that they will introduce if/when they retake the House, the House and the Senate, the House, Senate, and White House. Detailed plans for how they are going to fix this mess that we are in. Take a stand!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! None of this ‘trust us, we’ll do something’ nonsense. I want real specific promises and details. Predictability is needed in a time of chaos like this.
@8 John Watts “Our old, sclerotic American empire is being challenged by a newly energized, vigorous competitor. It reminds me of Spain and England in the 1600s. Spain stopped being a world power after the defeat of the Armada, and England took the lead and went on to colonize much of the planet.”
Spain was a world power for a lot longer and possibly hadn’t even reached its height at the time of the Armada (1588). The various wars in Europe in the 1600s and early 1700s cost it much of its land within Europe. It still controlled much of central and south America until the 1800s not to mention the Philippines (most of the Americas gained independence in the 1820s though Cuba gained it in the 1902 with Puerto Rico and the Philippines being taken over by the US in the same time frame). I would say the UK did not pass Spain as a world power until the 1700s.
The graph of scientific accomplishemts is not complete without the islamic section.
They initially burned books, then the muthezilites…mu..something started to translate the greek and roman books and build on their kmowledge (translations found their way to Europe and helped start the renaisssnce). Then a sufi hardliner wrote a book titled “The destruction of philosophy” which started a backlash, arguing the koran was all the reading people need.
This trashed the eqrly islamic science. The mongol invasion (deliberate destruction of libraries) completed the destruction and left islamic countries on the same low level as medieval christianity .
So both Christians and muslims have performed a deliberate lobotomy on their embryonic scientific efforts.
profpedant @ 18
Those who are actually doing something are getting the cold shoulder by the heritage Democratic leadership.
Ever since the days of Clinton, they have been content with small band aids , adressing systemic failures would scare away corporate donors and that is apparently worse than letting Trump triumph.
Have you forgotten the 2020 campaign when Biden went to corpoirate donors and promised them “nothing will change”?
He kept that promise. To give him credit, he did save the economy but – like Obama before him- he did not provide a recovery of disposable incom lost during Republican presidents.
That was enough for the populist vulture and his Republican enablers (Trump himself is not Republican, he is a parasite in the Repub host organism) to get enough voters.
Conclusion: “Vote for us, we are less bad than Republicans” is not a working slogan, but it is all you will ever get from the heritage Democrats.
NASA is not going to Mars. Congress with choke when it comes to paying for it. It’s not even managing to get to the Moon. Musk simply wants to upgrade StarLink by launching clown car sized satellites. To do that, he needs a ridiculously powerful rocket and he’s getting the taxpayer to pay for it. That’s all that’s happening.
I agree. We’re not going to Mars. Maybe the Chinese will, but the US…no way.
I remember when Kennedy set the goal of going to the Moon. What followed was slow, careful building ot the engineering foundation. The was Mercury, then Gemini — all that docking and maneuvering stuff — and then, finally, Apollo. Everything was planned and tested. They succeeded in getting a few people to the moon and back, mission accomplished, and then…nothing. We did not and do not have the technology to construct a habitat on the Moon, nor any way to extract useful resources, or to economically transfer people and materials back and forth. It was done.
For Mars, all we’ve got is a selfish, ignorant billionaire who learned his science from SF novels who has a base desire to make a vainglorious Mars colony. We don’t have the tools. We don’t have a reason, other than his ego. He doesn’t even have a reliable launch vehicle. SpaceX is a leech that sucked the life out of an organized, disciplined space program to help a parasite steal more money from the government while destroying the research infrastructure of the country.
Fuck Musk. Fuck SpaceX. Fuck Mars.
birgerjohansson @ 21
I am currently lobbying some of the more open-minded incumbents and all the primary challengers I can find to ‘show their legislation’.
@PZ
Do you, though? Actually want to live through this I mean. There are many, many, MANY worse things than death and a hell of a lot of them are lining up as we speak…
@3/rorschach
They don’t. They never did. That’s the point. The endgame of this is to bring the world back to medieval theocracy (but with 21st century weapons…) and, because they are on a Mission From God (TM), anything they do and anyone they do it to is by definition not only permissible but morally required of them.
Think about it like this: if you “know” your God has specifically created most of the human race, including all those who do not think like you do, to be fodder and fuel for the eternal fires of Hell, in which they will shriek and writhe and thrash and howl for alllllllll eternity, a) nothing any human can do to them will be anywhere near as bad, b) they deserve it, c) waiting is a dereliction of duty, and d) why should you value who and what God does not?
I’m not optimistic about space colonization, but I’d say we’re getting farther away from doing it, now. America’s killing a lot of the ecological and environmental knowledge we need to even consider building a habitat, and even if China or India take up the torch, they’re likely going to be more concerned with putting out all the fires America’s going to be causing.
Marissa van Eck @25:
The sociopaths in charge don’t give a shit about God, or the people who believe in it, any more than Hitler did. It’s about power. Nothing more or less.
The USA is not the world, nor is all its scientific research funded by the Government.
—
Incidentally, China had a Great Leap Forward quickly followed by a Cultural Revolution, much like MAGAs seek (but not Xian):
“Medicine in traditional China encompassed a range of sometimes competing health and healing practices, folk beliefs, literati theory and Confucian philosophy, herbal remedies, food, diet, exercise, medical specializations, and schools of thought.[3] TCM as it exists today has been described as a largely 20th century invention.[4] In the early twentieth century, Chinese cultural and political modernizers worked to eliminate traditional practices as backward and unscientific. Traditional practitioners then selected elements of philosophy and practice and organized them into what they called “Chinese medicine”.[5] In the 1950s, the Chinese government sought to revive traditional medicine (including legalizing previously banned practices) and sponsored the integration of TCM and Western medicine,[6][7] and in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, promoted TCM as inexpensive and popular.[8] The creation of modern TCM was largely spearheaded by Mao Zedong, despite the fact that, according to The Private Life of Chairman Mao, he did not believe in its effectiveness.[9] After the opening of relations between the United States and China after 1972, there was great interest in the West for what is now called traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).[10]”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine)
rorschach @3
How dark did Nazis go on facts and science? They surely went dark on morality and ethics. They did grisly morbid things to people in pursuit of facts that must have yielded some ill-gotten data gains.
They were sending rockets at Britain. The US benefited from Paperclip. Didn’t they have jet airplanes too?
I can’t help but feel we are at some point among Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Hemidactylus @29: They burned books by Einstein and other ‘undesirables’. Relativity was un-German, apparently.
It’s all on the record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Nazi_Germany
Reginald Slekirk @7
The Behind the Bastards podcast makes an interesting comparison between DOGE and The Khmer Rouge. People who don’t know how anything works have a bunch of ideas about how to run things better.
Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Sending people to Mars compared to sending people to the Moon is a lot more than a bigger rocket. The trip to the moon was short enough that Astronauts could take their chances with radiation. The longer duration of a Mars mission will require shielding resulting a bad case of the Rocket Problem. Lifting the shielding will require more fuel and the lifting that extra fuel will require mere fuel and …
[1] Antiscience regimes are not limited to Nazis and Soviets, going back at least to the ancient Greeks sentencing Socrates to death for posing difficult questions to his students, or the horrific murder of Hypatia. Even under the Nazis and the Soviets, lots of top-notch science was done with political knowledge and approval, so it’s more about suppressing specific scientific movements/findings that were politically inconvenient, by which measure there is yet to be an innocent regime.
[2] I am all in favour of a human expedition to Mars as part of a long-term, open-access, publicly funded exploration program that prioritises robot missions until such time as we’ve learned what we can from them (although I suspect it will always be cheaper and more effective to design and launch new robots to test hypotheses generated by previous missions than to send humans). Realistically, any human mission is decades away at best, and the justifications offered and logistic necessities hand-waved for any near-future permanent habitat are patently ridiculous. Any human-on-Mars program right now is actively harmful to effective and economical space exploration and a tool for siphoning public funds from science agencies to billionaire vanity projects.
@29 and @31–
Not just relativity. The Nazis also cast quantum theory from the Garden of Deutsche Physik, and promoted “race science” that was really just a tabulation of ethnic hatred.
Wry feminist observation: when the Nazis purged mathematicians from Göttingen, Saunders Mac Lane observed, “So many professors and instructors have been fired or have left that the mathematics department is pretty thoroughly emasculated.” Which I find pretty funny given one of those purged was Emmy Noether.
It is also significant that this death by a thousand cuts attack on science and medicine is directed towards institutions that are centers of knowledge and excellence whose authority is perceived by the MAGA movement as a direct threat to their ideological purity (ignorance). The totally incompetent cranks and crackpots appointed to reform them are not just there to promote Trump’s/Project 2025’s agenda but to exact revenge on those who have made them the butt of scorn for so long, They are there because they were appointed by Trump who’s appeal to the electorate was partly to massage their sense of grievance at being belittled by what they regarded as elitist experts. This is the Revenge of The Marching Morons,
Hmm… a number of points of interest here, so I’ll probably post a number of comments.
First, on the ignorant “scientific advancement” graph PZ rightly derides, the real ancient advancement of proto-science took place mostly in the Hellenistic era from roughly 300-50 BCE (think Archimedes, Euclid, Ctesibius, Eratosthenes…), and among Greeks working in that tradition under the Roman Empire (Heron, Claudius Ptolemy…). The Romans themselves were not in general scientifically minded, although some technologies important for later science were developed in their empire, most notably glass-blowing. “Dark Age” and Medieval Christianity didn’t really embark on any deliberate programme of destroying science as the Trumpoids are doing – there just wasn’t the capacity to continue advancement or even to maintain what was known, although monkish copyists (in Latin Europe and Byzantium) did preserve most of what texts we have from classical Greece and Rome (the rest came via the early Muslim “translation movement” birgerjohansson@20 refers to, which also led to further advances in Arabic* mathematics, optics, astronomy, proto-chemistry…). At least by the 12th century CE, scholars in Latin Europe were again making important advances, translating works from Greek and Arabic into Latin, and just as important, developing the apparatus of critical scholarship (scripts easy to read and write – actually these go back to the 8th-9th century with Carolingian minature – punctuation, paragraphs and chapters, lists of contents, running heads, alphabetical indexes, formal logic, references to previous works…) although still almost entirely in the service of commenting on religious literature and Aristotle. But two key inventions – eyeglasses and mechanical clocks, arose in the later 13th century, and were obviously not developed without predecessors – 13th century Latin Europe was full of mills using gears and levers, for example, and Robert Grossteste**, who died in 1253, wrote about the properties of lenses. Another, the musical staff (representing time and variation through time in a two-dimensional figure) goes back to the 11th – as does the university, if we allow Bologna’s somewhat dubious claim to a foundation date of 1085.
*That is, conducted in the medium of Arabic, not necessarily by Arabs.
** Horror of horrors, Grossteste was a bishop, and hence, according to the simplistic atheist view exemplified in the graph, couldn’t possibly have had any proto-scientific interests.
birgerjohansson I too thought of t5he Islamic world and Baghdad and the effect of conservative religion and culture on other civilizations all have had a negative effect. Unless there is some unifying idea or movement or internally generated force there will be no rebirth of United States leadership. I do not see it happening any time soon.
I have been thinking for some time that one of the ideas that has as much negative influence as positive influence on humanity has been nationalism kind of goes with capitalism which has had mixed results as well. The only positive thing I can see as a result of this return to a dark age is that in the interim before a new Top Dog can establish their dominance there might be a slim chance to work out a more “democratic” form of international relations or at least take some steps toward such a thing.
We are but one creature among others on this small speck of solid matter in the vastness all born equal and live a fleetingly short time which we waste with pointless and repetitive conflict aided by the 4 hourseman.
Fine idea but I doubt I will ever see it.
I expect that China will set up and sustain a base on the Moon at least before they get to Mars but they too will have a conservative “reformation” and reject free development of ideas and embrace power and domination as well to be followed by some one else some where else
“Once more unto the breach, my dear friends, ?
The crucial question may be whether this is possible. I’d argue that totalitarian regimes, particularly those focused on a Great Leader (which seems to be an attraction point in their dynamics – see how China has reverted to personal dictatorship, under Xi Jinping, despite apparent efforts to prevent this) have to deny the existence of objective truth*: the Church/Party/Great Leader is by definition infallible, but since in fact this is never the case, the degree of freedom of enquiry and speech which science requires cannot be permitted. It may be possible to maintain it within specific areas, as the post-Stalin USSR did at least in mathematics, physics and rocket science, but nonetheless, there always remains the likelihood of an eventual clash – for example the Great Leader’s favourites in these areas may turn out to be wrong. Notice that the Chinese authorities cannot permit a proper investigation of the origin of the Covid pandemic, because whether the conclusion was that it stemmed from a fault with the operations of the Wuhan labs, or with the trade in wildlife for consumption, it would expose Xi to criticism; they must insist the virus was imported from abroad, either accidentally or maliciously. (Incidentally, the Nazis were in power for too short a time to test this – their progress in rocketry, jet engines and so on relied on pre-Nazi work.)
So while progress in weaponry may continue for a while – possibly even some decades – in a totalitarian state, there must be considerable doubt about how long it can continue – and in the USA, where scientists and researchers have long been accustomed to a wide degree of freedom, the incompatibility may emerge faster than for example in China, where there have not. But since hostility to China, and determination to prevent it displacing the USA as global hegemon, is as central to the Trumpoid project as the destruction of independent science, I suspect that this is a key contradiction within its programme. One possible way to try to resolve it would be to engineer a war with China while the technological and geopolitical advantage still (probably) lies with the USA. But that would be, to say the least, a risky course of action – and the apparent determination to trash alliances with Europe and Canada suggest it’s not currently the intention, which is a (limited) relief.
*Gee, thanks postmodernists!
KG @40,
“the Church/Party/Great Leader is by definition infallible, but since in fact this is never the case, the degree of freedom of enquiry and speech which science requires cannot be permitted.”
That is a really good insight.
On Mars, the announced Chinese intention to send people to orbit the planet by 2050 sounds particularly pointless – what could people possibly do from orbit that couldn’t be done by the kinds of AI likely to be available by then if we don’t have the sort of war-or-climate disaster before then that would make launching anything anywhere unlikely? (I’d say the same about landing people on Mars, but that’s perhaps just slightly less obvious.) Could be intended to divert the Americans from more practical space objectives to a wild dragon-chase. Or maybe Xi wants to welcome the taikonauts back from this absurd prestige project on his 100th birthday in 2052.
I’m not sure about that. Lunar lava tubes might offer the basis for habitats giving reasonable protection from radiation and micrometeorite bombardment. I can envisage an Antarctica-type scientific base a few decades hence, with staff rotated out every six months or a year. Even in the 1970s, I think very useful scientific work could have been done if the Apollo programme hadn’t been Nixed – the first scientifically qualified person on the moon , Harrison Schmitt, landed from Apollo 17, the last flight.
I have always thought of space exploration, from an engineering perspective, as a responsible, carefully designed, long term, incremental, development project. not just the muskrat’s scatterbrained ideas followed immediately by poorly thought out blowing stuff up
As PZ points out that ‘What followed was slow, careful building ot the engineering foundation. The was Mercury, then Gemini — all that docking and maneuvering stuff — and then, finally, Apollo. Everything was planned and tested.’
As I wrote: 30 May 2025 at 11:35 am
Muskrat spacex operates by irresponsible, endless blundering using trial and error instead of using proven design and test methods. They waste BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to launch defective rockets again and again, causing pollution, destroying property, turning their fake ‘city’ into a ‘love canal’ environmental supersite.
But, before all that, people and governments need to prioritize use of financial and environmental resources for the best benefit of the populace, not just a bunch of arrogant, narcissistic, sociopaths with too much money and too few working brain cells. The tRUMP ‘golden dome’ is a CRACKPOT CRACKPIPE idea that is just as likely to become reality as ronny the raygun’s starwars. They are the ones engaging in fraud, waste and abuse http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/linda-pentz-gunter/113984/donald-trump-s-fool-s-gold
PZM,
“We did not and do not have the technology to construct a habitat on the Moon”
Someone explain it to me, we have had a habitat in orbit for 30 years, why can’t we set something similar down on the Moon? The question of course would have to be, what for? Just to be there? Are there minerals and rare earths to be mined? Experiments to be done that can’t be done on Earth? I do believe it is technically possible to have a Moon habitat, but, tell me, why?
I think sending a human to Mars, is something we could achieve now, without any new technology. The one catch is that it would have to be a dead human. And that tells you why it is a dumb aim.
Rorschach @44 – the additional difficulty, with putting a habitat on the Moon, is the length of the supply and communication lines, and that the moon has its own (weak) gravity and the habitat would be static relative to that, which means that some of the systems on the habitat in low earth orbit wouldn’t work on the moon.
Trying to go to Mars without first setting up orbital bases seems to me like trying to climb Everest without base camps. What the fuck is the crazy hurry?
“I do believe it is technically possible to have a Moon habitat, but, tell me, why?”
I can think of two good reasons off the top of my head:
Because if one is built, it shows that it can actually be built, and lessons will be learnt;
Because it can be a great staging post for anywhere else in the Solar System.
(Oh yeah, there’s the idea of mass drivers.
Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress )
raven 10
Deliberately eradicating starlings, which were believed to eat crop seeds though they were beneficial insectivores, didn’t help things.
Jim Brady @47: That’s just another piece of evidence that Phony Stark’s entire “let’s go to Mars” shtick is bullshit. It’s all about selling a fantasy and pretending we won’t have to do any boring expensive stuff to get there. Just another high-tech carny-barker hawking vaporware.
SpaceX is definitely fucking up the Starship program, but to claim it’s a complete failure as a company is bonkers. It achieved a huge reduction in launch costs with the Falcon 9, and no other launch company has replicated that yet. Other launchers exist for strategic reasons: even the US doesn’t want to rely entirely on a single launcher from a single company.
As for a moon base, the question isn’t so much how but why. We put people on the moon and kept them there for a few days using tech from the early 1970s. In the 50 years since, we’ve built a few permanent space stations and kept humans in microgravity for months to over a year. Making a permanent station on the moon would be well within the technical capability of humans today, and within the financial capability of the US, EU, or China.
Now, why would we build a moon base? Nobody’s provided me a particularly useful answer ever. Robots were already sufficiently capable for any conceivable task we actually needed to do, way back 25 years ago. And the idea that it’s a useful stepping stone to Mars fails in that the Moon is further in delta-V terms.
Does that include the fact that the Moon has a shallow gravity well, making launches from its surface easier than from Earth? Its escape velocity is 2.38 km/s, significantly lower than Earth’s 11.2 km/s.
No need to get past an atmosphere, either, so can use catapults for that.
Re the delta-v, I checked with a bubbly bot, and quoth it:
“A direct Earth-to-Mars transfer requires less delta-V than a Moon-to-Mars transfer, primarily because the Moon is still within Earth’s gravity well. Here’s a comparison:
– Earth to Mars: ~3.6 km/s (LEO to Mars transfer) + 0.6 km/s (Mars orbit insertion)
– Moon to Mars: ~2.7 km/s (lunar orbit to Mars transfer) + 0.6 km/s (Mars orbit insertion)
While the Moon-to-Mars transfer requires slightly less delta-V than Earth-to-Mars, the total delta-V for a Moon-based mission must also account for the Earth-to-Moon transfer (~4.1 km/s). This makes a Moon stop inefficient unless leveraging lunar resources for refueling.”
But I get your misunderstanding, numerobis;
“Here’s the delta-V comparison, including Earth-to-Moon:
– Earth to Moon: ~4.1 km/s (LEO to lunar orbit) + 1.6 km/s (lunar orbit to surface)
– Earth to Mars: ~3.6 km/s (LEO to Mars transfer) + 0.6 km/s (Mars orbit insertion)
– Moon to Mars: ~2.7 km/s (lunar orbit to Mars transfer) + 0.6 km/s (Mars orbit insertion)”
Oh, and from NASA back before the Dark Ages:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220005893/downloads/Power%20and%20Energy%20for%20the%20Lunar%20Surface.pdf
The Y axis is still bad on those budget graphs. They don’t start at zero!
beholder:
It’s not bad, it’s optimised for display of change over an interval on the X axis.
As usual, your comment indicates you’ve missed PZ’s bleedingly obvious point is that some sort of quantification is proper. Both axes are magnitude-quantified, so easy enough to extend the displayed coordinates to zero in the up/down direction.
For example, in that first graph, take the interval between 40 and 30, and extend it down to zero.
Redraw at the same scale, including the zero axis.
(It was not that all graphs should start at zero, though that’s your intended quibble)
Not to spam, but there is the ESA:
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Plato
Good, relevant segment on this arvos PBS Newshour here :