[meteorite-list] "Meteorite" for $7.1 billion per gram!

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jan 26 17:15:57 2006
Message-ID: <75.543d48fe.310aa330_at_aol.com>

Marcin writes:
>Think what could be done in Earth for that
>ammount of money (except next War ofcourse).
>Thousands of people die becouse have no food. Lets think about this when
>next time we look on photo of microscopic grain in a gel :-|
 
Marcin, a lot of responsibility does come with NASA's territory. Not a
whole lot could be accomplished by spending $200,000,000 on Earth, though.
People spend this kind of money every day, and the change is imperceptible in the
large scheme of human events. There is a natural limit to the resources on
earth, do you think the real solution is to spend money or to think out of the
box? Is the real solution jamming more and more in the same place as waste
only accumulates daily and resources are continually dwindled?
 
Don't forget, in economics "spending money" is very different for the social
good than for an individual's personal benefit. The money is still in the
economy and not destroyed, it only changes hands, and thus is still available
for giving. The grains collected by Stardust were obtained at $0.00 per
gram. The numbers of $ really are irrelevant to your argument. It just passes
money around from one gear in the society to another - in this case the
receivers are employee scientists so they don't add to the starving ranks of the
world and be forced to work in a non-unionized sweat shop and then get their
jobs sent overseas to feed the overseas middle class and perhaps corruption.
This is a collective benefit giving handouts to the scientists that preserves
a culture of technological advancement which today has even started to
outsource major portions of the missions to European countries and keep their
scientists from the breadlines as well.
 
The end result maintains the earthly culture of keeping a bunch of employed
scientists and engineering geniuses on call and hard at work, reaching for
the stars. It bolsters a society benefiting from everything this culture grabs
from outside of our stagnating terrarium and knowledge base, and keeps
afloat an industrial behemoth which can support novel and cutting edge
advancements for the whole of human societies, tending to advance human rights and
respect. That same industry would degenerate into a bunch of dejected scientists
and has-been high-tech companies that would vanish into hungry oblivion
themselves, without this support. Somewhat like Katovice was 30 years ago.
 
That sadly won't mean much to someone who keels over in hunger tomorrow.
You can alleviate his problem as Mother Teresa sagely advises "If you can't
feed 100 people, the just feed one.":
_http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CTDSites_
(http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CTDSites)
_http://hunger.stanford.edu/help_body.html_
(http://hunger.stanford.edu/help_body.html)
 
Best wishes, Doug
 
 
Received on Thu 26 Jan 2006 05:12:00 PM PST