never ask a biologist to do an engineer’s job

If only space exploration advocates had a nickel for every time they’ve heard the notion of going to other worlds and settling them at some point in the future disparaged with the “space travel is too expensive, and besides, all those places are really hostile to humans, and dry and boring anyway” excuse we could fund NASA for the next several decades. This time, the aforementioned naysaying technique was employed by PZ, who decided to compare traveling to other worlds with anything other than robots or the random flag planting mission for a headline story on the news undertaken by some governments, with fantasy novels.

… But also forget about colonizing planets in our solar system: not only is it ridiculously expensive just to put a human being on another planet, it isn’t even an attractive proposition. […] I love to read space operas, but face it, it’s about as realistic as your goofiest high fantasy novel with elves and gnomes and magic swords. It’s not going to happen, ever, but it is still fun to dream.

Gee, now those are the words of an open-minded scientist who really wants to push our technology, help us advance everything from energy generation, to infrastructure components, to computing and engineering for decades to come. Because clearly folks, once we set our sights at something that’s hard to achieve, the best thing to do is to shrink from the challenge and give up, saying that it’s really not important, or realistic, or even fun, just like those sour grapes on the vine just out of our reach. So let’s not find ways to tackle the high cost of space travel, discard the potential ideas of how to make space travel into a business, abandon even the current lackluster space exploration plans, and certainly don’t go back to the Moon to learn how to survive in tough alien environments while still being close to home, then bring the newfound knowledge back to solve construction problems in the Third World or license the necessary inventions for profit. Because if we just can’t do something now, primarily out of our laziness and shortsightedness, it could never, ever happen.

Yes, there certainly are times when people propose grandiose projects that simply aren’t practical in the long term, but when it comes to space travel, we often give up the minute we start listing what we’ll need to actually accomplish something significant. Unless of course it becomes a matter of national pride and politicians in charge decide to fund engineers and scientists for all the wrong reasons, and accomplish something great without actually meaning to do so. But if the kind of attitude PZ is espousing here was common, we would’ve never landed on the Moon or even developed the ability to travel into space in the first place. You know, since the whole concept would’ve been just too hard and too expensive right at the moment someone thought of the whole thing and because we still didn’t quite have the technology to do it a few decades or so afterward…