In its latest fund-raising ploy, NASA claims the ability to predict an event that will definitely happen ten years from now:
NASA's top scientist predicts that we'll find signs of alien life by 2025, with even stronger evidence for extraterrestrials in the years that follow.
"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years," NASA chief scientistEllen Stofan said Tuesday during a panel event on water in the universe.
"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added. "In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road."
Others at the panel agreed.
"It's definitely not an if, it's a when," said Jeffery Newmark, NASA's interim director of heliophysics.
I'm curious. Is this what passes for science among physical scientists nowadays? "Our statistical models tell us that something is probably true — based purely on extrapolation and not on any observations, mind you — but we'll predict that it will definitely happen within ten years!"
Science has nothing to do with it, of course, since these little pronouncements coming out of NASA are just attempts to keep the government agency "relevant."
With the long-outdated Space Shuttle program, which was still using 1970s technology until the very end, now defunct, NASA is obsessing about discovering life on distant planets that we will never reach and on other forms of deep space exploration. NASA also has a habit of spending more money and killing more astronauts in recent decades than the Russians.
Meanwhile, humanity still knows next to nothing about the effect of space travel on human bodies, nor has humanity developed common, economical, or reliable space travel, even for low orbit. Mars (like Venus) is still almost completely unexplored. There's nothing going on on the moon. But, NASA goes on and on about alien life because that's what grabs headlines and helps the agency's PR mission.
It's hard to not see a comparison with the transcontinental railroad, which was hailed as a wonderful advancement in technology and ingenuity, but in truth, it was never economical or widely used (firms preferred ocean shipping and the Panama Canal Railway) and the private sector did the same thing more cheaply once it made sense to do so — decades later. The US government claimed that without the US government, the Pacific and the Atlantic would never be bridged by rail by private interests. The Great Northern Railway proved them wrong.
To make the case further, NASA falls back on the old tried and true Tang argument. That's the claim that everyone benefits from the technological byproducts of the taxpayer-funded space program. "Sure," NASA says "we forced you to pay for us via taxes, but now you have great stuff like Tang (or nylon, microwaves, etc) that you wouldn't have had otherwise." Peter Klein destroyed this argument back in 2012.
With NASA abandoning practical space exploration, it falls to the private sector, which is now in the early stages or growing real knowledge about space exploration. What the cheapest ways of reaching low orbit? What are the effects of weightlessness? Can we expand working knowledge of space flight beyond a tiny circle of military-trained astronauts? In other words, the small incrementalist approach is what will make spaceflight something other than a governmental hobby. NASA scientists should be free to speculate about the future of extra-terrestrial life at junkets. They should just do it on their own dime.
