Low educational achievement in the sciences

Why is our nation so befuddled by low educational achievement in the sciences?

We are a nation of entrepreneurs and gold miners who don’t care one hoot about coulombs or astrophysics unless we can profit immediately from such endeavor. But we can’t.

Science today is not done in a backyard laboratory like years past. Instead it’s all done at the corporate level using high-tech instruments, and any discoveries that an individual might make, belong to the company, never to the man who discovered it.

There is no ownership of science when every scientific advance ends up in the hands of rich people who use it to charge you more money. And when was the last time somebody invented something to save me money? Nope, the purpose of invention is to corral profit, and if there is no individual profit to be made through science, then there is no reason for people to educate themselves about the subject.

That’s why our government should change its approach to the sciences and seek ways to involve the everyday man on the street.

And what better way to inspire a nation of gold-miners than to tell the population that we’re headed into space, not to find life on Mars or more dirty Moon rocks, but that we’re going into space to prospect the asteroids for gold and silver.

What difference does it make if the nation’s policy-makers fudge-the-truth a bit about the short-term chances of finding such riches and bringing them back to Earth? At least the effort will be more inspiring than the recent whoppers they’ve told about tax cuts for the rich and the necessity of reading Bibles to schoolchildren.

Imagine if people knew that diamonds were available on Neptune. Scientists say there is a possibility. Or imagine if the language of the street held real possibility of gold nuggets in the asteroid belt hidden slightly out of sight among the millions of orbiting rocks. Why the clamor to build rockets and find space suits would challenge an entire world to find a way into space that would rival any Klondike-era promise. The grueling hardship and freezing cold that men endured for a flake of gold in Alaska clearly proves what it takes to push man into space.

Instead the administration is sending men back to the Moon. Yawn. Are they looking for more grey dust or are they just making a government-sponsored luxury liner for eight astronauts to prove that we did it before and we can do it again?

Why are they going there anyway? No matter how we build the spaceship, it’s still unsafe for astronauts because of solar flares from the sun. Those guys will have barely 10 minutes to make it back to the ship before they’re burned to a crisp. Is the nation sending people to the moon just for reality TV, to see if our boys make it?

There is no water on the moon so you can’t even make a mud hut out of the soil. There’s barely any science to be done except to reconfirm what we already know, and sending a rover would be a whole lot cheaper.

Now if they were sending rovers to the moon to look for gold and silver, that would be different. Otherwise, lets face it, people don’t care about esoteric moonshots.

Only when science is ‘real’ do people take notice. For instance the atomic bomb is real and people know it. Boom, you’re gone. That makes sense to people. But far-away galaxies and dark matter and quasars don’t have validity.

It’s time for the lying politicians to do something for the future and tell everybody, ‘thers gold in them-air asteroids.’ Give the people a goal and let them work out the details and I betcha within ten years the Islamists and Christians will be fighting over space robots instead of whose ancient history carries the most import.

If you want to promote science education, then it has to be relevant to the people, and there is no greater relevance than inspiring men to undertake adventure for personal gain.

Gene Haynes