Why Yes, We Scientists Have A Death Wish And We Are Taking You With Us

I have just discovered a group on Facebook entitled 'Don't Bomb The Moon'. Under the elegant summation "NASA is planning to bomb the moon... join this group to stop it happening" aided by the haiku-like sparsity and poetic licence of:

The moon controls all the tides and time... hitting it with a bomb could be really dangerous.. join to help!!!!

...you could be forgiven for thinking there was something worth worrying about. If, that is, you were convinced that all the scientific minds at NASA, and their academic consultants, were out to get their measurements whether or not it involved imperilling the human race. I mean, even assuming they'd be able to analyse them in the absence of civilisation as we know it, where would they publish?

Or is it that these guys think that NASA hasn't considered the possibility that 'the moon controls all the tides'? Some professor at NASA is going to sit up and go 'Gosh, Joe from North Carolina points out that the moon interacts with the Earth! Stop everything, we mustn't touch it in case we knock the planet's orbit out of whack!' He then mutters, as an aside to his secretary, 'Send that man a t-shirt as a gesture of thanks. Then have him kidnapped and kept in a Cape Canaveral basement as our Senior Plans-A-Four-Year-Old-Could-See-Though Checker.'

Celestial attacks for fun and profit

Oh, and if you were wondering how NASA managed to obtain funds for a 'bomb the moon' mission, they cunningly dressed it up as http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite1. A rather exciting duo consisting of one rocket (not, actually, a bomb, but I guess 'don't crash into the moon' was a bit less snappy) which will do a kamikaze dive into a permanently shaded-crater, and a probe which will make a leisurely descent through the debris checking for ice. If we find ice, of course (why yes for these purposes I am now a member of NASA), this raises a number of intriguing possibilities:

• Research base on the moon for low-g, vacuum or lower escape velocity experiments
• Staging post on the moon for longer hops, allowing caches to be established
• Moon mining, either of minerals using ice as supplies for any crew, or of ice itself — could be a pressing problem as global warming sets in, as seems inevitable since noone gives a damn
• The capture of wild soup dragons and maintenance of a breeding population to provide succour to the hungry
• Other things I probably haven't thought of.

Of course, people did the same thing in the hype before the LHC power-up. Again, I'm not sure whether they thought scientists were not bothered by black holes, immune to them, or just not capable of getting their facts right.

Well, anyway, the money would be better spent on X

Once reassured we're not all going to die, people's thoughts turn, naturally, to their wallets. At this point they suddenly become very concerned with government spending and insist the $2 mil should go on healthcare or something humanitarian. Commendable, but unlikely, given that governments spend money on a lot of things and any spare funds rarely get relocated into improving health services, since this is a bottomless pit for mazuma. Give people enough beds, and they want enough medication. Give them enough medication, they want preventative care and gym passes. Eventually you'll have a super-healthy population, and then where will your alcohol and tobacco revenues come from?

Even if the money could be diverted directly into humanitarian causes, once your population has a decent living standard2, there's a lot to be said for scientific programmes. First of all, they have incidental benefits to People At Large: for example, in computing, electronics, materials science and, um, medicine. Secondly, they encourage people to study science, which makes the economy grow (particularly good if you're a country a bit low on natural resources). Thirdly, and most importantly, they give people hope and ambition and dreams.

They expand the sum total of humanity's knowledge and... you know what, if you have to have me explain it, you'll never know. Try watching videos of the moon landing and see if you can work your way up to a sense of wonder.

1. At least, this is the story they span this administration. Before that they just said the moon was in league with terrorists and got a blank cheque. ←

2. As a start, you could try not letting the poor die. ←