David Brin The Large Underground Xenon experiment looks directly for the invisible particles thought to make up dark matter. Its truly hard, since its been calculated a dark matter particle might pass through a block of lead 200 light years long with only a 50:50 chance of interacting with the normal atoms (except via gravity.) This is a nice piece of science journalism… though Id have liked a paragraph about how they subtract the inevitable flashes from Neutrino hits. wired/wiredscience/2013/10/lux-dark-matter/ The lesson? Science is getting harder! Weve plucked a lot of the low hanging fruit. return on Investment thats well beyond 5 years is not the sort of thing any corporation would invest in. So, we decide to do these great things together. Seriously. I defy you to find more spectacular efficiency and exceeded expectations than exists in a wide swathe of government funded scientific research which, with a tiny sliver of the overall budget, laid the groundwork for vast industries by inventing jet planes, helicopters, satellites, telecom, pharmaceuticals and genomics, and um… the Internet? But lets make it simpler by focusing on NASA. Can YOU land a spectacular roving science lab on Mars, at the end of a winch, from a rocket, from a parachute, from an aerobraking shell that hit the eye of a needle, like firing a bullet into a specific window in Manhattan… from Los Angeles? Id pay ten times the share of my taxes that NASA gets, just to watch that happen again. When Curiosity landed... I went to the nearest window -- as in that movie NETWORK -- and I screamed: I AM A MEMBER OF A CIVILIZATION THAT DOES SHIT LIKE THIS! What? You mean you didnt do that? Really?
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 19:46:53 +0000
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