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Links: MarsRepublicans oppose NASA cuts Roop, ’11 (Lee, “Most Republicans in House Opposed Vote to Cut NASA Money”, http://blog.al.com/space-news/2011/02/most_republicans_in_house_oppo.html, 7/25/11) HUNTSVILLE, AL - House Republicans in Washington opposed Wednesday's vote to move money from NASA to a community policing program, a Republican freshman from a NASA district pointed out today. U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, who represents a district that is home to Marshall Space Flight Center, also says "the House got it backwards" with Wednesday's vote. The House voted 228-203 to move $298 million from NASA's budget this year to COPS, a community policing program. The measure was introduced by Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York. Republicans cast 169 votes against the Weiner amendment and 70 for it. But it passed when 158 Democrats voted yes. Democrats opposing the move totaled 34. "If the White House had argued for NASA among House Democrats, we would have protected NASA from this cut," Brooks said. The amendment would change NASA funding this fiscal year, because it is attached to a continuing budget resolution the House is drafting. Such a resolution is necessary because no 2011 budget has passed Congress so far. Meanwhile, the 2012 budget battle revved up this week with President Barack Obama's proposal to level-fund NASA next year. Wednesday's House vote was one of many amending the budget resolution that could face a final House vote later today or tonight. But that isn't the end of the process. The Senate will then have its vote and any disagreements will need to be settled. Brooks said the challenge is to persuade some in Congress to fund the things that are the federal government's responsibility, such as NASA and defense, while putting the responsibility for things such as police on the state and local governments where he says they belong. "Hopefully, the Senate will fix this error," Brooks said of the House vote. Bipartisan opposition against Obama's budget cut for space
For years, NASA's SETI program was funded in that way -- out of discretionary slush funds. Perhaps it would have been better to keep SETI on that basis, because each time serious funding was granted by Congress, it initiated a disruptive process characterized by gearing up, national spotlight, backlash, and premature termination. SETI was a kind of lightning rod for America's unhappiness about its social conditions. The programs themselves were always modest in their cost. Even the officially-funded ones were slated to spend only a few million dollars per year. Everyone knows you can't buy very much with that kind of money - either in social welfare, education, or infrastructure. Yet when presented with images of what these dollars would purchase in terms of large radiotelescopes searching the skies for extraterrestrial civilizations, people were easily persuaded that this was a luxury, given the broad spectrum of society's crucial needs. It is probably the high visibility and the exotic nature of SETI that make it such an attractive target for congressional demagogues wishing to score points by showing how they were cutting out useless government projects. Link- Plan unpopular- politicians love cutting SETI funds. Cokinos 11 (Christopher Cokinos, University of Arizona English Professor, June 24, 2011, The Plain Dealer, cleveland.com, “Funding Cuts to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the death of curiosity: Christopher Cokinos”, http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/06/funding_cut_to_the_search_for.html) In a country where some corporations do not pay taxes, millionaires get farm subsidies and a presidential candidate can run up a half-million-dollar tab at Tiffany's, we're deferring an attempt to answer one of our most enduring (and least inexpensive to answer) questions: Are we alone in the universe? Certainly we don't cotton to the idea of being alone. We yearn for the big signal from the stars, the cosmic hail. When Stephen Hawking warns us against contacting E.T. because we might end up being invaded by Klingons, we argue about it around the water cooler. We thrill to "Contact" and "District 9" and play video games featuring tentacled aliens. We tune in when Carl Sagan and Timothy Ferris explain outer space on TV. Yet we're surprisingly unwilling to put our money where our imaginations want to roam. News that the Allen Telescope Array is "hibernating" -- a curiously biological term for shutting down 42 radio telescopes designed to listen for signs of life from other worlds -- raises questions about our true commitment to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The National Science Foundation recently slashed the University of California's budgets for the Allen array by 90 percent. This, along with state cuts, has left UC Berkeley, which operates the Hat Creek, Calif., array in the Cascade Mountains, and the private SETI Institute, which conducts searches, in the lurch. For now, the phone is off the hook -- as it was in 1994 when Sen. Richard Bryan, Democrat of Nevada, derided NASA's "Martian chase" and successfully shut down its SETI -- "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" -- program. It would cost each U.S. taxpayer just 3 cents a year to fund the Allen array, according to SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak. But in this political environment, direct taxpayer support is unlikely, so the SETI Institute is trying to raise $5 million to reboot the array. Donors such as Microsoft's Paul Allen stepped up after NASA's project died; it's for him that the array is named. In fact, SETI's best hope may be the private sector. Privately financed astronomy is nothing new. In the 18th and 19th centuries -- the heyday of private observatory building -- such work was in part spurred by interest in alien life. It's an interest that, despite present budget tribulations, runs deep. As scholars Steven Dick and Michael Crowe have shown, we can trace the idea of an infinite universe full of other worlds to pre-Socratics such as Democritus. This view was marginalized by more famous philosophers, such as Aristotle, and, later, by a church fearful of anything that threatened the notion of a unique God-Earth relationship. But by the Victorian era, there were serious discussions not only about a lively universe -- which was widely assumed -- but about whether Christ might have to be endlessly reincarnated on a "plurality of worlds." That thorny issue eventually faded from view and new takes on the question of cosmic life emerged, such as whether there were canals on Mars. Arguably, the first organized SETI took place in the 1920s when astronomer David Todd persuaded the U.S. military to observe radio silence across North America while he and others listened to the Red Planet. More famously, pioneering radio astronomer Frank Drake turned a big dish in West Virginia toward the stars in 1960. SETI has continued, in fits and starts, ever since. Still, while the public imagines a universe of star cruisers and galactic cyberwebs, budget-cutting bureaucrats find even partial grants for SETI an easy target. Did you write your representative or senator when the SETI funding was slashed? I guess we prefer our aliens to announce themselves without effort on Netflix. So it's time for more Paul Allens -- Carnegies of the cosmos -- to step into the void left by the cuts. And there's not a moment to waste. NASA's Kepler space telescope has identified some 1,200 potential planets outside our solar system -- dozens of which will be the size of Earth. Some of those could sustain liquid water. It's a big leap from puddles to technological civilizations, but if we don't look, we'll never know if the leap's been made. And only penny-pinching solipsists with streaming video could be happy in such cosmic ignorance. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.85 Mb. Share with your friends:
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