In a story filed – ominously – under U.S. Science and Austerity, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee asks “Will Tight Budgets Sink NASA Flagships?” (Science, November 11, 2011):
The 2012 budget request for NASA paints a far less rosy picture of the next 5 years than did the president’s previous budget, and the outcome for 2013 is expected to be even worse once Congress completes its work. NASA’s situation is aggravated by the rising cost of the James Webb Space Telescope. One casualty may be the $1.5 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The future is not bright for planetary scientists, either. (You have to pay to read the article, at present.)
We’ve been seeing a decided drift toward crackpot cosmologies in recent decades, and – despite disappointing crackpot results from the Large Hadron Collider – we’re not sure if anything will change.
To understand, you had to be alive in the 1960s, when exploring the universe meant going somewhere and doing something, not sitting around wondering if we live in a giant hologram.
The latter fits in with the new perception we noted earlier: “Science” now means “Maybe we live in a giant hologram.” “Religion” means “It turns out that even water is fine-tuned for life.” Good thing the ID community is said to be firmly on the side of “religion.”
Turned out “religion” ended up in charge of facts, if facts matter.
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