Oil and NASA's mission statement change

Geology is a developing intellectual field and many mistakes are made about events that made the surface of Earth as it now is. But, unlike model based studies very little effort is used trying to make reality fit the model. If CD is a belief system like BB of QM how do you see stratification matchups on all the land masses? There is very solid data having nothing to do with models that geology is based on. As for iceages they are climate events that are writen in the geological data. These kind details come alive when good rock readers reveal them. You can call this tea leaf reading I suppose but it makes sense to me.

Jim wrote, 10 Aug ". . . If CD is a belief system like BB of QM how do you see stratification matchups on all the land masses? There is very solid data having nothing to do with models that geology is based on."

There is so much geological strata complexity almost everywhere. This makes it deceptively easy to make those so-called "matches" along so-called Gondwanaland "sutures". The Jig-saw puzzle pattern of Gondwanaland is similarly unconvincing . . . when one thinks of all the CD contradictions.

I have been immunised against CD by such thoughts, starting with my "rough polar congruency", so I can see this. Others, seduced by the CD Sirens, hooked on the Siren's Song, cannot. My resistance has been confirmed by innumerable prediction-verifications, nearly all of them experienced privately unfortuneately. The biggest ones are recounted in my ebook.

I think what this Topic and most of this thread have been alluding to is that Science and its models are not as scientific as they ought to be.

But what do we and others mean by ¡°scientific"? My experience of Science administration is that Science administrators don¡¯t attach the same meaning to the word ¡°scientific¡± as we do. Administrators serve governments, corporations and so on and are well placed to hijack Science and have generally done so. ¡°He who pays the piper calls the tune¡±.

I mean scientific in the Popperian sense. Karl Popper wrote that Scientific theories are always approximations to ultimate Truth that we can never really prove, whereas we can absolutely disprove them. So much of our scientific effort should be concentrated on disproof, trying to disprove/contradict the latest best theory, as 20th Century Physics addressed SR, GR, QM, with possible contradictions appearing only recently. Hence my respect for contemporary Physics.

CD hasn¡¯t been addressed in anything like the same Popperian way as Physics, except by me and a few other lone operators. Hence my the CD Contradictions subtitle of my ebook and my complaints about Geology, a good example of that problem we have been alluding to, as I have explained in my ebook¡¯s paper 5.4.

Global Warming is another of these hijackings. There has been too much power and money involved, too much loss of power and money implied by Global Warming (GW) to simply wait for it to become really scientific, by waiting for H2O cloud effects to be adequately modelled and so on. I can understand this. Socio-political values are pre-eminent. It's as simple as that.

But the fact that Science was hijacked in the same way over those WMDs that were supposed to be in Iraq should make us alarmed. Hence that poor British scientific advisor's suicide.

Some prominent GW Environmentalists have become angry, abusive. I wonder where it will stop, and how much Science will be set back, if Global Warming becomes Global Cooling in the next iteration of those models and/or in fact.

And what about this thread¡¯s, emanuel's Topic, NASA¡¯s mission being turned away from the Earth? We¡¯ve been ¡°beating around the bush¡± a bit, but I¡¯d say, ¡°reading between the lines¡±, that we have more or less been saying that this may not matter.

NASA is an Administration and it¡¯s very important that organisations concentrate on whatever they are world-class competitors at addressing. It may be that other institutions are better suited to Earth studies now that the Moon and Mars are being seriously considered for human colonisation.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It may be that other institutions are better suited to Earth studies now that the Moon and Mars are being seriously considered for human colonisation.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

It's not colonization that they are considering. It's resource extraction. And the reason I posted these two articles (don't forget the other thread) is because they demonstrate to me how science is getting side-swiped by politicians. Actually-existing science is seemingly no longer about expanding our awareness of the universe, but about serving power. The political powers that fund NASA have recognized that oil and natural gas extraction has peaked, and they want NASA to figure out how to import more carbon-based energy from other places in the solar system. My whole point here is that these very important decisions (decisions regarding the allocation of funds to NASA, and thus where the intellectual energy of a great number of excellent scientists will be spent) are being made by politicians, and politicians are often short-sighted. Their motives are not always pure.

The notion that a significant contributor to global warming may be the human burning of carbon fuels may be debatable, but if true it is serious, and re-directing NASA's goals towards finding out how to load up the atmosphere with even more CO2 may not be in the best long-term interest of anyone.

Emanuel

My original 30 Jul 2006 post to this thread is relevant to Emanuel's ". . . The political powers that fund NASA have recognized that oil and natural gas extraction has peaked, and they want NASA to figure out how to import more carbon-based energy from other places in the solar system . . .", particularly its:

". . . in the absence of great breakthroughs in spacecraft propulsion systems, that [extra-terrestrial hydrocarbon] resource is likely to be used beyond the Earth [and not imported]. Earth's running out of oil might thus be expected to be an important factor greatly boosting space colonisation . . ."