The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Whilst finishing my lunch, I renewed my acquaintance with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I had forgotten what a great piece of satire it is, although its founder swears with a straight face that it's not satire, but is an actual religion. He points out that there is every bit as much scientific evidence for the existence of the FSM as there is for any other claimed deity. Point well taken. As you might expect, he has the same respect, or lack thereof, for Intelligent Design, at least for intelligent design by a deity other than his Noodly Goodness, the FSM.

If you're killing a few minutes and need a chuckle or two, I suggest you Google Flying Spaghetti Monster and visit the web-site. I get the biggest kick out of reading the hate e-mail. It's amazingly vituperative and equally amazingly misspelled. And it led me to the quote of the day: “ The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ”

-Bertrand Russell

It seems to me that if that's not a basic truth, there probably isn't one. As FSM believers are wont to say, "May the sauce be with you."

Space and The Obama Budget

Dateline Washington, February 2. From the Washington Post News Service:

Obama nixes back-to-the-moon program

The Obama administration is killing Constellation, NASA’s ambitious back-to-the-moon program. …Instead…the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit…

Well, as far as I’m concerned, that’s good news and bad news… and more good news and more bad news. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Good News: We won’t be continuing the work on a new rocket, Ares 1, and a new crew capsule, Orion.

Bad News: We’ve already spent $9 billion on Ares and Orion. To make matters worse, Obama’s budget includes another $2.5 billion to shut the project down!

Good News: Without the new rocket and crew capsule, there’s no way for us to get to the International Space Station (ISS), which is another spectacularly bottomless money pit. The shuttle fleet is being decommissioned and disposed of through a gigantic yard sale, so nobody will be using that to get to the ISS either.

Bad News: In yet another example of backward thinking, the $6 billion commercial space taxi will be good only to do exactly what the shuttle fleet had done: give rides back and forth to low Earth orbit, i.e. the ISS.

The Worst News: There is not a thin dime in the budget for exploration. $17 billion wasted, to go nowhere but to the Hubble and the ISS. Not a single dramatic piece of science has been done in the ISS, the Hubble is on its last legs, and there won’t be any more Mars rovers, unmanned visits to the rest of our solar system, or colonists on the moon or Mars.

Unmanned exploration is the best thing we can do right now. It’s cost-effective, relatively quick, and completely safe. But that won't happen. Clearly, though, our government is on a different page. It seems to me that we’ve somehow decided that our destiny lies here on Earth and nowhere else, and that’s sad. I had hoped for more.