Is Space Exploration a Waste of Money?

If asked if space exploration should continue, most Americans would give an immediate response either in favor of continuing or in favor of ending space exploration. A common response would be that space exploration is a waste of money. An average American, uneducated on the subject, might believe that the government is wasting billions of dollars on the research that has no value. Someone strange to the subject might say that a space shuttle goes up once in a while and that is about all that happens. Research is ongoing and continues when there are no shuttles being launched. This also costs the government money. Does the extreme cost of space exploration make sense?

One argument is that the government is wasting money on the research not being used on Earth. Actually, the money goes to workers and scientists that support National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) missions, and goes to major companies that play important roles in major sectors of the US economy. Boeing is a partner of NASA for aircraft, the same company that makes commercial aircraft for the airline industry.

Another benefit to continuing space exploration is the many technologies it provides. The artificial heart resulted from experiments on the space shuttle. The handheld Jaws of Life used to save victims from car accidents resulted from the system used to separate the space shuttle from its booster rockets. Insulation in homes that keeps them warm and energy efficient is based on the technology used to insulate the space shuttle.

There are direct benefits to the economy provided by NASA missions as well as those technologies. These advances are found in food, building materials, medical procedures and the vehicles we drive. While it can be proven that billions of dollars that could be used elsewhere is being spent on space exploration, the benefits it provides outweigh the terrible aspects. As a matter of fact, the money spent helps to improve the quality of our lives.

The Next Supersonic Airliner

When the last Concorde, a famous airplane model in the 1980s and 1990s, touched down at London's Heathrow Airport in November 2003, the first era of supersonic passenger flight came to an end.

Although Concorde was a beautiful of design and engineering, it was also many things we don't want in a modern jetliner. It was deafeningly noisy, for fuel, and day-to-day profits could not keep up with long-termcosts.

The second supersonic age

The idea that a battery powered aircraft could generate enough thrust to push it through the sound barrier at first seems Luke Workman believes he's the man to put supersonic airliners back in the sky. Luke  lithium batteries for electric vehicles. He's come up with a system that, he says, could be used to build clean, quiet and profitable airplanes.

One major problem with electric aircraft is the weight of the batteries. Luke Workman's system  this by making the aircraft itself part of the battery.

His" axial stack'" method proposes building the layers of aluminum and copper, found inside the battery, into the wings of supersonic aircraft. The battery effectively becomes a structural part of the plane. These metal elements make up the bulk of the weight of a lithium battery. If the plane is built from them, the additional weight load from adding batteries is vastly .

The bigger the better

Concorde was small. It only had 100 seats. That made it expensive to fly. Luke Workman says his battery could be the path toward much bigger, viable, supersonic airplanes. The bigger this battery gets, the more efficient it becomes.

Luke Workman ishis design could reinvent supersonic air travel for the 21^st century. However, he's not about to register the intellectual property with a view to making a fast buck.

英语中有句话:"You are what you do. ", 谈谈你对此的理解，并用举例的方法来论证你的观点。

By 2050, climate change and its reality will no longer be up for debate. The subtle signs we're starting to see around us will be more pronounced, scientists say, and their impact will be easy_ (spot) in everyday life.

Weather in 2050: Hot, Hotter, Hottest

"The global climate is like an aircraft carrier; turning it around is slow," says Julien Emile-Geay, an associate professor of Earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and (stick) in a very tough place in 2050. "Sciences." If we don't start now, we

The 20th century was Earth's (warm) period in nearly 2,000 years, he says.

Data he examined from a wide variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings and coral reefs, show that the warming trend (begin) after the Industrial Revolution—the 1850s. For most of the world, the record-hit temperatures __ (come) within the past 100 years. He agrees that  the trend continues, sea level rise and droughts could make areas of the planet unsafe. Refugees leaving their homes for loveable climates could lead to geopolitical instability.

Environment in 2050: Something in the Air

When temperatures rise, does" bad" ozone. Don't confuse this ozone with the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, shields Earth from the sun's radiation. Bad ozone forms at ground level when pollutants from cars and other industrial sources react to sunlight.

"In part due to climate change, many of the benefits that we have achieved are quickly being undone," says Bento, who recently published research showing a rollback of vehicle emissions standards would be dangerous." We have arrived at a point we would have to rely on adaptation for us to prevent major damage. "

Hollywood's theory that spontaneously(自发地)evil machine consciousness will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that AI may become incredibly good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 legendary mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics, put it this way: "If we use, to achieve our purposes, mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere.., we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire."

A machine with a specific purpose has another property, which we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this trait is not innate, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the sole directive of fetching coffee, it will have a bonus to ensure success by disabling its own off switch or even remove anyone who might interfere with its mission. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super-intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.

The prospect of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super-intelligent machines.

Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super-intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not feasible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just" switch them off" as if super-intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super-intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, renowned physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with utter confidence," Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. "On September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction.