From Distant Planets to the Deep Blue Sea

I have long argued that not only should our government fund scientific research, we should demand it do so. I need not go into details -- you can find my arguments here and here and here and especially here -- but let me just say that science always pays off in the long run. Always. And many times in the short run as well. Even in hard economic times, we have to fund research. If we don't, we make things that much harder on ourselves later. Now please, don't tell me we can't afford anything for science, or that I'm asking too much. This argument is not so clearly black and white: I am not saying we can afford to fund everyone's research at the levels we do during economic boom times, of course. But unless this country (and in fact the whole world) slides into a vast depression, then we certainly do need to keep some money flowing, even if only at a tighter level, into research. We don't know what major advance will come out of some medical research, or engineering research, or even space research. So even if we restrict the flow, it's important to keep at least some flow. This does mean some research may get funded at the expense of something else, but the last thing we need is squabbling inside the fence of science between projects that are all facing cuts. Doing that poisons the scientific community. And doing it in public is ugly and extremely bad form, since that cannot help but make the public turn against science in one form or another. That's why I am particularly unhappy with an editorial in the Huffington Post by Amitai Etzioni. It's an attack on NASA, set up as a false dichotomy between space research and ocean research, and uses narrow-minded opinions that I don't think reflect those of the American public. To start off, Etzioni complains that the Kepler mission -- designed to look for the signatures of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars -- is essentially a waste of money: