Puhhhhhhhlease about NASA “ignoring” the potential for life on Enceladus. Nobody expected to find water vulcanism there. The Cassini mission team is doing its best to make the most of every pass of Enceladus with the instruments available. A followup mission to Saturn to focus on Titan and Enceladus is surely forthcoming and moving way up the list.

These missions aren’t built overnight, you know. Plus, we don’t have engines that instantly take us to Saturn like the old intro sequence to TNG. It just ain’t so.

Commodore Lurker is a former soldier who held a rifle in his hands in hostile territory. THX-1138 is a former US Marine combat vet. And Doug, who just posted from Kuwait on the “Calander” thread is on his way to Afghanistan.

I’m quite sure all three of us agree we’d much rather have the robots do all the warfighting.

If we go to war with Iran, you should be glad about the robots. Because, if you’re under 32 years of age YOU WILL BE DRAFTED!

Wake up kid, let the bots to the killing, you’ll be glad they did.

And that my friends is a . . .
Recloaking.

7. “…Or maybe the implications scare a bible-thumping Republican administration? I’m not trying to insult anyone’s religious beliefs…I’m just curious.”

I think the more likely explanation is the enormous cost involved in a follow-up mission. This isn’t to say that NASA or some other earth space agency won’t revisit Enceledus in the future but look at where we are currently in space exploration. The space shuttle (long overdue for replacement) is scheduled for retirement soon and NASA has nothing in production currently to replace it. That means NASA astronauts will have to hitch rides with the Russians for the next few years to the space station. We haven’t been back to the moon in decades because of costs. In fact, humans haven’t been out more than 100 miles or so beyond earth’s surface in all that time since. Truthfully, the American public is much more willing to spend billions on fixing the problems here on earth than spending billions on science.

To assume that the religious right is behind some conspiracy to roadbloak the search for life in space is giving those guys far more power than they have. If this were true it would be more likely that our conservative-minded and openly religious right-wing president would never have proposed a permanent moon base (which he did) and would’ve instead done something tantamount to shutting down NASA, JPL and SETI.

As to NASA “completely ignoring it”, this news just came out! It’s not like we’ve known for years of the potential for life on Enceledus. I think more money has been bet on life on Jupiter’s moon Europa until these new findings came back. And we still haven’t been back to Europa yet (though it is being discussed; again, the cost is considerable).

In the end, when life is found elsewhere in the galaxy in whatever form, there won’t be any denying or hiding of the fact. Just like cloning, it will become a huge debate with the right scrambling to stall further study, but give it a generation or two and that short-sighted, small-minded clique will have to accept reality. Then the few remaining disbelievers will be just like those rare wackos who claim we never landed on the moon in the first place!

So when do we start building battlestars?