Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good

That's the title of a post over at Marginal Revolution, a very good blog.

And yet ...

Well, let's read down a bit more until we get to the video embedded in the article. The still shows a title for the video segment: "Asteroids to hit planet earth?" (I love the "planet" in that.)

And then let's read the teaser from the original news segment the video is drawn from: "NASA lacks funding to monitor asteroids that are potential threat." And Alex Tabarrok, the author of the post also reminds us, "Moreover, detection is only the first step towards deflection."

Why is it that every new "public good" identified by scientists turns out to be a giant sinkhole for taxpayer money?

Today, for example, we just learned that here in Canada we have millions of surplus H1N1 flu shots sitting around. A scientist-driven political panic led to their being ordered and now they are just hazardous waste.

No comments:

Post a Comment