Eric Olsen sent me an email about this post of his concerning a group of students participating in research about Mars.

This is just amazing: direct participation in unique research regarding Mars by students as young as 10! Next time I hear a long diatribe against science and technology, I will point the luddite in the direction of this project. This will generate enthusiasim for science, space, and Mars that will last a lifetime. And of course, participation in and management of the project is made possible by the Internet. This is grassroots dynamism in action. Dig it.

I replied to him something like “…I’ve seen things like it. I’ve actually got mixed feelings about it. I’ll put up a post to explain why.”

I’m spurred to get back to it by Ken Layne’s Fox column yesterday about the NBA versus “football” (soccer to Yanks).

I think that the NBA, more than most sports, is contributing to a national tragedy.

There are millions of kids of school age, particularly in the inner cities.

There are a few hundred openings in the NBA.

I weep when I think about the millions of kids who, instead of studying, spend all their time shooting hoops, hoping to win that lottery, and dressing and talking like their NBA heroes.

How many of them won’t beat the odds, but will instead grow up with no skills except shooting baskets and dribbling? It offers a tantalyzing possibility of life out of the ghetto for a few, but a chimera of false hope to the many.

While I would never propose abolishing the sport, I’m convinced that the world would be a better place without it, at least as it’s presently constituted.

But it’s not the only siren call to false dreams–there’s another.

When I was a child, we were preparing to send astronauts to the Moon. I remember sitting in my pajamas, watching John Glenn’s rocket lift off. In school, we were told that in the mid-seventies, we would have lunar bases, and in the mid-eighties, we would send people to Mars. We were told that if we studied our math and science, that we might be one of the ones to go.

It was a scam, worse, in some ways, than the NBA.

There are only a couple of hundred slots available for astronauts, and (particularly given the reduced crew size on the current space station), it’s possible that some of them will never fly, even after selection and training. Based on NASA’s current minimalist plans, the chances of any of those schoolkids getting into space is about one in a hundred thousand. It’s a lottery with very long odds.

Of course, I’m glad that kids are learning science, and it’s exciting to see them actually able to participate in real space science. And at least, unlike the failed NBA contestant, they’ll have a marketable skill from it when they grown up.

But it simultaneously frustrates me that this is the only way we’re teaching them to think about space–as something that’s only about science (thus turning off those who don’t think they’re good at science), and that it’s something that only government agencies like NASA can do for them.

I’d like to see schools have design competitions for space hotels or lunar resorts, or missions to mine asteroids, or divert them, or build solar power satellites out of them.

And I’d like to see private sponsors, like Hilton, or Bechtel sponsor them, so that we can broaden kids’ minds to think about space in a context other than science, and NASA. I’d like to see Space Camps that don’t just (or even) simulate Shuttle missions, but that provide exposure to a variety of activities in space, that might be done privately.

And mostly, I’d like to see policies put in place that will encourage all of these things and others to happen rather than, as is presently the case, to discourage it, so that the space dreams of today’s youth won’t be betrayed, as ours were.