Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Why not?

Eli has never been much of a fan for manned space exploration.  The bunny may have to reconsider.

12 comments:

  1. Also, he still has many photos from space to tweet: https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/334796009173565442

    such as: https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/334796523693039616

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  2. And he has been declared the King of Space!

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/05/chris-hadfield-crowned-king-of-space-by-the-internet.html

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  3. NASA needs to grow up with respect to PR, it's like its run by a bunch of interns.

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  4. So this is one of the important things you dedicate your time to KT?

    Dog likes to bark, but a toothless dog has no bite.


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  5. You mean hassling NASA so much that a Canadian commander decides to go rogue and produce something of value to people who can't recognize value when they see it? NASA would have never permitted this if he had been a US national on the government tit. And of course, a US national would have never done anything like this.

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  6. KT,

    Yawn.

    Did the blood come off your hands from all those innocent deaths that you contributed to over the past few days?


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  7. Yes, o'anon'o'one, the rototiller is a really worm killer. Leaf mulcher. Dirt maker. I'm still keeping hold of my antiques and holding out for Elon Musk's new electric rototiller. New engine here, new belt there, what I need now is a whole new drivetrain. Something innovative.

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  8. ClimateProgress has a post up by a Ryan Koronowski that has a quote from this Canadian spaceman, translated from French:

    "Climate is changing naturally, and perhaps, as a result of what we have done, our influence…. And so maybe we just need to be more responsible in the decisions we make and think of the longer term, more than five years, more than the upcoming elections, more than just one lifespan, and think about our grandchildren and even further."

    Its just inspiring.... Eh?

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  9. Did he say "Climate is changing naturally..." or Climate is changing, naturally,..." Since it's translated from the French and since he may well have used the word "naturally" as meaning "of course".

    I dunno where KT is coming from and I don't know if NASA has a problem with Hadfield tweeting and making music in space, etc. but the Canadian Space Agency is thrilled to bits with the outstanding PR he has done, talking to schoolkids from space, making videos explaining how he eats sleeps and handles other body functions in space, and with almost a million followers on Twitter looking at the magnificent photos he has been tweeting.

    We have now got a new generation of kids dreaming about being astronauts, if our current anti-science government doesn't kill the space program like they've been cancelling other scientific research in Canada.

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  10. I am within 7 degrees of separation from Hadfield because his daughter attends Trinity College Dublin (as I do , part-time)- and he has given Ireland a nice plug in some of his videos, with greeetings in Gaelic etc.

    Wonder if he is related to Peter Hadfield a.k.a Potholer? Probably not.

    Toby

    Toby

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  11. Hadfield is walking the line, speaking as a diplomat. If you think his quote is distorted, here is the full article.

    Further evidence of his position and the way he speaks in public is this video of him speaking from the ISS to students at Canada's University of Waterloo several months ago. Around minute 36 or so, he is asked "are you able to see any evidence of environmental degradation on our planet?"

    He manages to respond without mentioning climate change at all. His #1 point is the human irrigation changes that resulted in the Aral Sea, #2 is its hard to see big cities through their smog, #3 is someone on the ISS is monitoring glaciers in Patagonia, #4 is when a volcano goes off they can see aerosol in the stratosphere.

    The Prime Minister of Canada Hadfield's ultimate funding source, represents the tar sand operators of Alberta. This Prime Minister's government has been criticized by Nature magazine for its "manifest disregard of science". It is Canadian government policy to try to stop Canadian scientists employed by Canada from speaking to the media about their work, i.e. climate change.

    Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon, in Exploring the climate mindscape commented on the situation in Canada re: discussing climate change, in a 2012 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

    "In Canada, increasingly the discourse has identified climate change conversations - and anybody who's concerned about climate change - as unpatriotic, because the Canadian economy is now so closely tied to energy resource extraction that to raise the climate change issue is implicitly and sometimes explicitly a criticism of the oilsands, and the oil sands has become a Canadian third rail.

    The oil-sands interests have a direct line into the Canadian federal cabinet, so we have deeply structurally embedded vested interests that have no interest in a climate change conversation. It's like the issue has disappeared from the national media. We had an absolutely bizarre winter, and nobody talks about it. Among the congnoscenti, it's pretty clear after Durban that nothing's happening, and it's completely rational not to talk about something if you can't do anything about it. To bring it up in a conversation at a dinner party with friends, you're just depressing people."

    Just saying. This is 2013. Scientists such as Hansen are warning we are risking Earth's ability to support life.

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  12. The fact remains is they have been up there for 10 years now and this didn't happen until a Canadian commander took charge of the facility. That tells you something.

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