impassioned plea to President Obama<\/a>.\u00a0 I fully support everything Zack says in this article.\u00a0 I have written to the White House in support of this plea.\u00a0 I think it is probably the single most important thing that we, as a culture, could do.<\/p>\nHowever, I have to be pessimistic here.\u00a0 The space race that inspired a generation of scientists, engineers, and children wasn’t just a grand research project.\u00a0 It wasn’t done because it was hard or because it was cool (though it was both).\u00a0 It was done because the Soviet Union was the great evil and they had a satellite and a man in space before we did.<\/p>\n
Kennedy campaigned on being superior to the Soviets.\u00a0 The Apollo program was in doubt (with NASA requesting a 30% budget increase) in 1960.\u00a0 But then, Yuri Gagarin flew in space April 12, 1961.\u00a0 The next day, many congressmen pledged support for a revitalized US space program.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the point is that there was a common enemy back then.\u00a0 The soviets.\u00a0 Now, the common enemy is science.\u00a0 And the money (and therefore political power) is mostly on the wrong side.\u00a0 Religions don’t like science.\u00a0 The oil industry doesn’t like science.\u00a0 And, let’s be honest, science isn’t so good at shmoozing.<\/p>\n
We need a lot more people like Zack, who managed to become quite an advocate for science.\u00a0 We need to find more people willing to talk to anyone and everyone about science.\u00a0 I’m perfectly willing, but I’m not a ‘name’ with dozens of credentials.<\/p>\n
I hope this helps and I’m going to promote it as much as I can.\u00a0 I hope that you will forward Zack’s letter to your friends, post it on facebook, and your blogs.\u00a0 Get the word out.\u00a0 For a society that has everything handed to it because of science, being a science denialist is stupid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You may have heard of Zack Kopplin.\u00a0 While he was in high school, he testified to the State of Louisiana…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,44,18,6,45],"tags":[242,937,264],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creationism","category-culture","category-government","category-science","category-society","tag-obama","tag-science","tag-zack-kopplin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}