We Have Awful Science

To start off, I'd like to say that we're not going to Mars any time soon. In part, because both NASA and SpaceX don't have plans to Mars until at least 2026, and some critics are saying that's too ambitious. Public sector space programs around the world aren't well funded or have no intention to go to Mars soon. And private sector companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Google's Lunar X Prize don't have anything to gain in the short term. They won't get any real money until they make it to space or Mars, which means they'll have to get the funding to get there in the first place from someplace else, which is really hard since this is literally rocket science. Aside from money, there's another reason why I don't think we'll be sending any dude's to Mars any year now: our science sucks. Don't get mad at me if you're a scientist, but we haven't seen much innovation lately. Apollo 11's mission was to look for life, get man on the moon, and play golf. There were no aliens, no one has been on the moon since the 70's, but golf is still a thing (yay?). We, as humans, are awful at science. Cancer, diabetes, and AIDS are still here, and now we've got Zika and Ebola. Hell, Apple can't event make a phone that won't die in a few hours. These are just a few examples, the vast majority of our science and technology is really bad.

The last paragraph was pretty depressing, so from now on, one should focus more on how can science get better and what is causing it to be so bad in the first place. We can start to improve by getting rid of planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence, for those of you who don't know, is the creation of a product that deliberately brakes or loses its quality in an attempt to have the consumer buy a newer version. In other words, whenever a company makes a product that stops working sooner than it should because they want you to buy the newest update. Ever noticed that your iPhone starts to run a lot slower right when a new iPhone is released and you start to think about buying it, that's planned obsolescence. I believe that the reason for this is the software update. Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, it comes with a new software (iOS). Apple must leave in some bugs in its softwares for older phones so that they'll run slower. What can we do to stop this? As a consumer, we can stop patronizing them. Before you buy a new product, ask a friend who's been using it for a long time if it's a product that won't stop working easily. If you take a survey, tell them that you chose your product because of how long it lasts. It's definitely worth your money in the medium term to do this. As a society, we need to rebuild a world where there's no incentive to make anything so that it'll break. Right now, companies want to get rich at mostly any cost. There are a lot of things we can do to stop this but I'm not going to go into them. Let's just say, we need to rethink the structure of our companies.

Another change we need to do is in education. There's lots that can be said about the way most countries handle their education. I'm not going to add to this discussion. What I would like to say is we need to make sure the focus is on education, not anything else. So many schools, of all age groups, don't have education as their primary goal. The focus is on indoctrination instead. That is to say, every time a student has to learn one sided history or sing an anthem, they're losing valuable learning time. And nothing productive comes from this. Furthermore, a lot of schools don't want you to learn too much. The students are supposed to practice things like handwriting or standing in line. Also, there's a necessity to go to school. Most jobs have a minimum level of education. They often don't care what you learned, as long as you went to the right schools. They also don't care if you learned on your own. This can be fixed by employers. If you are an employer, please higher who would be right for the job regardless of where they spent their youth. If we stop all of these shenanigans, the world's science will be much better.

This post is getting pretty long, so I better end it here. Remember that our science is really bad. We've been trying to go to Mars since the Kennedy administration and it'll be more than a decade until we ever set foot on it. To end this we need to, out of other things, get rid of planned obsolescence and fix our schools. I didn't mean for this post to be so bleak, so keep in mind that we make our science and tech better in the future!