More from the OpEd ...
... Back in 1980, science fiction and science author Isaac Asimov wrote, "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of antiintellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
He didn't know the half of it.
US President Donald J. Trump's regime has aggressively cut federal science and technology research funding since taking office last January. Recently, one of those cuts hit home for me. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has been closed, and while some of its materials will be stored, at least 85% will be thrown away.
It was at Goddard in the mid-1980s that I learned I had a gift for technology, and, better still, I could explain it to other people. Put simply, that's where my career as a tech journalist began. While there, I also got to know the engineers and scientists who'd pioneered space. This closure is a disgrace.
I mean, who closes down a research library? (It's not like they cost a lot of money, and libraries like this one contain a mountain of material that's never been digitized.) The answer: an administration that has no interest whatsoever in science, knowledge, wisdom, or expertise, that's who.
While personally painful to the people who used that library, there have been worse. NASA itself faces cuts, for example. As John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who flew five shuttle missions, said: "America is stepping back from leadership in virtually every science area. ...
The proposal for the NASA science budget is ... cataclysmic for US leadership in science." ...
