NASA & their empire of dirt

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering," (NASA Administrator Charles) Bolden said in the interview. (foxnews.com)

I completely agree that one of NASA’s missions is to “re-inspire” children to be interested in space and want to study science and math. Expanding international relationships seems vague as I would hope it would be in connection with space exploration projects with other countries and some of those countries will have large Muslim populations but to believe that one of NASA’s missions is to make them feel good about their historical contributions to science is at best misdirected and at worst, a fundamental alteration of NASA’s purpose.

Muslim countries are well aware of their historical contributions, they live there. By there I mean literally the pre-enlightenment age, as it was the birth place of civilization, the middle-east would have been the home of all things science and math, of course this was before Mohammad was given the words of god (according to their religion) and the Qur’an being written. Much like those that claim to have discovered America (of which there were already people here) the important date is still in 1492 as that is when things changed and Europeans, for better or worse, continued to come here until this very day. (The Vikings, Chinese, Polynesians, or whoever else, did not come back)

It is much like what have you done for me lately when it comes to math and science, if you don’t keep up on improving it or making it an important part of your culture it really doesn’t matter if you were best at it, just ask the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Sumerians how their empires are doing today.

I think NASA and our president needs to focus on teaching U.S. citizens about its history, math and science to assure we don’t become like those other empires of dirt.

Chris Mendelsohn 2010