http://t4america.org/platform

This is off-topic, but I’ll make a few points.

1. Exploring Mars and similar places is highly relevant to survival here on Earth. Even if you limit “survival on Earth” to climate issues and science, it’s still relevant. The history of the mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere on Mars alone is a good case study to compare to the Earth. Then there’s the runaway greenhouse on Venus … those are just the tips of the iceberg, so to speak.

2. The technologies to explore Mars are highly relevant to monitoring the Earth. They use the same launchers, the same types of satellite subsystems, etc. Push a remote sensing technology for Mars and you can use it here, too. Again, Earth remote sensing is just an example. There are many others in the environment and energy areas that these efforts encourage.

3. There’s no reason why we can’t do both. I don’t think it would be wise, for example, to discourage music with lyrics that are irrelevant to survival on Earth. It’s not an either-or situation.

4. The Google Earth 5.0 rollout that you mentioned is a really bad example to criticize on a climate basis. In addition to the Mars features on GE 5.0, there are major new features related to the Earth’s oceans that may bring “GIS to the masses” for the marine environment like GE already does for the land. I imagine Joe would be interested in these. There are also features to allow historical views of Earth imagery. That should make it easy for the public to see for themselves what has changed over the last few decades in snow and ice cover, etc. See http://www.gearthblog.com/ for more. It’s a huge opportunity for making Earth environment data accessible to the public, and it’s easy. On the political front, I imagine most readers of this blog would be more favorably inclined if they know that Al Gore was in the GE 5.0 rollout.

5. Even if the Mars features were irrelevant (which they aren’t), they help draw interest to the other GE features, which is of benefit to the “survival on Earth” effort. From a more general perspective, exploration like that on Mars gets the public and especially students interested in science. Most of them don’t actually end up working on Mars exploration, so their talents become available for energy and environment work. This effect isn’t dominant now like it was in the era of Sputnik and Apollo, but it’s still there. Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google are probably examples of this (after all, consider the ticket to the Space Station, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, the SpaceShipOne replica at Google Headquarters, etc). Elon Musk (Tesla, Solar City) is another example, and he specifically has the goal of opening up Mars with his commercial rockets.

6. On the other hand, ceasing to explore physical and intellectual frontiers (of which Mars represents both) is not a good idea for any civilization that hopes to survive.

7. Google has pretty good environment and energy credentials.

Now, if you criticized NASA’s plans to build government rockets to go to the Moon and some decade go to Mars with astronauts at over a billion dollars per launch, I might agree with you. I’m not fond of the Shuttle or Ares, and I think the government should get out of the launch business which is not exactly one of its core competencies and use commercial launch services (which would again be very helpful to NASA and NOAA environment satellite efforts). I’m also not fond of cost-overruns like NASA has on its big new Mars rover when we haven’t gotten the benefits of the type of smaller Mars rovers we already have built and could now crank out for pennies on the dollar. But criticizing Google Earth Mars features doesn’t make sense to me at all.

Anyhow, congrats to Ron and the Obama administration. Great choice IMO.

Google Earth provides dizzying 3D views of Mars
http://www.newscientist.com/ article/ dn16524-google-earth-provides-dizzying-3d-views-of-mars.html