We landed on the Moon 40 years ago and for all of those years we've had to endure false trade-offs between the manned space program and curing cancer or solving climate change or ensuring world peace. Just because the latter goals are good, doesn't imply all other priorities are bad.

Click on my signature to see the U.S. federal budget. Discretionary spending is $1.2T. Mandatory spending is $1.9T. More than half of the so-called discretionary spending is DoD and Homeland Security. NASA doesn't even crack the top ten of the discretionary budget.

Climate change is a challenge to world security. It is also non-discretionary. We can (and should) choose to go into space. We cannot choose to not deal with the core issues of climate change. Not only should this not steal funding from other grand activities of our country - it is not even a problem that the U.S. can begin to solve on its own.

Presumably these spurious zero sum arguments about NASA keep coming up because NASA is seen to be home to large numbers of talented scientists and engineers. This is a great compliment in one sense. But in another sense this is a bizarre statement of the willingness to enslave the scientists for the benefit of the political and commercial classes. Curiosity is the stuff of science. If space exploration is left unfunded, is there any reason to believe there will be a mass exodus in the direction desired by social engineers like Romm?

Between the carrot and the stick, scientists will always respond best to the carrot. How about funding climate change studies through NASA itself? There is also the little issue that Space may provide the home for some of the more creative solutions to climate change: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/lab-books/space-sunshield/guide1.html

Others have commented sufficiently on the various hypocrisies of the piece. I'll merely add that the author's underlying thesis is also suspect. Plenty of middle-aged white guys voted for Obama. And this one will do so again if the President chooses to prosecute the war criminals from the previous administration.

The founding fathers - more old white guys - were severe critics of party politics (click my signature). There certainly is nothing about a "two party system" in the Constitution. It is a fiction, like our country being a single faith nation. Rather, we are free to pursue any political party and any religion.

The parties in power have colluded through the years like Coke and Pepsi to attempt to ensure that no third party can rise to challenge their dominance. And yet - third party attempts keep happening even against the odds. As long as both the GOP and the Dems remain healthy, there is precious little chance for a third party, whether to the right or left, to succeed.

What will happen if the GOP truly withers? What would have happened if Karl Rove's anti-American ambition of a permanent GOP majority had succeeded? In that case there will be a slim - but not zero - opportunity for a third party to rise to prominence. Unlike recent third quasi-centrist parties, in a power vacuum this party will almost certainly be further to one or the other flank. Libertarian on the right or Green on the left. To remain in the center, it would have to incorporate both fundamentalist market economics with fundamentalist environmentalism - this seems a hard sell.

If one flank rises, the other flank will benefit from great community pressure to rise in response. For example, the Democrats would have a difficult time dealing with a successful Libertarian uprising breathing fresh life into fundy conservative (economic) principles. A new more left minded party will be needed. (Considering the current Democrats are somewhere to the right of the Eisenhower era Republicans, some would regard this as long overdue.)

A smart Democratic party would encourage some third party measures as a proactive defense. Start with instant run-off elections, such that voters can choose a Nader or a Kucinich as their first choice with a Gore or Kerry as a second choice. The alternative is to eventually see new political parties evolve to repopulate the ecological niches currently filled by the Democrats as well as the necrotizing GOP.

Science will take care of itself - one advantage of describing the actual underpinnings of the real world. And pop culture is going to continue to evolve in weird and wonderful ways and most certainly will include more and more of the fruits of technology. Politics will remain... well... politics.

The scientific laity are not the real issue. Few are called into the ranks of the scientists - it has always been so. But many fewer study theology. The ignorance of the religious laity to the tenets of their own faith is staggering. To suggest that physics is anti-God - as described in another letter - is more insulting to God (anybody's God) than to science.

The children of God are divided by their adherence to different books, different dogma. The one thing that ties them all together is the natural world - direct evidence of God's creation. It is science which seeks to describe that world. Maybe some choose to believe in a trickster God who buries false fossils. We can be confident that cartoon creationism will continue to fail even the most cursory tests of logic. It is only science that can ultimately lead to a functioning ecumenicism.

It is this vision of a robust diversity of faiths that drives the anger - from narrowness of faith more than lack of empirical imagination.