Sometimes I pretend I’m the Mayor of my kitchen and veto fish for dinner. ‘Too fishy’ is what I say!
— Marie Curie

Yes, it would be grossly untrue.

Henri Becquerel discovered radiation and it was further researched by himself and his two doctoral students Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, for which all three received a joint Nobel Prize.

Yes, and calling Marie Curie an inventor for discovering radiation is very inaccurate. She was one of the greatest scientists of all time, and her sacrifice is well remembered. Incidentally, I've heard her notebooks are still radioactive.

Saying Marie Curie "took no precautions" is somewhat disingenuous. It's because of her and her husband that we now know we have to take precautions...

>> ^shole:
>> ^SunTzu:
flying around the planet at thousands of miles an hour, a man who puts his life in danger to further the knowledge of mankind.

what do they actually even do up there?
i now i'm being ignorant and that they probably do a lot of great stuff but we never specifically hear about any of it
there's never been a news story like "bananas made of jam invented on ISS! astronaut Jamforbrains gets nobel for being awesome!"


Rofl..

He's probably involved in various zero gravity experiments up there, acting as proxy on behalf of people on earth who come up with new questions as to what happens if you do this in zero gravity. I don't know the specific purpose of the ISS unfortunately, but i suspect your question is a bit like asking "Why are you looking through this telescope at the moon?"

And the answer is, who the hell knows what you'll find? Why did we sail around the world and discover new countries, new species of animal.. why do we still search for new species? Why do we test those species of plant and animal to see what they do, what they're made of, what properties they have? Why step outside of our front door?

Because if we didn't, we'd never have invented the wheel or mastered fire.

Imagine how much shit we've found in our own oceans that we didn't know about a few hundred years ago. Imagine what we've done with that new knowledge.

Can you possibly begin to imagine the sort of shit we might find out there in space, which is infinitely bigger than our ocean?

Imagine if you'd asked marie curie why she was messing around with a luminous material? "Did you make a banana made of this new material? Stop wasting your time!" And we've just lost the x-ray machine.

Cmon, man.. that sort of question depresses me.. of all the amazing things we've found out through stargazing, through expeditions into space (the hubble deep field picture, to me, is worth all the money on earth) the one thing that would validate such a trip, to you, is a fucking jam banana?

"As Marie Curie said, nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

Now I'm fairly pro-nuclear, but I'm not sure that's a very convincing statement given Mme. Curie's fate.

I disagree with the notion that its arrogant to 'mess around with these things'. In fact, though I knew this post might arouse anti-nuclear sentiment, I'm very pro-nuclear. There is a reason three mile island would NOT have been a Chernobyl if it had totally melted the core and that is it had a containment structure. Chernobyl had no containment dome at all, the operator on duty that night broke no less than SIX critical safety rules to do his extremely dangerous stupid test. Nuclear power can be very very safe when done properly and with strict oversight. And persephone, I think you're missing the inverse relationship between half-life and radioactivity of a substance. A substance with a half life of 10^19 years is utterly harmless BECAUSE the half life is so long. In fact, I'll wager you've EATEN significantly large quantities of a radioactive substancec with exactly this length of half-life......its bismuth! As in, the pink tummy remedy, pepto-bismol! As Marie Curie said, nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood.