Quote:
Originally Posted by mental4astro
Worse still is a more sinister aspect that underlies the "uncool" aspect - that being dumb is cool.
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Alex, nihilism (which is what that is) has always been around in a certain socio-economic segment of the australian population. I'd have to say there were three things that stand out, which are very missing today:
1. NASA was given a very simple clear mission - to land a man on the moon, a dream that even drunken yobs at a pub could understand pretty well. Mars and the planets... didn't quite get so much interest, frankly.
2. Carl Sagan's TV series, 'Cosmos', managed to capture the public imagination fairly well, especially school-age kids learning science for the first time. Couple that with the Mariner and Voyager missions and yes quite a few were sufficiently interested to at least take a look at astronomy.
3. Upto the mid 1980's, keen amateurs with the right gear could make minor contributions to astronomy. That is pretty much finished now, thanks to the technological advances on several fronts.
In current times all three of these are lacking.
- NASA is doing nothing much of significance and its budget has been slashed, and there are no really outstanding missions going on that will grab the public.
- since Carl Sagan there hasn't been a really decent astronomy series that compares. The BBC efforts are all very well but frankly rather lame and too dumbed-down.
- there isn't much you can do now as an amateur beyond "ooh look at that" and take a few happy-snaps much the snap as millions of others.
Lastly... there has been a general trend away from the hard sciences in secondary and territory institutions for the past 20 years as these are perceived as "too hard" compared to the soft subjects, and admittedly have rather poor career prospects. The output from one graduate school alone in Australia is enough to supply all the positions requiring PhDs; the rest finish up driving taxis or waiting on tables while making major career change.
It leaves astronomy where it was a hundred years ago - an interesting little niche subject which kids should learn about if they have a chance, to see for themselves that these things are real, that mathematics has real applications and that there is such a thing as "hard proof" (i.e. right or wrong) by actually observing something, not just stuff in a book or computer game.