A very rare discovery: Failed star orbits a dead star every 71 minutes

[NNadir]

13. I am very much in favor of taking care of this planet, but you clearly have a primitive view of...

...how science works.

For starters, the instrumentation utilized to detect planets in other systems relies on the knowledge of engineers who may find other applications in fields that have nothing to do with planetary or interstellar science.

In fact, this kind of equipment is actually key to saving this planet.

Look, if you hate science, science funding, and scientists, that's your privilege, just as it is the privilege of the orange Idi Amin wannabe living in the White House.

But don't couch it in a faux concern for starving children. You clearly have a very primitive understanding of agriculture and the science on which it depends.

Here is just one example, among tens of thousands of examples of how space based science is helping to feed the world:

International Journal of Remote Sensing, 21:18, 3487-3508 "Estimating crop yields and production by integrating the FAO Crop Specific Water Balance model with real-time satellite data and ground-based ancillary data"

The imaging technology that made this satellite based study of crop yields in Kenya in the period from 1988-2000.

If people bought into the "save starving children" anti-science rhetoric observed here and now - and I've been confronting this trash thinking for my entire adult life - this study would not have happened.

Here's a link to a more recent paper on satellite based study of droughts in India:

A combined deficit index for regional agricultural drought assessment over semi-arid tract of India using geostationary meteorological satellite data

(International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation Volume 39, July 2015, Pages 28–39)

The type of imaging utilized here is not appreciably different than the type of imaging utilized in interstellar planet searches. Interstellar planet searching not only enriches humanity aesthetically and, I think, morally and spiritually, it also has practical results in improving human lives.

Trust me, we saved a lot of lives in the last half a century that would have been lost if the type of thinking you express here had been adopted as policy.

We have enough trouble in the scientific world with the moron in the White House. We don't need faux moral lectures about "starving children" to make things even worse.

I'd suggest you rethink your rhetoric.