Monday Matters- Marking Period 4 Week 1

The Other Final Frontier

By BEN HELLWARTH

While missions to outer-space and the moon bear technological and scientific fruits, they without a doubt expensive: coming billion dollar price tags. Today's economic downturn and high government debt does not mean that we should stop pursuing scientific expansion entirely, however, but that the United States should look for better value projects than space exploration. And an area with a lot of potential for that is exploration in the other direction: in the deep ocean. American underseas programs have been limited and then dwindling as the Navy shelved most of what programs there were due to some dangers as well as not high enough suitability for military endeavors. There is much opportunity in the ocean's depths, however, for advancements in medicine, biology, and environmental understanding that is ample reason to expand exploration into "The Other Frontier". 

This article shed a lot of light for me on the possibilities for science on own home planet, and I think that today innovative research is more important than ever. It would be interesting to research more on possibilities for research like this one, as well as addressing questions of government and military involvement in science.