General Discussion

Beyond the kind of inspiration it brings - like I said, I became a scientist partly because I watched the Apollo missions - unmanned probes may be able to do most of what a human can do, but not all of it.

I have colleagues in my department who rely on data collected from the Apollo missions to study the moon. They're also involved with the unmanned rovers on Mars, but each of them agrees that a manned mission, in spite of the hazards, would greatly expand what we know.

I agree that actual exploitation of space resources (e.g. minerals from the moon or asteroids) is way off in the future, but we have to start somewhere.

I do not regard this as entertainment. No science is entertainment, even if it doesn't look like it has immediate benefits.

I've been accused of doing nothing more than expensive stamp-collecting in my work, which involves naming new crocodile species and understanding their relationships. Such claims ignore the broader outcomes, such as improved abilities to tell when lineages separated with DNA data. We rely on such information to determine when virus strains last shared a common ancestor, for example, or to set conservation priorities for threatened populations. But these methods are not as precise as we'd like. Want to improve them? Look for a group with an excellent fossil record AND a well-resolved evolutionary tree based on both molecular and morphological data. Can't do better than Crocodylia for that.