There's no telling where you might live one day - or what they could put in your Pepsi
I answered the Sputnik challenge. When America needed smarty-pants people to be rocket scientists, I learned calculus to keep us safe from Commies.
Once a junior scientist, always a junior scientist; I'm ever on the alert for science stuff that might impact the American Way.
This week there were two of those.
The first science-y thing to catch my attention was a proposal in Oklahoma to make it illegal to produce food using aborted human fetuses. An author of the bill said he'd heard of efforts to make better artificial sweeteners using stem cells.
How?
Pepsi wanted to make disembodied, custom-Frankenstein-taste-receptors, using stem cells.
The idea being, why bother paying a whole human taster to taste possible sweeteners one at a time, when you can create designer taste receptors by the billions, hook them up to sensors and taste hundreds of sweetener candidates an hour?
A patent was obtained for a method to create such taste receptors using "mammalian cells or Xenopus oocytes." That's science talk for meat or frogs' eggs.
There's nothing in the patent that says they'd use aborted human fetuses, but I'm in complete agreement with that state senator: It never hurts to play it safe.
That's why I'm proposing, right now, that we outlaw any use of aborted human fetuses to make cosmetics, create or refine fuels, including, but not limited to, motor fuels, or build better lawn chairs.
Don't think it can't happen.
Scientists and oil companies are tricky. If there's a cheaper way to make a gasoline substitute using human stem cells, they'll do it.
There's even more money in that than there is in making a better saccharine. Plus, current lawn chairs desperately need improvement. We have to be prepared.
Speaking of being prepared, let's get ready for President Newt Gingrich.
Naturally, what I am most concerned about here, as a junior scientist, is that a president Newt Fruitcake will try to make a 51st state on the moon, because the moon is a science thing.
I want to indicate a few problems with his proposal.
First of all, you don't have to be the first people to colonize a place to make it a state. We made all the lower 48s and Alaska U.S. states more than 10 millennia after other people colonized them.
We should do like we did with all our other states. Let other people colonize the moon first and then go take it from them.
I don't know where he gets the idea that a moon base could be a state when it has 13,000 people. Ohio had to reach 60,000 to be considered for statehood, and that was in 1802.
If anything, you'd think the threshold would have gone up.
Anyway, it wouldn't matter if we had a million people up there, because there's something called The Outer Space Treaty (I'm not making this up), which the United States signed and ratified in the 1960s. It forbids us from making a state out of any part of the moon or Mars or Venus, or any place off Earth. U.S. treaties constitute U.S. law.
Now, my guess is, Newt doesn't care. He wants to be president. He wants to make a state. He doesn't care about our treaty obligations. Laws aren't a big deal to him. Wasting taxpayer money to create an illegal state is also not a big deal.
Still, as crazy as Newt is, if we start now, there's a chance we might think of a way to talk President Newt into building our 51st state somewhere cheaper.
How about the bottom of the ocean under the Bermuda Triangle?
How about Antarctica?
It's easier to get to, it's just as inhospitable, and it's just as much a violation of our treaty obligations.
As John F. Kennedy might have said, we can choose to try to get Newt to do these other things, not because it's easy, but because it's hard.
And because he's an idiot.