Alphabet Soup

Our wacky priorities

Two random but entangled articles in the NYT 9/24 caught my eye. The FAA administers the air traffic control system. A recent survey found that it is obsolete with 50-year-old components. Fifty-one of 138 systems were considered unsustainable. The neglect raises public safety concerns. Bringing it up to speed is likely to take ten years.

 Then we have NASA’s $5 billion project to evaluate the habitability of one of Jupiter’s moons. Given the destruction on our planet attributable to climate change and the self-inflicted degradation, ubiquitous invasive plastic pollution, for example; spending $5 billion to check out water quality on one of Jupiter’s moons seems like a fools errand. We might wonder whether our societal priorities need some adjustment and tuning.