Recently, Chinese Scientists were told they could not participate in a NASA event covering topics of planetary exploration and astrophysics. This angered the Chinese obviously, but it also caught a few American Scientists off guard as well.
There was an article about the aftermath of this NASA announcement in Phys Org online news on October 8, 2013 titled; “NASA ban on Chinese scientists ‘inaccurate’: lawmaker,” by Kerry Sheridan which stated;
“The US space agency’s announcement that Chinese nationals would not be permitted to enter the Second Kepler Science Conference on exoplanets at California’s Ames Research Center sparked a boycott by some prominent US astronomers,” one stated; “In good conscience, I cannot attend a meeting that discriminates in this way. The meeting is about planets located trillions of miles away, with no national security implications,” Geoff Marcy, an astronomy professor at the UC Berkeley.
Well, yes I can see why there is all this commotion and really in my view it depends if the conference was going to talk at all about space propulsion technology, which would be dual use – I did not get a chance to look at the symposium topics or the papers submitted on this one – but it is a REAL issue. And scientists should not be linear in their thinking – now then it could be a silly reading of the law which caused the conflict or it might have been a real issue? Either way the Chinese are ripping us off blind in so many other ways that it hardly makes a whole lot of sense. Let’s discuss all this shall we?
When one nation undermines another economically, cheats in trade, maneuvers for advantage using proxy entities and client nations, and/or steals intellectual property and then lies about its endeavors over and over again, at that point there isn’t enough trust left for open communications. Now I am not an apologist for my own nation’s global games of the past, nor am I naïve of the tit-for-tat nature of the global chess board (Go) but I can tell you that there are some human science projects that are bigger than all this nonsense – more important than the infighting – and at some point the silly human games need to stop so we can drive the species forward.
If not, we are no better than any other species on this planet, in fact, we are worse as we do everything behind cloak and dag blast it, it’s about time we were at least honest with our true intentions – especially between nations and leadership. Enough is enough. China needs to stop ripping us off, forcing its will onto others, and manipulating global trade – then we can forget about the pettiness of banning them from information. Everyone will be better off. Can’t anyone see the value in “real cooperation” anymore? It’s simple really, surely the Chinese are smart enough to see that reality? Please consider all this and think on it.