To the Editor:
Re “Pluto’s Portrait: Ice Mountains, No Craters and, for Scientists, a ‘Toy Store’’’ (front page, July 16): The stunning photos of Pluto, from the New Horizons spacecraft, represent a towering achievement for the human mind and heart—and something else. What we see is yet another bleak, lifeless, sterile sphere wandering around our sun, like all the others, save one.
Compare these pictures with those amazing photos of our own lovely, blue-green world that first came to us from Apollo 8 on its voyage around our moon more than four decades ago. And consider: It is the only sphere like it in the solar system, the only world that does or can support life. We would do well to keep those two disparate images in mind as we contemplate what our species is doing to the planet Earth—the only home humankind is ever likely to know.
RON BONN
San Diego
To the Editor:
Since there are limited funds available for basic scientific research, spending $700 million to get a photograph of Pluto is not a prudent use of these funds.
We spend money on basic research in the hope that in the long run it will benefit mankind. I think that the billions of dollars we spend on astronomy should be spent on other types of basic research.
DAVID J. KRUPP
Howard Beach, Queens
To the Editor:
It is remarkable that mankind is capable of sending a spacecraft traveling three billion miles for nine years to capture amazing pictures that tell us so much more about the world around us, yet on planet Earth, we still haven’t figured out how to respect and live with one another.
MIRIAM KAGAN MARGOSHES
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
