"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
I doubt that's his thesis. My guess is that, as with mine, the question
is how much YOU are paying. YOU are the one complaining. Many
taxpayers are satisfied with how their money is being spent.

BINGO!!!

That point of view is like asserting the cost of a home is the value
of a single mortgage payment . The cost to taxpayers is clearly the
entire additional sum (if any) resulting from the inclusion
(preparation, testing, launch, ...) of the ashes aboard the New
Horizons mission to Pluto.

It is only "like" that assertion if you carry the assertion to its logical
conclusion: that is, that it's as if nearly the entire mortgage was deemed
acceptable by the payer, except for the very last payment (representing your
sole dissenting voice as a taxpayer).

And of course, when you do that, you see how silly it is for one person to
presume to voice a complaint on behalf of the hundreds of millions of
taxpayers who most likely don't mind an extra penny or so of their money
spent honoring a key figure in astronomy.

[...] what would you
think of a race of organisms that chose to include the charred remains
of a representative of their species aboard an otherwise completely
functional piece of mechanical equipment?

That would likely depend entirely on the nature of the organism finding the
remains. If they are anything like humans, they will comprehend that the
ashes are there as a way to honor a person. They may even correctly infer
that the person was somehow related to the spacecraft.

If they are nothing like humans, they might (for example) come to the
conclusion that the ashes are the remains of a human who was sent along with
the spacecraft as part of its normal operation, but who through some
untimely accident was incinerated. They may or may not stop to hope that
the incineration was quick and painless, but regardless, if they have no
customs similar to human approaches to dealing with the dead, they likely
will only arrive at hypotheses explaining the ashes which seem rational to
them.

It seems absurd to me to presume that we can even begin to imagine what
another organism might thing of our behavior. Our activities are likely
unfathomable to most, if not all, the organisms right here on Earth. To
concern ourselves with what an extraterrestrial organism might think seems
futile.

To me it just seems an anachronism, an act appropriate for stone age
beings, not those sufficiently advanced to achieve such a
technological feat. But given the longs odds and funding
requirements, I believe I've come accept it.

Our current social customs are not very far removed from those that existed
thousands of years ago, all the way back to the beginning of written
history, and probably even before (as inferred through archeological studies
of cultural remains predating written history). To expect them to change,
never mind disappear entirely, even in the last millennia, never mind the
last generation, is to fail utterly to comprehend human society.

Granted, that's a common flaw among people who are highly experienced
computer users. But it's a flaw, nonetheless.

Pete