Educational outreach is an important part of what NASA does. For the low cost of a letter they most likely encouraged a kid to have a career in the sciences. In my mind that is peak efficiency.
The efficient guy in me agrees with the overall sentiment, though not with the tone.
My inner nerd had a big, fat smile on his face when reading the story and, if I was the person to receive the letter, I'd probably have "wasted" the 10 minutes the response took because I would not be who I am today if not for highly paid scientists encouraging me. And I'd have put in 10 minutes unpaid overtime to make up for it - I'd not be surprised if the respondent did the same.
Kids are import and they really matter for us humans: They'll solve future problems if we invest the time to love and encourage them.
EDIT: Ffs, please unflag the parent comment - do we really only want to read comments that fit into our own bubble? What happened to discourse?
You are likely enormously underestimating the % of HN crowd who got into computers, science, engineering, etc because they were inspired at a young age by stuff like this.
NASA is doing a good thing with promotional actions like this.
coming from a country that didn't and still probably doesn't have a dedicated space institute, I would like to let you know this this is a fantastic thing that they did.
[+] [-] mcappleton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raister|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wizu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlg23|8 years ago|reply
My inner nerd had a big, fat smile on his face when reading the story and, if I was the person to receive the letter, I'd probably have "wasted" the 10 minutes the response took because I would not be who I am today if not for highly paid scientists encouraging me. And I'd have put in 10 minutes unpaid overtime to make up for it - I'd not be surprised if the respondent did the same.
Kids are import and they really matter for us humans: They'll solve future problems if we invest the time to love and encourage them.
EDIT: Ffs, please unflag the parent comment - do we really only want to read comments that fit into our own bubble? What happened to discourse?
[+] [-] gruturo|8 years ago|reply
NASA is doing a good thing with promotional actions like this.
[+] [-] tehlike|8 years ago|reply
Kids need encouragement, they need role models.
[+] [-] tpeo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|8 years ago|reply
Not like that.
[+] [-] overcast|8 years ago|reply
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