I was meaning to post something about this comet thing before it actually happened, but never found the time. Here’s an article about a Russian who is suing NASA for $300 million because they upset the natural balance of the universe. I actually have to admit to having had some thoughts along these lines myself. While I’m not so worried about the mission “deforming my horoscope†I do find it a typically American thing to do. We might gain some knowledge about the universe but given the lofty cost of the mission, it seems to me that the NASA braintrust probably just thought it was a really f**kin’ cool thing to do. In a way, I have to agree, but that just might be my American upbringing talking.
They also say there is no possibility of bad side-effects but an interview I heard with some NASA guy on the Today Show left me thinking there was at least a little room for interpretation there. He said no, but he qualified it with a statement along the lines of, “Well, the odds of it are extremely minute.†Had he elaborated, I was imagining something like, “Well, there is the off chance that it could cause the comet to careen wildly off course and smash directly into Earth, or release a slew of radioactive material that just might shower the atmosphere and wipe out all life as we know it, but I’m tellin’ ya, the odds of that are really small and not nearly enough to justify passing up the opportunity to do something this f**kin’ cool.â€Â
I don’t have too much to say about the comet. I would have speared it, given the opportunity. Other than that, I am a little hamstrung in forming any opinion by my reluctance to read up on what NASA was hoping to acheive.
Whenever I think of NASA nowadays, I am always thinking about Mars and those plucky little rovers. In fact, I have a sad little collection of half completed blog posts about how the rovers are just kick-ass. There has even been some high drama, with one of the rovers getting stuck in the Martian sand for a week or so. The NASA site has great news about all aspects of the Rovers. Neat discovery (for me) is the presence of dust devils on Mars.
The whole NASA site is fascinating: A quick check of [nasa.gov] shows some pages devoted to the re-launch of the space shuttle Discovery coming up July 13.
Maybe I am on a space kick. I am near the end of a huge “hard” science fiction anthology I have been reading for the past month or so. More to say on that in a later post.
Yeah, I was also thinking it would be really cool if we unleashed a lot of outer-space demons or something supernatural by blowing a hole to the core of the comet, but maybe I should just write a sci-fi book about it. They really might learn some neat stuff. One particular theory of interest is that Earth was actually populated with life by “seeds” that arrived on meteors. There’s some theory that a sentient being out there somewhere planted seeds on all these comets and spread life all over the universe. Of course throwing the sentient being out of the equation, it’s still a plausible explanation for the source of life on this planet and would give tons of credence that there the universe is probably teeming with life. Whatever they find, plus whatever they find on Mars, I suspect it will add up to the conclusion that life ain’t all that hard to create from the perspective of the universe. A little comet dust and a Duracell battery might be all it takes.