After ten years of hard work by more than a thousand people, a space probe has managed to land on a comet in outer space. The first question that has to be asked, before all others right now is: Who the fuck cares? People are offended that others care more about Kim Kardashian's fat butt than about pencil-dicked STEM-nerds landing a robot on a comet on the other side of the solar system. I think it is completely justified for people to be more interested in Kim Kardashian's butt than in some space probe, for reasons I will outline below:
Unlike the Rosetta mission, Kim Kardashian's fat butt will actually affect you. It is likely to spread sexually transmittable disease throughout the population. If you have a habit of exchanging bodily fluids with gangster rappers and similar figures, it is more directly relevant to you than the comet, as unlike the comet, it poses a genuine risk to your life expectancy.
Unlike the comet, it harbors a variety of different forms of life. It is likely to harbor millions of lactobacilli, propionobacteria, it might very well harbor staphylococcus epidermis. It can sustain all these different germs. More importantly, so can your fat butt. The comet doesn't harbor anything. Anything that might have survived the journey from Earth to the comet would certainly die there. Nothing survives there, the comet is scorched by the sun.
The comet doesn't affect you. You can't smell it, you can't touch it, you can't stand on it. You can do all of the prior three with the other big object that received a lot of media attention lately, if you're willing to invest some effort into it. If someone claimed the comet does not even exist, you would have no way of proving the opposite to them. They can show you pictures of the dead rock, but anyone could make those on his computer.
Here's the thing you don't seem to get. Humans are irrelevant in space. The computers were willing to take some of us with them to the moon, but after that, our business in space was over. We're heavy, we're expensive, we're sensitive to the radiation in space. We have no business in space. We're given computer signals, from a machine that tells us what it happens to see on a particular spot on the surface. You don't see anything real. You see a different few photons radiated out of your computer screen, based on the server of some other computer, which if we go all the way through the chain of communication bases itself on what it was told by a machine that was sent out into space.
You're fed science-fiction scenarios about space, in an effort to get you excited about it, but there's nothing to be excited about, because you're not going into space. Perhaps the Chinese might set some people on the moon to prove they can do the same thing as the Americans, but after that, it's over. Nobody can afford to send people out into space. Europe can't afford to keep Greek children from fainting during gym lessons from lack of food, do you think we're going to Mars? That era is over.
A handful of people were lucky and got to jump around for a bit on the moon in special suits, the rest of us got to see grainy video footage of it. Sending humans into space is dangerous to their health, costly and inefficient. Computers are taking over from here. There won't be humans landing on comets, or humans mining asteroids. There's no need for us there, artificial intelligence can do it much cheaper and safer than we can. You're going to sit on Earth and the computer is going out there showing you its holiday pictures. You don't like watching your own friends show off their holiday pictures, why do you suddenly care about the pictures a computer sends you?
What if those thousand people spent the last ten years traveling through the Amazon rainforest? Wouldn't they have benefitted more? You want to see a moon landscape? Save our fossil fuels and ignore space, travel to the nearest desert. Outer space is like a desert but with less colour. Except the desert will surprise you with the occasional camel or even an oasis. Outer space won't. It will bore you to tears after a week.
There isn't jack shit out there that's worth exploring anyway. I've seen bugs show up in my bedroom that are more interesting than that piece of rock. I've seen anthills here in my country that I could stare at for hours. How long do you think it would take you to grow bored of a giant grey piece of rock that smells like rotten eggs? Yes, that's right, it smells like rotten eggs and cat urine.
Why should we be excited about a dead rock that smells like the refrigerator of a crazy cat lady? This comet is the very opposite of life. It's static and sterile. It looks like a test object God put into an alpha version of the universe that was never removed. It is interesting in the same way an abstract painting left entirely blank is. It reminds us of how lucky we are at home.
"But it tells us more about the universe!" Us. You said it right. It increases our collective knowledge. Who cares about our collective knowledge? Your individual knowledge of space is probably embarrassingly low. Could you navigate a ship using the stars at night? Chances are the light pollution of thousands of STEM-nerds in your neighborhood sitting behind computers at night reading about a dead rock makes you incapable of even seeing the stars.
If we find out tomorrow that the robot claims the comet smells more like donkey urine than like cat urine and all scientific theories are thrown into disarray as a result, does it matter? Step on a mushroom in your local park and you wouldn't be able to tell me what you just killed, it doesn't matter to you. You specialized in a specific brand of STEM-nerdism and feel a sense of power when its control over nature is increased, any other branch is like a rivaling tribe competing for its own share of government subsidies and student tuition.
Outer space is like going out of bounds in a poorly programmed video game. You can walk on forever, but you're not going to encounter anything particularly meaningful. Nobody put any effort into putting anything interesting out there, the programmer figured you'd find out there's nothing there and move back. How many more billions are we going to spend walking out of bounds? Freud claimed that we have a death drive, the desire to explore the absence of life, to pursue self-destruction and return to the inorganic. There are more exciting ways to go about it than to stare at pictures of a rock that smells like a cat pissed on it, a smell we will never even smell, because even if we sent a human he'd have to be protected against the vacuum. Visit an underground cave instead. How many people could we have sent out there to explore underground caves, for the budget we have spent on building a robot that sends pictures of a dead rock to STEM-nerds back on Earth?
Fuck that rock.
Submitted November 15, 2014 at 02:15AM by myohmywtf http://ift.tt/14nCTpw accountt1234
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