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We once roamed the vast forums of Corona Coming Attractions. Some of us had been around from The Before Times, in the Days of Excelsior, while others of us had only recently begun our trek. When our home became filled with much evil, including the villainous Cannot-Post-in-This-Browser and the dreaded Cannot-Log-In, we flounced away most huffily to this new home away from home. We follow the flag of Jubboiter and talk about movies, life, the universe, and everything, often in a most vulgar fashion. All are welcome here, so long as they do not take offense to our particular idiom.
Space Tycoon wrote:Actually, the more I think about, the more I don't fully believe that finding water--awesome though that would be--would warrant quite this much hoopla. After all, we've found evidence of liquid water on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, even an asteroid.
Yeah, but if we could find some water in some place where we don't have to haul it into orbit..... ?
You're preaching to the choir, dog. The problem is the ordinary working, taxpaying voter is rarely awed by the announcement of near-Earth resources.
Here are the two announcements that would actually mean something to the majority of the people of Earth: (1) we've made honest-to-God contact with aliens, and (2) we've found somewhere else where life is sustainable, and it's close enough for modern man to travel to.
NASA banks on us thinking it will be one of these two things, then it tells us something way less interesting than that. "Hey, we think there may be water a few miles under the ice of this planet we're still decades and decades away from being able to park a ship on." "Hey, we think maybe we found another planet in what could be a Goldilocks zone, and it's only probably 1,400 light years away." "Hey, Pluto's bigger than we thought, but it's still a good bit smaller than Earth's moon." "Hey, two black holes are on course to collide a million years from now. Wind your watches."
Well, if they pull the ole' bait and switch again, I'll be disappointed, but not greatly surprised. A very large part of me wants to get my hopes up, another does not.
Right now, I need to hear something awesome. Even a fossil would be enough. But water will suffice. It's like when you come home after a long day and want to get hammered, but you've only got two or three beers left in the fridge, and you don't want to go out.
They have to tease to drum up any interest in these nonevents. It's sad and lame. These announcements have all been the kinds of announcements they would have simply released in the pre-clickbait days. No fanfare. We wouldn't have all been told to hold on to our cocks and brace for impact.
I understand that it's harder and harder to get the world to give a shit about space exploration. I understand that this means that it's harder and harder to get funding for it--especially when hobbyist billionaires are hoping to start exploring space on their own dime. This Dance of the Seven Veils approach to delivering tiny scraps of news to us, though, is only going to hurt them in the long run.
Announcement made. Potential/Stronger evidence for water flow on Mars. Like I assumed, it's another anticlimactic nonevent. I joked with Jubbers last night that the announcement would probably be what it actually ended up being. Right down to NASA's long string of qualifiers.
It's not that it's not news. It's big news for people in the field. It's just not the big kind of news they were banking on the Average Joe assuming it would be.
Water flow on Mars is something we've all sort of been told to take for granted for a while. I guess it's cool to have something closer to confirmation, but it's still not newsworthy enough for them to tease it out the way they did. So I guess I have something new to add to my "Hey" list: "Hey, remember how we've been saying for a long time that we were pretty sure water [used to/might still] flow on this planet? Well, now we're even surer."
Well, it's the same two bottles of beer you've had in the fridge since earlier this decade. You should have drunk them a long time ago. They probably taste pretty shitty by now.
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:Seriously, man, this shit barely qualified as news. It certainly didn't call for the teasing and vague "huge announcement" heads-up they gave us.
There is a big movie coming out about Mars that NASA helped with, a movie which people are saying may help build interest in future manned missions to Mars.
Oh, boy, don't I know it. Pretty damning. Enough so that the optimist might be compelled to pardon the cynic for coming to the conclusion that NASA cooked up this non-story with the intention of encouraging greater exposure and/or better box office receipts.
It'll probably turn out to be nothing, but this is how you do it. You don't announce that there will be a huge announcement a week from now, shroud things in mystery, get everybody excited, and then reveal it to be either (1) something way less exciting than people were expecting or (2) stronger evidence for something people already assumed was the case.
If it's true, I can just see Elon Musk watching the discovery on the news and saying to himself, "Fuck Mars....I'm going to KIC 84...whatever the hell it is!"