mmmn platmmn

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mOOn platOOn bOOndOggles: STUPID ROCKET SCIENTISTS or STAR WARS COVER-UP?

O

Where are those X-Files investigators when we need ‘em? NASA can’t be as stupid as they’re coming off – or ARE rocket scientists highly overrated?

O

So many stupid NASA missions have been launched as of late, my suspicions have been aroused. And I’m not easily aroused – that way.

Are rocket scientists not so smart after all? Or are they being used as a front? Judge for yourself…

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States has launched a space telescope, Kepler, whose three-year mission is to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Fascinating. I think that once, I would have considered this a worthy endeavor. Now, I think it proves that rocket scientists – or at least their bosses – can be pretty damned stupid.

I’m not even complaining about the cost. At a cost of nearly 600 million dollars, Kepler will be the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, at just the right distance and temperature for life-sustaining water to exist.

That is so stupid. Life might just as easily be based on petroleum. Or ammonia.

This is almost as stupid as when NASA sent a blast of Earth noise blindly out into the cosmos in 2008 to announce our presence to anything and everything that might be out there. Remember? They even sent a Beatles song.

"This mission attempts to answer a question that is as old as time itself -- are other planets like ours out there?" said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "It's not just a science mission, it's an historical mission."

More like a “hysterical” mission based on public relations. Ed, let me ask you, really, “…as old as time itself?” People have only been able to distinguish other planets as other planets (‘cause we didn’t even know Earth was a “planet”) for a few hundred years. “Time itself” is a lot older than that.

These guys are like a religious sect. There are people who will fund these missions based on some flaky humanistic philosophies trying to prove how common life is “out there.” We’re looking parsecs across space to find ourselves. Validation through repetition. See? There’s another one of us over there! I knew we weren’t alone!

Explained William Borucki, based at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, "If we find many, it certainly will mean that life may well be common throughout our galaxy, that there is an opportunity for life to have a place to evolve. If none or only a few of these planets are found, it might suggest that habitable planets like Earth are very rare and Earth may be a lonely outpost for life." Outpost? Isn’t an “outpost” a colony or settlement that’s an offshoot of a much larger population? If we’re alone, Earth is Eden.

Instead of looking for general signs of possible life, they look for themselves: water-based, radio-blasting mammals. How difficult is it to find another Earth? You’d think, from their rhetoric, that we’re just moments away from beginning a catalogue of Earth-like worlds.

Actually, this will be just like the other NASA missions sent out to look for that something specific we call life. This will be inconclusive.

"If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front," according to Kepler project manager James Fanson. "Trying to detect Jupiter-size planets crossing in front of their stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying by a car's headlight. Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea in that same headlight."

There will be NO WAY to conclusively interpret such data in the near future. And even if we did prove that another planet “like” ours – at least superficially – existed, what conclusions could be drawn logically or even emotionally from knowing that? We already know that our Sun is a commonplace star.

I think it’s a front for funding and placing some space-based weapon in orbit. This poetic crap about finding another Earth doesn’t even serve a practical academic purpose. The pubic reads uncritical accounts of these expenditures fluffed up with public relations jargon and gives it not another thought, except, perhaps, “There go those eggheads again.”

Ah, the fanfare with which these egghead missions take off. But oh how they peter out. Eventually, someone will decide that something was concluded, someday.

I’m not buying it.

-         OO –