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Why You Should Be More Interested In Mars Than the Olympics
New submitter hugeinc sends this quote from an article by author Andrew Kessler:
"Next week, while we're all watching NBC, a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized super rover will land on Mars. We accurately guided this monster from 200 million miles away (that's 7.6 million marathons). It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand. It will use a laser to blast rocks, a chemical nose to sniff out the potential for life, and hundreds of other feats of near-magic. Will these discoveries lead us down a path to confirming life on other planets? Wouldn't that be a good story that might make people care about science?"
Running fast and bouncing a ball in a bikini is much more important
Because Mars IS more interesting than some boneheads chasing each other around a dirt track. Humanity needs to move on.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
There’s insanely amazing stuff happening every day. Marvels of human achievement and technology all around us. And for each, there is usually a group of people around it who:
a) lives and breaths the stuff
b) can’t fathom why everyone else doesn’t feel the same way
It doesn’t work like this. Even if you could some how identify the one absolute “top of the pile” thing that everyone should be focusing on, it’s completely impractical for everyone to do so. It’s the same reason we can’t have every scientist in the world working on say, cancer research. You need some of them to be trying to figure out how to get rid of wrinkles.
Some people don’t care about space. A lot of people don’t care about space. Arguing that they should care about space because it’s a more “worthy” thing to care about than whatever they do care about is just ridiculous.
As to trying to frame the story so it’s more in-line with the stuff they are interested in... even more ridiculous. You can’t trick someone into caring about technology by turning it into a human interest story.
People don't care about it because it's not lip-synching an over-produced pop song, it doesn't have actors trying to pawn things, it's not trying to sleep with a housemate, and it doesn't carry crab traps.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
The Olympics are self-important beyond their entertainment (or any other) value. Not interested.
I'm pretty sure I can follow both. And be interested in both.
Join me in celebrating the wonders of our world.
People should like what I like not what they like. Only my opinion matters and if you have any interests I don't have then you are wrong and should change that.
How much of an asshole do you have to be to hold an opinion like this? Some people enjoy sports and some people like polishing rocks. The world is a diverse collection of people and just because you might not care for the Olympics doesn't mean its wrong for any one else to do so.
I'll care when the Olympics are ON Mars.
...the Olympics (and all sports) existed for the sole purpose of preempting my favorite TV shows.
The Olympics can teach us all kinds things about government corruption and inefficiencies. How the IOC is allowed to change the laws of a country ranging from IP to road laws. How the IOC gets a country verging on bankruptcy to spend around 20 billion dollars so that the 1%, the VIPs, and a token handful of us rif-raf can feel important. One the best examples of this is how the VIPs got so many tickets that the stands are half empty for venues that are "Sold out". Another is that the city with some of the worst traffic in the western world created lanes just like they had in Soviet Russia that were limited to well connected people.
All this to watch various countries send their OCD athletes who have nearly destroyed themselves try for a medal.
Bread and circuses.
The only silver lining is that the company that was an inch away from privatizing the police in Britain has humiliated itself to a point where this won't happen. Another study in where a company that can't find its ass with its hands was able to schmooze its way into the corridors of power and milk this single schmoozing skill for billions.
If the money and effort (considering what that many athletes working out for that many hours must also be worth) put into the Olympics were instead were to have been put into science and space exploration we wouldn't be watching a car sized robot touch down on Mars but would be watching the amateur Olympic team representing Mars participate in a scaled down Solar Olympics.
So, if the golf analogy is correct - the rover was launched from earth and, after that, has not made use of any sort of propulsion technology for steering, course correction, or braking? That IS pretty impressive...
I'm a pretty pathetic golfer, but I bet my scores would improve dramatically if I had a team of people steering the ball after I hit it. Getting it to New Zealand might still be a bit of a reach, though.
(The rover is darn cool, seriously. I'm more interested in it than in most of the Olympic events.)
#DeleteChrome
No, no - the Australian term is "budgie smugglers".
I reject the premise of the article.
First, as has been said in a couple other posts, being interested in the Mars story and the Olympics are not mutually exclusive. I like space exploration stories, and I like sports. There is no reason to have to pick one over the other unless we are talking career choices. Recreational level interest is a completely different story.
Second, the sports guy in me (exercise physiology degree, and I've coached a college sport) doesn't buy the idea that the accuracy or endurance is more important or impressive in the Mars mission. More impressive endurance based on raw miles is just silly. There wasn't constant acceleration during the whole voyage. Shooting from the hip, I would imagine it was a whole lot more like a lot of initial acceleration and then months of coasting. Similarly the accuracy comparison is almost laughable. Sure, if you just look at the amount of significant digits on what bearing you're hitting a golf ball the comparison is appropriate, but the Mars mission wasn't exactly launched by someone manually adjusting angles with the same amount of fine tuning as someone with sausage fingers playing Angry Birds on an iPhone. Never mind that the Mars mission wasn't likely to have any unexpected external forces altering its trajectory, and it most likely had some means of course correcting in transit.
Beyond those absurdities, it is the standard media treatment of space exploration stories. It's a brief mention of what is happening that leaves more questions about technical details than it answers. Please leave the unnecessary comparison and competition of two noncompeting, unrelated events. Now, if you want to talk about the technological dark ages the NBC executives call home...
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
...is that golf isn't currently an Olympic sport (but has been added for 2016), and isn't being contested in London this year.
And yes -- sometimes it is these little details that can cause the non-scientists to completely ignore you. Some will feel there isn't much use in hearing your message about space science if you can't even get the details right about what is happening here on Earth.
Yaz
After the disappointing, and frankly insulting performance put on by Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera (who I watched while growing up as local TV personalities) and the execrable Ryan Seacrest interviewing Michael Phelps instead of showing the 7/7 memorial, and the NOT EVEN 5 MINUTES BETWEEN COMMERCIALS, I'm done with the Olympics for this go-round.
So much this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/five_ring_circus/2012/07/28/nbc_olympics_coverage_meredith_vieira_think_it_s_cool_to_be_ignorant_.html
FUCK NBC. Fuck all of this crap.
Yes, the Mars Landing is much more relevant. I would rather watch grass grow and paint dry than turn on NBC coverage of the Olympics.
--
BMO
I see your point, but there's something to be said for being the pinnacle of human physical fitness.
It's exciting to see the fastest person alive.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It's exciting to see the fastest person alive.
I've seen him. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe enjoying a pint, when I saw someone with a wallet in his hand running, oh, about twice the speed of Ben Johnson, leaving a pair of pursuing cops in the dust. They wouldn't have caught him on motorbikes.
No, wait, fast as he was, he's not the fastest person alive. That would be the trio of Stafford, Young and Ceman. It's amazing that these ~80 year olds hold the record.
Diplomacy and international politics are also both important for our continued survival. For that matter so is the global economy.
All the science in the world isn't going to help us if we blow ourselves up, or our system of managing resources and man power falls apart. You ask someone who works in either of these areas.. I mean who is really involved.. and they will pretty much parrot _exactly_ what you said, with appropriate fields replaced.
Everyone wants to put their area of interest in a special category. Everyone can make a case that the thing _they_ care about is really the most critical and anyone who doesn't get that just doesn't understand reality.
For many discipline (all?) we already have known for a long time the limit of the human body. We don't test for that anymore. What we test nowadays, are two factors : how far can we push materials to get an advantage, and, to a thankfully lesser extent, how far can we push human modification/doping and get away with it without getting caught.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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1 - Organized sport has largely supplanted war as a means of getting one over one one's rivals. Imperial pissing contests now involve athletic achievement, not who can build the biggest battleship with the biggest phallic symbol guns. I think humanity has moved on quite a bit in many ways, and organized sport is one tool that has helped.
2 - The opening ceremony of the Olympics gave pride of place to honouring two engineers who changed the world: Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Tim Berners Lee. (If I were directing I would have tried to add Frank Whittle in there, but I'm not griping, I thought it was a powerful show and I found it very moving. Probably helped that I watched the BBC's coverage, anyone who watched it on NBC seemed to complain about it.)
Yes the Curiosity mission is exciting and I'll be following it with great interest. But I'll also be watching sports. Hell I'm even going to watch tomorrow's Formula 1 Grand Prix. It is possible to do two things at once, especially when there's about 7 billion of us.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Will these discoveries lead us down a path to confirming life on other planets? Wouldn't that be a good story that might make people care about science?
Actually, I think the possibility of discovering life on other planets is exactly what drives a disappointingly large percentage of the population to *not* care about science. Might mess with their whole world view and all that. Some of them haven't fully accepted the round-earth-orbiting-the-sun thing, life eveloving on other planets would just lead to apoplexy.
I imagine you're going to need some fairly fit people to survive a trip to Mars without their bodies failing.
Actually no. That's why this Mars crap is not interesting to me.
If they did it right it would be interesting to me. Example of doing space stuff right: work on building a space station with artificial gravity[1], better radiation shielding.
Once we have that technology working in practical ways it removes the main obstacles to long term human space travel and inhabitation. It would no longer matter so much that it takes months to get to some place in the solar system.
Next step would be tests on space-based mining, factories and farms[2]. These can be done concurrently.
Then space colonies, and self-sustaining space colonies.
In contrast much of the human space travel stuff NASA is working on appears to be mostly dead end stuff. You are not going to have a viable human colony using that tech (drugs to slow wasting and bone loss etc). It can come in handy for specific cases, but it's pretty stupid to waste time, resources and money on this sort of stuff at our current tech stage. All that NASA talk about going to Mars is stupid at this stage too- Mars is a gravity well. Only do it later when the space colonies are rich and thriving (from mining the asteroids and trade).
[1] Example option for a small station is using tethers and a counterweight.
[2] Fish farms could be one of the many good farm options. Sunlight + CO2 + nitrogen+iron for algae.The fish (e.g. tilapia) eat the algae, the humans eat the fish. I suspect fish farms could be fine in low-g regions of a space station/colony (water oxygenation could be a problem in zero-g regions, but maybe the fish and their food might be able do fine in an air-water foam). It'll cost a lot to get that much water up into space, but we should later be able to get lots of water from asteroids and similar. So initial ones would be small scale test farms which should cost less to set up.
Farms on the Moon might be worth considering - but there are many unknowns - lunar soil is very very different from earth soil. Might have to stick to hydroponics till we figure more out.
British SAS are far superior to the US Navy SEALs. (As are the Australian SASR, but even they pale in comparison to the pom's SAS)
The olympics have been around since the 8th century B.C. Exactly how many wars do you really think they have stopped? Probably none at all.
I see your point, but there's something to be said for being the pinnacle of human physical fitness.
The pinnacle, is of taking the maximum amount of drugs, without being caught at it.
It's exciting to see the fastest person alive.
It's even more amazing, that they are still alive, given the amounts of Bath Salts that they are 'meth-ed up on.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some athletes wig out and do some Florida Zombie style face eating. Now that would deserve a gold!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Nonesene, it's largely driven by fashion. Being anorexic, which many girls aspire to, is not healthy. Marilyn Monroe was somewhat chunky by modern standards. Go back a few centuries and fat chicks were teh hotness.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>> pinnacle of human physical fitness
It's more like extreme genetic freaks of nature pumped on top of that full of various performance enhancing drugs. A freak show.
The olympics have been around since the 8th century B.C.
Actually the games as we know them started in the 1890's. There was a bit of a gap between the Fourth Century and then.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Tell me how many straight males you know who subscribe to Vogue. Women care about what other women are wearing, but it's for social purposes, not reproductive.
The number of anorexic 'heroin chic' Kate Moss types in the world are very few and far between, people have to pick and choose from the gene pool of reality, not whatever you're seeing on TV.
moox. for a new generation.
"but there's something to be said for being the pinnacle of human physical fitness."
and it should be held in a lower value than the pinnacle of human intelligence. But we all know that intelligence is looked down upon and a useless trait of physical fitness is held up as the ultimate a human can be.
Sorry, I don't need to chase down gazelles for food anymore. Highly physical fit is a useless trait to humanity nowdays.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't have to convince me.
I was more interested in the dry toast I had for breakfast than this orgy of corporate excess they call the "Olympics".
There's nothing going on in London but product placement and exploitation. This is the first Olympics in which I have absolutely no interest. There is nothing in these games about human achievement or "sport" that has not been crushed under a blanket of ad revenue and messed up priorities.
Even the athletes just make me sad for how badly they are being used.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Go back a few centuries and fat chicks were teh hotness."
It usually depends on what is "easy" - when food was expensive and harder to get, being fat meant you were rich and special. Today the cheapest food is the most unhealthy crap that makes you fat.
Just like once most people were outside working in the fields etc, and they all got suntanned - so the in thing was to be as pale as possible. That showed you were rich and powerful, because you could stay inside and didn't have to work.
Today most people have to work inside, in their small offices and thus are very pale. So being tanned means you have time to be outside.
History shows how odd these humans are
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Yeah! I stay away from freaks by spending my time reading Slashdot comment threads.