Witches! Trees that talked! Bad luck from broken mirrors! Dead men walking! How could those blinkered folks of the past have believed such nonsense? Too bad we can't go back and smooth out the rough edges in the past, the way we've built ourselves a snug, warm comfortable today! But sometimes I imagine that a portion of our comfortable existence is ... just a tad illusory.
Modern myths are formed by a stubborn collective conspiracy to exempt certain ideas from rational scrutiny. Once they secure a spot in our minds, they begin to grow some rather gaudy appendages, but we only become more accustomed to them.
Here's a modern myth we can't stop...NASA. The purpose of NASA was fairly clear: to prove that we could burn our money in a bigger and more splendid bonfire than the Russians could. And aside from winning a meaningless race, we'd also get, as a FREE GIFT (after all, we were going to waste the money anyway, it's not like we're paying extra!) a generation of highly trained scientists.
OK, so we did manage to blast a lot of money out of a cannon, and the tattered dollar bills that fell haphazardly back to earth did give us Tang, countdowns, monkeys in space, and Nixon's "greatest week since the creation of the world". Is that what we wanted?
Didn't anyone notice that the day after the moon landing was... just like the day before? The utter banality and pointlessness of the entire affair ought to have become clear; was it Neil Armstrong's botched attempt at a timeless quote? The lunar buggy? Hitting the golf ball? And this was the high point!
After that, NASA went on a thirty year decline, because even congressmen felt that there had to be some limits to how much money they were willing not to spend on highways and bombs and Medicare. And even NASA felt the glory days were gone, and that it was going to have to turn into a "profitable business". When it became clear that there was no market whatsoever for the services NASA could provide to manufacturers, they realized that there was still a business they could go into: the entertainment industry!. They were reduced to sending up teachers (on the pretense that it was "for the children") and superannuated headstrong Senators from Ohio (on the pretense that it was "for the old people").
But hope still burned for some, who believed that the International Space Station would give NASA a new purpose. And what was that going to be, exactly? There was some vague talk about new medicines, and really round ball bearings. But in fact, it's all a joke. The sorry state of this gold-plated hamster house in the sky confirms and repeats the NASA curse. No amount of money, not a trillion dollars, not a quadrillion dollars, will ever be able to hide the fact that there is not one reason for people to be in outer space. Not scientific, economic or political.
But the NASA apologists have to believe that they're doing it all for a good reason, and they want you to think so too. So we're back to the last flabby enthusiasm: it's all about the search for life. Please don't cut our funding, we're going to find it out there. I can only say that it's at least refreshing that no one at NASA speaks of "intelligent life", leaving that to the lunatic SETI cult. But frankly, I wouldn't think it much of a bargain if my 90 billion dollars brought back a steaming bucket of intelligent worms from Mars. What we're much more likely to get is in fact yet more grainy silhouettes of rocky planets 25 million years away from us that could harbor life.
My recommendation: Wake up and face the facts. Shut down NASA. Then go out and look up at Mars (if you even know where to look) and think "There might be life there". It won't cost you a dime.
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