Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards
was nearly predicting the end of the world today.
It didn’t happen.
People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.
What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.
The LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) two-ton Centaur rocket booster disappeared into the perpetual shadow of Cabeus crater without even a thud. (Just imagine Slim Pickins from the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” riding it down and shouting “Ya-hooooo!”) Its shepherding probe, serving as cameraman, fell silently out of the black lunar sky a few minutes later and was swallowed by 4 billion year old regolith.
This much anticipated space drama went off for the public like a lead balloon as observatory after observatory failed to seen any evidence of skyrocketing plumes of dust and ice crystals, so dramatically previsualized in NASA animation made for TV. Even Hubble Space Telescope seemed to come off empty handed as scientists poured over the data looking for signs of water vapor on the moon – the purpose of the experiment.
Just minutes before its ultimate death, the shepherding probe did send back an infrared view of a hot spot where the Centaur impacted. The greatly blown up image showed the crash site as one pixel wide. Imagine, one pixel, not a nuclear mushroom cloud.
It would be an understatement to say that this was anticlimactic to the Internet bubbleheads who whined and bitched in the buildup to the LCROSS impact. The much anticipate collision sure wasn’t the exploding moon so dramatically illustrated in the “Time Machine” remake in 2002, or the late 1970s sci-fi soap opera “Space 1999.” Reality sucks.
I have lamented in previous blogs about how science illiterate and frivolous our culture has become. This was dramatically demonstrated in some of the public reactions to the LCROSS. It shocked and saddened me.
NASA, once the crowning jewel of American technological prowess and scientific boldness, was lambasted in blog after blog as extravagant, paramilitary, and arrogant. That’s because in our Bart Simpson culture being stupid is cool and smart is, er, being “stupid.”
Pop culture portrays scientists as geeks to be distrusted. Some people are so fearful of science they respond to it purely with doubt and ridicule. That is, except when geeks can engineer IPods and IPhones -- which only work because some eggheads a century ago invented quantum physics.
Some of the most caustic comments I’ve seen:
What difference does the result make anyway? Does it have the potential to stop global warming, or something?
NASA geeks think we should all pay for their cool firecrackers in space.
It’s time to pull the plug on NASA; they can all go home and play with their slide rules.
This is horrible and irresponsible and beyond dangerous. And all for, what, WATER!
Add to this the ongoing ridicule from those journalism flunky bloggers who find NASA a high-visibility target to go after for relentless accusations of government secrecy, cover-up, and excesses.
Even worse is the mawkish environmentalism some chat board discussions tried to graft onto space exploration. Many folks assumed NASA was sending nukes to the moon in violation of the U.N. Space Treaty, not to mention the “natural laws” of the universe. So they got all huffy-puffy about our “right” to “despoil” other worlds.
Guess what folks? Our universe is a violent and deadly place to be feared. Worlds are destroyed every second -- literally -- by supernova blasts, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, and cosmic collisions. There is nothing our puny technology can do to upset the moon or other planets. (But if you place 8 billion people on a single planet, that’s a different story!)
Some LCROSS critics took a giant leap back to the Middle Ages by expressing a pre-Copernican view of the moon as mystic and romantic. They even ignored Newton’s Laws of Gravity that make it crystal clear the LCROSS impact energy was Lilliputian for something the mass of the moon.
Face it, the moon is simply a ball of rock with an ice-cold heart of solid iron. It has survived for 4.4 billion years, and will far outlast our brief tenancy on planet Earth.
Though all of us who viewed the impact were disappointed there were no “instant results,” the mission was a good cold splash of reality for the science-phobics. This event came off for what it simply was, an innocuous experiment done out of pure curiosity.
Regardless of the science outcome, LCROSS embodies the spirit of exploration and inquisitiveness. It demonstrated that science is a careful step-by-step process to be respected for it perseverance.
In belittling human curiosity, we are belittling ourselves as an intelligent species.
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