The Astronomy Thread

Saw this pic over on an Ars Technica article. I like the guy at bottom left. He is saying in his head, "You do realize this will be addressed, right?"


Of course it's thrilling. But my god, if I was on a boat around there, I can guarantee this: I would not be anywhere near this action. I would not want to be in visible sight of it. Here is my outlook.

The human species or its tool-using cousins and pre-cousins have been around at least a couple million years. We've managed to be multi-faceted tool users for a sliver of a fraction of that time. Robust tool using and written-language equipped societies are 10k old.

Plato was telling people how not to be retarded about 2.5k ago. A bare handful of centuries pass, another fellow argues that being a retard actually rules. What can I say? That's history. It is what it is.

Francis Bacon first used the phrase "knowledge is power" (someone here has that as his tag under his avatar) at the dawn of the scientific revolution 400 years ago. 200 years ago it was common that people thought humans come in things called "races." 90 years ago an otherwise unremarkable human went insane and got 67 million people to believe another race was out to get them. They killed 6 million other humans.

Yet here we are. Hundreds of thousands of generations, the vast majority of them where if you lived to 25 you were the luckiest of the lucky. Then, that insane guy? If he had his way, a lot of the brain power that created the 20th century would have been snuffed. Fortunately he was as retarded as he was insane, and declared war on Russia. It's an Iron Law: never get engaged in a land war in Asia. Having dodged that bullet, and then saving all that delicious brain power, we, here, are among a bare few generations -- a temporal speck in our history -- that are bearing witness to the birth of human space exploration.

The entire species should pat itself on the back. And, here is the kicker. If you are a Westerner, you get to say, eat some Newton, bitches. If you are an American, you get to say, damn am I happy we saved all that sweet, sweet brain power from the insane man, and fuckin A, I believe that's our flag on the moon, thankyouverymuch.

In light of all this awesomeness, which literally only a microscopic portion of the total human species will be able to say, "I was alive then!", get your goddam Chris-Crafts out of the way.