From Motherboard.tv
“I’m sorry if they are disappointed.”
That’s how Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, actually responded to a USA Today reporter at a press conference today, in response to a question about how doggone annoyed newspaper readers and internet users were that NASA didn’t discover a giant space alien, but only a measly microbe that can live on arsenic alone, a finding that blows apart our definition of Life and could help us find aliens in the future.
She had to remind everyone, half sheepishly, half Kindergarten-teacher, near the end of an hour-long press conference, that “that there are lots of people … that see this as a huge finding.” The exchange is here, at 4.55:
The announcement, and the wild speculation it generated ahead of time, underscored just how excited the public is about science – provided that science involves Eureka-type discoveries of space aliens, likely using robots or machines that could swallow the Earth in a black hole. Blame may lie with the blog editors and owners reporting on that kind of science. They may argue that they’re only following public taste, but they’re also probably not talking about science. Science would be, as an excited Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the NASA astrobiology research fellow who led the research, said meant “thinking about life… and asking questions, simple questions, with simple experimental design.”
NASA also isn’t faultless. The agency’s valiant but unsatisfying efforts at educating the public about what they do seem to have gotten lost somewhere between debates about the need for the space agency, confusion over its mission, and a public that’s more interested in new Earths and aliens than in elusive molecules or weather patterns.
It’s that audience that NASA may have had in mind when it wrote that tantalizing email on Monday. It began,
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
See, there’s your problem right there, NASA: use the words “evidence of extraterrestrial life” in the first paragraph of your email (“you” being the world’s leading space agency, which never officially talks like Agent Mulder), and you are going to send a million thumbs a Tweeting and RTing all around the black hole of the Internet.
See Ten Quick Reasons We Really Want There To Be Aliens
This problem – aiming to excite an over-stimulated public by sensationalizing science – isn’t new for NASA either. When the head of the NASA / Harvard Origins of Life project gushed about finding Earth-like planets at a TED talk in Oxford, the Web went crazy over the prospects of making contact with E.T. or simply finding a new escape pod for humanity. The first problem was that those planets haven’t been found yet. And when they are found, as they likely will be, and then verified, that won’t mean we’ve found anything like oceans or an atmosphere at all.
"We [scientists] like to err on the side of caution," John Geary, one of the Kepler co-investigators based at Harvard, told Motherboard on the phone back then. "Too often people get carried away and announce things that don't hold up in the end, and it gives everybody a black eye. Things like cold fusion had an enormous splash in all kinds of media several years ago. It's never been shown to have actually occurred."
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Exploration should occur only if corporations see an imminent cash flow coming over the horizon. The technology invented for the program was not foreseen to be as important as it turned out to be. To be shortsighted is to be a Republican conservative in this country.
You journalists cannot get anything correct. The strain of bacteria can use arsenate in place of phosphate to a limited extent. It still requires some phosphate.
I read story after story before I found one that seems to be complete and correct in the BBC. And I am still not sure if this is correct - this bacteria uses arsenic and light in photosynthesis. It can use arsenic to some extent in place of phosphorous, but phosphorous is still required. Apparently there are some metabolic pathways that can substitute arsenic and some that cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorous.
That is incorrect. I have a collection of 1,200 peer reviewed journal papers on cold fusion, copied from the library at Los Alamos, and 2,500 others from proceedings, national laboratories, EPRI and other sources. This literature describes thousands of positive replications of cold fusion. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/
http://www.lenr-canr.org/News.htm
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/
"NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe."
I guess the words that come prior to "evidence of extraterrestrial life" were completely ignored by the media.
And so now we have this article with a misleading headline...about other articles with misleading headlines...about a misleading press release from NASA... Is there perhaps another level of "misleading" that I've missed?
Bait-and-switch? Over Hype? Has this always been the way of the media? Or is there something to our gut-feeling that something is amiss and gone awry these days?
I've had people say to be that NASA is educational...for who...we cannot afford to provide decent educations on a primary level much less space...we need to grow up and figure out that right now under the current circumstances, NASA is a total waste of time, money, and resources..
And if there are other life forms and they are advanced, they will find us and the costs will be next to nothing…meantime even if we did find other life forms in space, we cannot ever get to where they are in our own life times…so…so what…it is all meaningless and useless plus we already have Teflon…
MRIs
Lasers
Water filters
Bar codes
Broad spectrum lights that mimic sunlight
This does not nearly to justice to what NASA science has done for modern life. See the following links for example.
http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-nasa-research-affect-my-life.htm
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
The dreamers of Science Fiction have made everything from cellphones, smartphones, laptops and satellite communications to biotech possible because they implanted these ideas and innovations into the minds of engineers the world over.
The wars in Iraq & Afghanistan are costing us trillions in BORROWED money. www.costofwar.com That money dwarfs by orders of magnitude the money NASA spends on basic, important and necessary science.
The fact of the matter is, basic science has led to millions of jobs for this country through it's eventual application, China and other developing nations recognize this, if the US is to maintain it's accustomed position in the world it would do well to remember it.
http://www.economist.com/node/3061258?story_id=3061258
This is it people. Get your houses in order on where you want our future to be and what you want it to look like for our children.