Every time we do something amazing in space, some douche weasels crawl out of their douche weasel caves and piss all over it. Usually it’s some bitching about how awesome life on Earth would be if we’d spent all that money on whatever they happen to think is important, like education or homelessness or socks.
I saw this gem on Facebook the other day:
1. Curiosity cost about $2.5 billion, which is $97.5 billion less than Mr. Happy Thumbs says. Math is hard.
2. That $2.5 billion didn’t create Martian jobs. It created American jobs, about 7,000 of them. Most of them weren’t permanent, but hey, what is?
3. If we spent $2.5 billion on socks, you know what would happen? People would still eventually need more socks, because socks wear out and people continue to need them, and more people are born, and they need socks, too. And we wouldn’t have a rover on Mars. Just a lot of sock puppets.
4. Space exploration happens in a vacuum, but technology development does not. Thanks to space exploration, we have heart pumps and infrared thermometers, ATMs and GPS. We have safer school buses, robotic surgery, better mattresses, kidney dialysis and better home insulation. Before we even got our happy asses off the planet, it proved the Earth is not the center of the universe — an important step in the ongoing process of figuring out what the hell we’re all doing here.
5. We put a MOTHERFUCKING ROVER ON MARS. We’ve done this before. I hope we’ll do it again. But let me repeat myself in case you weren’t paying attention: WE PUT A MOTHERFUCKING ROVER ON MARS. We managed to launch a hunk of metal and electronics out of Earth’s atmosphere and through space, and land it safely on another planet. This from a species that just 400 years ago figured out how the circulatory system works.
Wait. I’m not done.
We made this robot capable of telling us, from 150 million miles away, what’s going on around it. I don’t mean like, “Hey, guys. It’s kinda cold here.” It can take pictures. It can take pictures of things and send them 150 million miles back to us. Let me put that into perspective: If your grocery store is a mile away, you would have to walk to the store 150 million times to walk as far as Curiosity just traveled through space. Oh, and it can collect and analyze rocks to see whether Mars ever supported life.
(Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL)
If thinking about the feats involved in getting this picture doesn’t make your heart stop, you are clinically dead.
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