Copacabana

You can't handle the truth

I have always maintained that the NASA Space program has been doing more up in the final frontier than they let on -- it is a tragic fact that humanity tends to operate under the mass hysteria umbrella, giving governments reasonable excuses to keep potentially scary information out of the general public knowledge base.

This article from NPR about emerging methods for knocking asteroids off their potential collision courses with earth is fascinating to me. Not so much because the technology exists but because we all want to delude ourselves that this technology is being developed on the fly. Um, maybe Reagan called it Star Wars as a nice, big, fat red herring. We can handle warfare but not uncontrollable, against-all-odds, natural phenomena that could exterminate us quicker than any nuke. War in space? Yes, that's what we're preparing for...uh-huh...I'm comfortable with that.

It reminds me of my theory of American propaganda, i.e. the ability of interest groups to fund certain films as a way to get the information out to the general public in a less threatening, more exciting and big-bugdet blockbuster kind of way. Case in point: There were at least two movies that I remember coming out within a few years of each other wherein an asteroid hit earth and the race to save humanity was on. Armegeddon and Deep Impact, I think. Anyway, I remember thinking at the time, "That's random." That kind of topic was even off my radar and I kind of go the extra mile, ya know?

Morgan's known about this for a while...

But here's the thing -- it wasn't too long after that that it was obscurely published in a science journal (you'll have to google this one because I can't remember -- and please correct me if I'm wrong!) that there was -- guess! -- an asteroid that had been on a trajectory toward Earth that had thankfully not smacked us. And --here's the best -- they had been watching this bugger for many years. It's just an interesting timeline is all I'm saying...

No it's not paranoia! It's dissemination of information. And a very effective method at that.

posted by Lola @ 8:49 AM