Bullets: tongue biters, London crackheads, and the return to the moon
Woohoo bullets!
- NASA is going back to the moon. On paper, anyway. Probably most of you have heard about this by now, so I’m not going to do an extensive writeup on it. Ars has the best coverage, as usual, and New Scientist also has san article on it.
- A few days ago, I wrote about Cymothoa exigua, the tongue biters who strangle or eat (it’s still unclear) the tongues of their host fish, substituting themselves instead. But why stop at one tongue biter when you can have two? That page also has more pictures of normal fish tongues and other cutaway photos of the fish.
- Apparently one in every hundred Londoners could be a crack cocaine user. Sounds like they’ve got the same problem as Italy. Maybe Virgin should start a cocaine refinery: Virgin Coke.
On the subject of NASA returning to the moon… while this is nice to see, and the moon provides a good stepping stone on the way to Mars or a similar mission, I can’t help but feel just a little disappointed. While no one in my generation has ever seen anyone walk on the moon, we have seen the Apollo 11 video footage. My mom was 14 when Apollo 11 landed, and I’m 22 years old. It’s been decades since we’ve been to the moon, and now, all of a sudden, we’re going back and there’s this big to-do about it, as though something extraordinary is about to happen.
We were on the moon in the sixties. Almost 40 years ago. Why should we be excited to go back to a place we went to two to three generations ago? This is not new or spectacular. This is redundant. Unlike Halley’s Comet which comes around once every 75 years, and is constant, science and technology is fluid and always progressing. The moon is the best we can do, now, 51 years after we did it the first time? Please tell me I’m not the only one disappointed by this. Is a moon landing something that’s only going to happen once every 50 years, so we should simply get used to it and enjoy it while it’s here? Or are we going to make a decision to finally push beyond the bounds of Earth and keep going instead of throwing up our hands only to sit back complacent in the knowledge that we “did it” and there’s nothing more to be done?
I realize that the space race was a political tool more than anything else, and that it served its purpose (along with the nuclear arms buildup) in bankrupting the Soviet Union, but I would have expected a little more out of NASA than merely a plan to return to the moon 50 years after the first landing. If not NASA then a private corporation, though I suppose that (right now) there isn’t much money to be made in space simply because of the prohibitively high cost of transportation. Anyway, so is this return to the moon to accomplish some major political end, or is it finally in the interest of science? I don’t know the answer, but I hope it is the latter, because if it is, there’s actually a chance that we’ll stay there or even push on instead of returning to Earth once it’s “mission accomplished.”
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