Sometimes, when the political news is slow, I wander over to the science pages to seek inspiration. That’s where the real news is, the stuff that is going to impact our lives in the decades to come in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
The comments over there fall into several distinct categories. First, there are some people who are really interested in science and some of them know a hell of a lot more about it than I do. Just like on the political pages, you’ll sometimes learn more from the comments section than from the articles. Then, there are the inevitable Geek jokes, about boldly going somewhere and Klingons and Uranus and whatnot. Of course, left and right wingers alike will try to twist any discovery into a political joke. In the article yesterday about Mars Rover Curiosity (or Mr. C, as I like to call him) making some major discovery they aren’t willing to announce yet, guesses ranged from Jimmy Hoffa to Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
There are always a couple of people who say “This is useless. I can’t see why we’re spending money on this when we have real, immediate problems.” Fuckwits. Knowledge is always good. We don’t always know immediately how a specific piece of it will be used, but we know it adds to the pile of human knowledge that is steadily being accumulated and brings us one step closer to our goal, which is, of course, a total understanding of the universe and everything in it. If you don’t share that goal, we are not on the same page at all.
We can’t help being ignorant, but wanting to stay that way is another matter.
Then, there are the religious types, for whom every scientific endeavor is “interfering with God’s plan.”
Anyway, I’ve noticed a couple of universal rules.
1. The more esoteric the science, the dumber the comments. No surprise, when you think about it. When we don’t understand something, it’s almost instinctive to make a joke about it and, if we don’t understand it in the first place, it’s likely to be a really lame and irrelevant joke.
2. The God thing (and this goes to that nonsense comment Marco Rubio made the other day, too.) I can’t say all religious people are stupid, because I’ve met plenty who aren’t, but extremely religious people are extremely stupid. I think we can infer a basic rule from this: the more religious you are, the stupider you are.
Before all the religious people jump down my throat, let me say I think there is a cut off point. If you think the stories in the Old Testament are literally true, you either don’t understand the meaning of the word literal or, yeah, sorry, you’re way dumb. Please, do not breed.
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