(no subject)

[hyuri]

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover-A, "Spirit," landed on Mars almost five hours ago.

Nobody cares.

Sadly, it seems that even my parents—people who have loudly and passionately bemoaned the fact that our moon is a dusty and forgotten conquest, and that the allure of space seems gone—don't really give a damn about this. When I excitedly spun in my chair to tell them, their attitude seemed to be, "Yeah, so? What are you telling us for? Shut up and let us watch TV; this is utterly pointless." Utterly disinterested, dismissive.

It seems that achievements off Earth are irrelevant unless a human is right there, achieving. Unless there's a human being on the actual site, nobody cares.

Comments

[novacheckers.livejournal.com]

I care I care! Kim and I looked at the first photos this morning. They're neat!

Still, I'll be more impressed when they send four rovers to the same area on Mars, and have radio-control kart races on Mars. You know the geeks at NASA would be all about the Martian R/C kart action.

[wildtigress.livejournal.com]

YES! And there could be two astronauts to a car, and they could make blue sparks that make them go faster! XD

[moonbunnychan.livejournal.com]

My dad was watching live internet coverage from Nasa for HOURS last night

[science-vixen.livejournal.com]

Actually Live humans being there doesn't make that much off a difference either.

The only reason people watched the Apollo XIII mission was because they were in trouble. Almost no-one knew the Columbia was up on a mission when it disintegrated during reentry.

People don't take space serious anymore. The fact that they are being inundated with mostly unwanted information over 100+ channels of TV & Radio, several kilos of paper adverts and god knows how many spam messages and uninformed web pages does not help.

The sum result is that people just don't care.

Personally I'm thrilled.