This week's award
for most stupid symbolic gesture I hereby hand to good ol' NASA.
"Beaming" a Beatles song "directly into space". Wow. And aim it at the North Star too. Because Polaris (a rather unlikely star to communicte with, I guess) is probably packed with aliens who will tune in to Sir Paul & gang 431 years from now. Right. Are we surprised they choose the Beatles? Not very, right, it is straight into the generation growing up with Glenn & Co, the Generation Which Refuses To Step Down.
Can't NASA devote themselves to these things fully? You know, flying billionaire geeks into the stratosphere for some overpriced seconds of free fall, scattering ashes of dead SF notables in Spaace, dump little flags on rocks, sell Martian craters and campaign for having spacecraft named after Orson Scott Card and characters on SFTV shows. It could be like a Really Sad lobby organization onto itself.
Aw hell, now I get an image of the space enterprise in 2058. All symbol, no substance, and a lot of little geeks sending them letters to make the dying agencies properly acknowledge their own lack of life by commemorating their special interests.
"Beaming" a Beatles song "directly into space". Wow. And aim it at the North Star too. Because Polaris (a rather unlikely star to communicte with, I guess) is probably packed with aliens who will tune in to Sir Paul & gang 431 years from now. Right. Are we surprised they choose the Beatles? Not very, right, it is straight into the generation growing up with Glenn & Co, the Generation Which Refuses To Step Down.
Can't NASA devote themselves to these things fully? You know, flying billionaire geeks into the stratosphere for some overpriced seconds of free fall, scattering ashes of dead SF notables in Spaace, dump little flags on rocks, sell Martian craters and campaign for having spacecraft named after Orson Scott Card and characters on SFTV shows. It could be like a Really Sad lobby organization onto itself.
Aw hell, now I get an image of the space enterprise in 2058. All symbol, no substance, and a lot of little geeks sending them letters to make the dying agencies properly acknowledge their own lack of life by commemorating their special interests.