New article here on Mélange!
NASA's Perseverance mission blasted off in 2020, and its rover arrived on the Martian surface in 2021. Its mission: To find evidence of past or present life and collect those samples for a later trip back to Earth.
If the space agency accomplishes this mission, and I think they will, then it will be one of the greatest feats of space exploration to date. However, I do have a few questions for NASA about the effort, questions such as:
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
WHY DO THAT?
AND WHY DID YOU LAUNCH IT IN THE YEAR 2020?
This is like a bad science fiction movie, folks. 2020 was the year when COVID-19 became a full-on pandemic, when often-violent civil unrest, and when natural disasters reminded all that Mother Nature still reigned supreme.
In short, 2020 sucked—epically.
NASA is just begging for it, and Hollywood has consistently shown that when a space agency tempts fate, it's the public that meets it.
In film, it never goes well when people try to bring back alien life or try to study and preserve it if it's already on Earth.
Never.
How bad could it get thanks to NASA's actions here in the daily trainwreck that is the 21st century? Let's consult a table of several major sci-fi movies and see how "meet the aliens" usually turns out:
Well, that was disturbing.
See what I mean?
We're dooooomed!
Even though the samples aren't due back until 2031 or later, the mission was launched in the phenomenally horrible year of 2020, so it'll be just another notch on the tally stick of one of the most horrific years ever experienced by humanity.
It won't just go wrong. No, it will probably go terribly wrong, unimaginably wrong, tragically wrong. Almost nothing good came from 2020, the year when fecal matter hit the high-speed fan almost every day and in almost every way possible.
And despite NASA's technological expertise, Hollywood says we're doomed.
This means we have just three options:
Cancel the mission; or
Fudge the lift-off date to some year other than 2020; or
Cancel the sample return mission and lose anything the rover saw.
Oh, third choice, how I do love thee.
~END~