what is SAM going to say?

andy1033 said:
Personally i do not care too much, i think nasa are just some sort of show for the public, that we are still doing something. I would say the people behind the scenes have already answered the big question here.

Personally i care not what the thing is they are teasing about.

Like for instance, mankind had been to the moon before 69, and with better technology. Mankind is more advanced than they let on.

So the stuff on mars and nasa is mute for me, what ever they have found out already we will never know.
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Why bother posting? Truth Seeker. Go with mute.
 
Tiassa said:
D'oh!

You are correct. Thank you for the correction.

Now ... now I just don't know what to think!

Oh, wait, I'm not that confused.

I don't know, though. It's just that I have this state of mind I call pleasantly disappointed. It doesn't come up too much, but this is sort of a naked example. I do want what NASA has to be mind-numbingly cool. We need that, to a certain extent, for our society; we need to be really psyched up about something cool and noble. And if what NASA has turns out to be real, but "merely cool in the obscure", I will certainly be pleased, but will also feel silly for having such high expetations, and a little bit disappointed that it was "only that cool". Pleasantly disappointed.

And we're going to have to wait until the stakes are really super-cool, I think, before the contamination question sinks in for the general population.

I'm not sure what I want from NASA on this one. I mean, I have faith in their calculations if the risk analysis says go forward with the potentially contaminated drill bit. But there is no avoiding the underlying ethical question and what it signifies for the incoming results. I cannot not recognize the problem, as such.

They can give me lots of cool stuff with this one, but the really cool stuff treads squarely into the contamination question.

And then there is this almost amusing notion that it really is a first-world problem, that I can be fretting about an expensive robot. Except it's not. It's a question on a scale humanity at large only considers in the most abstract of senses, or, perhaps more likely, not at all. But NASA, at the same time it is looking for a reason to alter the paradigm of human self-perception, could also be on the verge of committing the biggest blunder in human history. And that's a bit mind-bending. It's an interplanetary question. I mean, just how many times have interplanetary questions really come up in the history of the Earth?

But we'll have to see what comes. Maybe the preceding paragraph will turn out to be moot.
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I doubt there's going to be any blunder. If further analysis shows the initial evaluation was wrong that's what will be said. If it turns out to be wrong I still would like to follow the process 'all the way through' since it will be a positive comment on the scientific method and probably pretty interesting.
 
NASA scientist farts and reporter replies "does that mean you have found methane on mars?!?!?"
 
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brucep said:
I doubt there's going to be any blunder. If further analysis shows the initial evaluation was wrong that's what will be said. If it turns out to be wrong I still would like to follow the process 'all the way through' since it will be a positive comment on the scientific method and probably pretty interesting.
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Reporting error by a scientific journalist. What else is new.
 
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