..... as I prepared for another day on the hamster wheel, I listened to the Radio 4 morning news and current affairs...and was surprised by some of the contrasts and similarity in the todays story headlines...
Of course there was reference to last weeks shootings in Newtown, there was Savile.....agaaaaaain....there was the BBC news night saga attached to the Savile debacle, there was plebgate....[more to follow on that one me thinks] and then this
What surprised me was the graphic detail Radio 4 made of how they were killed...and killed for what ?? trying to save children from illness, surely no life is worth taking for that....is it ? What of course gave these killers their motive [?] was the US using a spurious inoculation programe to garner DNA details, to then hunt and kill Bin Laden....so of course the killers are now bound to say these latest but honest inoculations are another US military exercise.
There was also some report about pink jumpers but I think by this time my brian was on autopilot and shut my ears down to such nonsense but finally there was....
The story about finding a planet that could possibly support life like on earth but this is the catch
But it got me thinking, there was this bloke prattling on about how this planet was so exciting.....but it's 12 light years away......yes 12 no less...what this means in reality is that the light they saw, which makes this planet visible, started it's journey in the year 2000, so they are seeing the planet from 12 years ago..... and of course if we wanted to send a man to the planet get this.......
The space shuttle travels at around 17,000 miles per hour. Light travels at 671,000,000 miles per hour. Yes thats right, 671 million miles per hour....now that is fast.
So I reckon it would take the space shuttle 53+ years to get there. Now you couldn't send a baby or a young child, so the astronaut would need to be say 25-30years old. So by the time he arrived there he would be say over 80 years old. Having gone all that way he would want to stay for a couple of weeks or so, so by the time he decides to head back, he'd be into his 80's but ....wait ...hold on one more minute...... by the time he got back to planet earth he'd probably be dead.......aaah thats a pity......so scientists are p!ssing about worrying about planets that are 12 light years away...... and yet we can't even get the one we are on, right.....
I think scientits would be best served worrying about the here and now...not the never evers...... Why are we worrying about going to other planets when we are making such a mess of this one ?? It's not rocket science you know !
I did think about mad mad world by tears for fears....but then I thought aaah Gary Jules did that one.....and so maybe this one is more appropriate somehow.
