For every Steve Irwin, there ought to be a Jeff Smith out
there. Instead of being a hardcore
naturalist that jumps on crocodiles ten times his size, Jeff is just a
practical, everyday guy that happens to have an Australian accent and is a
total pansy. He makes it up as he
goes, but there’s none of this ‘Aint she a beaut!’ crap.
Because she’s not a beaut, Steve. In fact, Steve, she wants to eat your goddamned face off.
Nope, Jeff will go into backyards with a team of cameramen
and haphazardly bring us closer to nature, not much closer though. “Oi!” he’ll say, pointing to a spider,
“this here is the North American Arachnus
Humungous or as it’s better known Big Spider. They are supa aggressive, so I need to be extra careful to
get in close,” he’ll say while standing three feet away, giving the camera guy
room to zoom in on the confused, motionless spider. “I would grab him, but he’s got these big fuck-off
prehensile fangs that will pierce up to 7 inches of Kevlar, killing me almost
immediately.” And the spider, no
bigger than a thumbnail will casually wander away in the opposite direction,
completely unaware of the attention it attracted. “By crickey!” Jeff will shout, jumping back like Jerry
Lewis, “that was a close one! Now
let’s go find the extremely venomous Burrowing Owl, which I’ve been told is the
deadliest creature in the Western Hemisphere.”
I would watch that show with a vengeance.
Darwin’s Watch is
the third book in Terry Pratchett’s The
Science of Discworld trilogy.
The chapters bounce back and forth off each other with narrative and
hard science. The title is an
homage to Paley’s Watch, which makes
it clever on all sorts of levels.
Paley used the analogy of inferencing a watch maker from a watch to the
relationship of God and Man in poor attempt to disprove evolution. Current arguments use the irreducible
complexity thesis in place of a watch, but fail to see that it’s the same idea
only in a different context.
We’re pushing back boundaries here people. In the age of information, ignorance in
a choice.
Speaking of, Buzz Aldrin said, “Exploration is wired into
our brains. If we can see the
horizon, we want to know what’s beyond.”
To that end, I’ll tie in M^6 with this quote:
I've
never been afraid of the dark, though I do have a touch of claustrophobia. Sometimes when I go to the beach I
stand on the shore, feel the hot sand between my toes, look off to the horizon
and see the vast blue ocean carry off into the distance. Then I think, huh, the land just
kinda stops right there. I'm
literally out of land right now, there's not enough of it. Then I look up and realize that our
breathable atmosphere only extends out to seven kilometers, past that it's a
vacuum. Past that vacuum is the
limits of our solar system, then our galaxy, and oh my god, what do they
mean the universe is expanding?
There are boundaries? It's
not finished yet? I don't care if
I'll never live to see the edges, the universe is too small!
C-3PO postulated
that the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720:1. We (that is to say, legitimate
scientists that are not me or anyone I actually know) have crunched that number
down to 100%. Yes, the only time
you’ll crash into an asteroid is if you are aiming directly for it and
sometimes not even then. Too much
space is the problem.
Which makes space
kind of boring.
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