> If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering
> or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the
> Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system,
> is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
"Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
"You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
"Fools.
"The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy."
Well, it recovered pretty well after a 6 mile wide rock going millions of miles per hour hit it right in the face and cause one of the biggest extinction events in its history.
If that didn't destroy its habitability for good, I'm not sure we'd be able to do it.
"The momentum would be enough to knock the Earth into a different orbit—but the Earth is no more. The energy deposited is ten thousand times greater than the planet’s gravitational binding energy, and the planet is blown into an expanding cloud of plasma, with a particularly energetic streamer extending away from the far side of the impact site, out into space."
So many things to say, but really not the right forum.
Sigh. I laughed at this, it's a fun and smart response targeted to a sub-community that barely broke the threshold to get that response.
But let's be real. If your standard of 'blowing up the planet' is somewhat lesser than 'the Republicans'...it might make you feel better to say it but history shows both of them are plenty happy dropping bombs for no justifiable reason.
How about the Mexican-American war, where US soldiers crossed the Mexican border, Mexican troops chased them away, the US decided this was a Mexican invasion, the US declared war, then we took the entire South-Eastern United States from Mexico. All because WE invaded THEM first.
Ah, but it was the Manifest Destiny of the USA to conquer North America and Mexico happened to be in the way. How much more justification do you need?
(Note, I grew up in Canada, which became a single country for mutual defense in case the USA wanted to repeat the incident on its northern border. Details are a bit more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it.)
How about the most recent US-Iraq war? The one justified by "OMG WMDs and Al-Qaeda", and a vial of scary stuff waved around at the UN by our Secretary of State?
Merely saying a few things and seeing what might stick in order to justify your actions doesn't automatically qualify them as justified or reasoned.
While there are jokes within the response, I do not believe this to be a "joke response". The points he makes are good, and the call to action regarding careers in math and science is a fantastic way to handle a response likely to be read by 14-16 year olds throughout the reaches of the internet.
Paul Shawcross is still a long way from making amends for what he's done to help cripple our human space flight program, however.
The "Shawcross Option" might have been for the best for all we know. The shuttle was designed to be expensive, doing things that it never really needed to do. If NASA had ended the shuttle program sooner we might very well have a better space-exploration-only vehicle out on the tarmac right now instead of... what do we have now? Oh, right, nothing.
I would add that the emphasis on non-human exploration seems to be about the best possible PR and science move for NASA, it has been cheap and generated positive buzz in the media as mission after mission has exceeded expectations.
Is 96 the real number? Since the search bar always says 'featured responses'. When you click the bottom bar to see more responses it does some delayed-JS-scroll action and shows all of 8 more results.
Unless you're really trying to increase the drop-off rate on each click, why make it so crappy? How many sites set their pagination to 8 items, unless they want users to linger on what was just delivered?
They don't seem to be very serious about the petition site. Good PR, and I guess I'm glad they have the option, but it's kind of a joke.
Perhaps only in the larger umbrella. As in, "we have a site where you can sign petitions, and if you get 25k signees, you are guaranteed a response".
It sounds good in theory. But nobody in proportion to the general population is actually using it (much less heard about it), so it's just a cutesy PR move at this point.
I think we're about to reach a point where internet humor and government and humor finally converge. Congress has basically been trolling the American people (minus anyone actually getting to laugh about it) for most of the last decade, and they're finally getting trolled back by the likes of internet-driven campaigns like Mint the Coin.
I think this is a great development. As a DC resident, I can attest to everyone here taking themselves far too seriously.
Not in all countries, in fact, in most countries governments consist of goblins. I think there is a correlation between the national wealth and the percentage of normal people in the government.
"The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it."
The White House blog doesn't link to the source article, so here it is:
Estimated cost of death star $850,000,000,000,000,000
Estimated current US debt $16,437,339,543,399
Cost of Death Star per US citizen $2,705,101,099
Estimated US debt per US citizen $52,311
Stopped reading at "Death Star". Kind of ashamed that I blew 20 seconds typing this. Also ashamed that probably 50K in tax dollars were blown in responding to it.
I am proud if $0.00043 of my taxpayer dollars went to this. It gave me more value than I get from the vast majority of $0.00043 increments of my taxes.
($50k/$2.9 trillion government taxation revenue * my approximate tax paid yearly = $0.00043)
Now I am as critical as anyone of frivolous public spending, but how in god's name did you get to $50,000 for this? At worst, this took one Friday afternoon of this government employee's time. Just how well do you think this guy is paid?
One afternoon of this guy's time at $50,000 would mean an annual salary of $26,100,000.
(261 workdays per year * 2 * $50,000)
In all likelihood, this was either done on this guy's own time or took like an hour....
Ahhh, the Chief of the Science and Space Branch at OMB perpetuates achieving "the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs". Allow me to author a petition...
