HuffPo commenters bring the crazy to LCROSS

So, tomorrow, at 4:30 AM PST the LCROSS satellite will impact the Moon. (I’ll be up with my telescope to watch should be GREAT viewing conditions) Below is just one of the more sane comments posted on the web site (yes, this was one of the more sane ones). The scientific ignorance on display is absolutely breathtaking.

Bomb the moon? Are we insane? Are we space cowboys now? Why is everything we do to be bomb?
The moon shares a delicate etheric web with earth, which is why she controls the ebb and flow of tides, the menstrual cycle in women, enhances growth at night, responsible for gravity, and excites passion to poetry when gaze at. Bomb the moon? How about Bomb NASA! and save trillions of dollars of taxpayers money to be use to pay off our debt, help create universal healthcare, stimulate economic growth, and a dozen other matters of national urgency. NASA is not necessary anymore. It is outmoded, outdated, and without any real purpose.

Here are the numbers my colleague, Richard and I worked up:

   73459000000000000000000 kg  (Moon)
                      2366 kg  (Maximum mass of LCROSS Centaur Impactor)

                      3000 kg  (Hummer H2)
                         0.00000000000000009662532841448 kg (the "bug")

Mass of an average bacterium: 1 picogram. Weight of the "bug" above: 0.09662532841448 picogram.

So... if 1/10th of a bacterium hits the windshield of a Hummer, does it swerve?


Part 2:

So, I got up at 4:00AM (ouch!) and took my telescope out in the backyard on the hopes of being able to see the impact and the plume. Unfortunately, because I’m in Portland, it became overcast about 4;25 so I wan’t able to resolve much of anything. Frustrated, I went back inside to watch it on NASA TV which turned out to be anti-climatic. In my hopeful naivete that intellectual honesty is not just two, completely unrelated words in the dictionary, I went back to HuffPo to see what, if anything, the doomsayers were saying on the subject. Needless to say, my hope that someone anyone might have the courage to say “well, guess I was wrong” was ill-founded.

One person, SUSANINCOLUMBIA, posted a heartfelt and completely wrong-headed lament stating that she would “never be able to look at the moon in the same way”. Another poster, posted that “even though there was no reaction yet” there was sure to be one because “for every action there is a reaction”. The irony of her invocation of Newton’s Third Law was, apparently, entirely lost on her. I attempted to explain that there had been a reaction, which was the debris plume ejected from the lunar surface, and that this was the very reaction that NASA and every scientifically literate poster (all 9 or 10 of us) on that thread had predicted there would be.

At this point I began to despair. Not because the Moon would have its revenge in some vague, unspecified manner, but because I had believed that after the Bush administration and the reign of the non-reality based conservatives, the Progressives had ‘gotten it’ and decided to be the reality-based political faction in America. HuffPo has convinced me that, in fact, reality has no political constituency in America. These same people, who I have no doubt express frustration that conservatives reject the science of climate change for no scientifically adequate reason completely ignore the math and the physics of the LCROSS mission. Instead of ‘being humble before the data’ (which is readily available) they instead go on about vague prophecies of doom that will befall humanity or, just as stupidly, they draw a distinction between a meteorite hitting the Moon and a satellite hitting it as if the physics of those two events are fundamentally different, governed by different laws.

At one point, I had an epiphany that some of the opposition was the reflexive anti-Americanism that conservatives so often accuse liberals and progressives of indulging in. I began to muse upon the question of “what would the reaction be if it had been, say, India or Pakistan or China or Brazil?” I imagine that there would have been nary a peep or worry but because it was Americans this action had to be opposed. Why? Because it was, laughably, militaristic. That’s right, gentle reader, a physics experiment no more different, really, than dropping a stone into a lake observe the water ejected was an act of aggression. It made me embarrassed to be a Progressive, quite honestly.

I have known, for quite some time now, that Americans are scientifically illiterate but every time I think I have a grasp on the breadth and depth of the problem, something like this happens and I realize that we are in much more dire straits than I had imagined we could be.

To reiterate, opposition to the LCROSS mission falls into the falling species

• The Moon will be knocked out of its orbital position.
• It will throw off “the balance of the Universe” or the tides or gravity or women’s menstrual cycles or astrology.
• It is an ‘act of aggression against the beautiful moon, the only one we have’.
• It will lead to “Wal-Mart and Disneyland on the Moon” (SUSANINCOLUMBIA again)
• The militarization of the moon (Einstein10--on whom more later)
• “A reaction and it will be bad”
• It will throw the moon off by ten or twenty feet and this will affect the tides (Einstein10 again)
• We have no right to mess up the pristine moon until we learn how not to mess up the Earth (The typical anti-space program, anti-science mantra of the scientifically ignorant.)
• The Americans are doing it therefore it is bad.

The problem with all of those arguments is that not a single one of them is specific. In fact, to call them vague is to give them altogether too much credit for being coherent thoughts at all! What’s more, they are all based on pure emotionalism. Not emotion but emotionalism. By that I mean that they are driven not by any facts carefully considered but merely by “I don’t like this”. All of the reasons are, in point of fact, backfill to attempt to justify a position that is entirely unjustifiable.

One poster even invoked the ‘hollow moon’ idea. Yes, the purpose of the mission isn’t what NASA stated it was but to determine if the Moon is hollow. Naturally, he invoked the ‘Great Scientific Conspiracy’ to cover up the truth. Now, what I find fascinating about this little gem is that it perfectly illustrates one of the problems with anti-science in almost all of its forms. On the one hand, scientists are, if anti-scientists are to be believed, a bunch of incompetent boobs stumbling about trying to find new and ever more expensive ways to piss of Nature. On the other hand, they are fiendishly secretive and capable of maintaining such perfect operational security that the NSA, KGB and Mossad can only look upon their opacity with awe, envy and wonder. It would appear that the scientific community can carry on conspiracies of such fiendish and byzantine nature that only the most dedicated can even suss them out or understand their convolutions. Yet, these same scientists can’t seem to get correct the mass of the moon, or explain its tidal locking, or the flight of bumblebees, or the evolution of species. One would think that their utter incompetence would preclude being able to maintain such incredible levels of secrecy but apparently not.

Then there was Einstein10 who does what anti-science proponents do so much, namely invoke the name of a Great Scientist, almost always Einstein and then quote him, almost always out of context, from his letters or from “Ideas and Opinions”. All this while being almost entirely unaware of or interested in his prodigious body of scientific work or the implications thereof. Einstein10 was one such poster on HuffPo. When challenged, he would quote Einstein at us but when challenged to provide a single prediction of specific doom OR to even give a description of either Special or General Relativity in his own words, he would either disappear or simply quote more Einstein. It is insulting to the memory of a truly great scientist to treat him this way in the name of “respect” but there’s not much that can be done about disrespect for the memory of the dead.

I will say that the last 36 hours on HuffPo has given me a much better understanding of why PZ Meyers of Pharyngula and Steven Novella of the New England Skeptics Society are encouraging scientists and scientifically literate people to boycott Huffington Post. In-between the decidedly pro-woo spin given to articles related to medicine and health and the pervasive anti-science culture there, I imagine that both Drs. Meyers and Novella are trying to keep a generation of scientists from going to an early grave, either from repeated blunt-force trauma to the head from banging on the desk or from aneurisms vessels brought on by sudden spikes in blood pressure.

Oh and although I doubt anyone reading my blog needs to be told this, the Moon does not cause gravity. Gravity is caused by the warping of space-time by mass. The Moon and the Earth are bound to one another because of their gravitational masses, and both were created by gravity and held together by gravity but the Moon does not cause gravity here on Earth and the Earth does not cause gravity on the Moon.

Stay rational.