Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best-selling show.
Is there life on Mars?
The talk of the day is that the latest Mars rover, Curiosity, has successfully landed and is now driving around on the Martian surface. I'm finding it fairly interesting so far, and it'll probably turn into a story worthy of great attention over the next few months or so. Given that the shuttle programme has ended and there are no plans to return to the Moon in the near future, us firing a robot onto another planet to take pictures is pretty awesome.
I do however have a very mild beef with NASA, that being the price tag for this operation.
2.5 billion dollars. Or 1.6 billion crisp English pounds.
To get this into some kind of context, if I were to get my old job at the pub back and work full time, every single day until I was 90, starting now, I would earn around £1.2million.
This is less than 0.01% of Curiosity's budget.
It might afford a pair of fluffy dice or a space-proof novelty air freshener to hang on its camera.
This is less than 0.01% of Curiosity's budget.
It might afford a pair of fluffy dice or a space-proof novelty air freshener to hang on its camera.
Put differently, I would have enough money to send a robot to Mars in about 91 and a half thousand years.
This translates to approximately 38 million shifts.
This is also before tax and without considering any rent or food purchases I may have to make in the next 900 decades.
There are other things I'd rather was done with that cash. Third world stuff and the like. Education. Global warming. The global economy. Exploring is important. But getting our shit sorted here should be our priority. Not even seeing news footage of how happy all the NASA tech nerds at Houston were after landing successfully could change that. Everyone's a fan of seeing nerds happy on their TVs, but not at the expense of the crucial things.
You better find us some fucking Martians, Curiosity.
