Wingnuts everywhere.
May. 2nd, 2011 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn one of my other lives, namely the political one, I come in regular contact with a host of ordinary Americans. Most of them are Democrats, but that's because the Republicans in Washington's 33rd District are so damned dysfunctional that, despite the presence of the regional airport in our district, not one of our Republican candidates could find his ass with both hands, ground radar, and the guidance of two concurrent towers.
I've documented before about local political activism is rife with crazy folks, and sometimes it just gets worse. One woman I run into regularly has suddenly gone all Area 51, convinced completely about the whole "little green man" story in its entirety. She also started evangelizing the story to everyone at a recent meeting.
I finally sat down with her and tried to lay out all of the problems with the story from a completely scientific standpoint: about just how far it is from one star to another, how much energy it takes to move a ship capable of carrying and provisioning beings even the size of Kouryou-chan across interstellar distances. I described the state of the art in building a station within Mercury's orbit to harvest solar power and convert it into antimatter, then shooting that antimatter at near-relativistic speends along a line of flight to provide fueling stations, so the ship wouldn't be weighed down with it's own fuel, and even then how it would take twenty years to get to the nearest star and back, and the nearest inhabitable star was centuries away. And finally I got into the whole bit about how our bodies couldn't stand the strain of such travel, no organic being could. The physics of interstellar travel made little green men impossible.
She held onto every last little straw, arguing in favor of cryonics, warp drive, cyborgs. I said, "If they're cyborgs, they've gone all the way. They're completely machines, even their minds are made of silicon and glass. Meat is a terrible way to get from one star system to another." I talked about the different time scales one has to embrace to be an interstellar traveler, conceptual language problems, the whole gamut from Clarke to Egan to Watts.
A week later she was still talking about little green men and flying saucers.
I don't know why I bother.
[Edit: *Giggle.* I just noticed that audacious is twistedly psychic today.]
I've documented before about local political activism is rife with crazy folks, and sometimes it just gets worse. One woman I run into regularly has suddenly gone all Area 51, convinced completely about the whole "little green man" story in its entirety. She also started evangelizing the story to everyone at a recent meeting.
I finally sat down with her and tried to lay out all of the problems with the story from a completely scientific standpoint: about just how far it is from one star to another, how much energy it takes to move a ship capable of carrying and provisioning beings even the size of Kouryou-chan across interstellar distances. I described the state of the art in building a station within Mercury's orbit to harvest solar power and convert it into antimatter, then shooting that antimatter at near-relativistic speends along a line of flight to provide fueling stations, so the ship wouldn't be weighed down with it's own fuel, and even then how it would take twenty years to get to the nearest star and back, and the nearest inhabitable star was centuries away. And finally I got into the whole bit about how our bodies couldn't stand the strain of such travel, no organic being could. The physics of interstellar travel made little green men impossible.
She held onto every last little straw, arguing in favor of cryonics, warp drive, cyborgs. I said, "If they're cyborgs, they've gone all the way. They're completely machines, even their minds are made of silicon and glass. Meat is a terrible way to get from one star system to another." I talked about the different time scales one has to embrace to be an interstellar traveler, conceptual language problems, the whole gamut from Clarke to Egan to Watts.
A week later she was still talking about little green men and flying saucers.
I don't know why I bother.
[Edit: *Giggle.* I just noticed that audacious is twistedly psychic today.]
