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Being the rabidly nationalistic patriot that I am, I heard with
delight that NASA had landed an $820 million dollar golf cart on Mars.
Always get the best, I say. The planet has always seemed to me a
reasonable place to play golf. I bow to no one in my mindless
enthusiasm for technotrinkets. And I quietly gloated a bit that
America had done it and not, say, Vanuatu or Papua-New Guinea.
Then I thought: Wait a minute. Mars is a gazillion miles away,
probably whole whoppaparsecs or gigawhatsises. Mostly you can’t even
see the place. NASA says it shot a golf cart all that way and hit the
right crater? After the thing bounced all over the place wrapped in
inner tubes? The federal government did this—that couldn’t make a
functioning doorstop?
Nah. Buncha engineers just wanted funding.
When I was eight I used to throw rocks at the hub caps of passing
cars. Those cars were all of twenty feet away, not going over forty,
and I had a pretty good arm for a tad. I almost never hit those hub
caps. Of course after every rock I had to hide in the woods till the
driver stopped looking for me. Still, I couldn’t do it.
Neither can NASA. You can’t hit something that far away, going
that fast, in all whicha directions, with a golf cart. It ain’t
doable. Any fool can see that if he thinks about it, and probably if
he doesn’t.
And those pictures they always show up after they get they spend
$820 million, or more likely put it in a Swiss bank—they really do
look just like Arizona. They’re always grainy, because grainy
pictures look authentic. Besides, if the resolution was any good you
might see jeep tracks, or a distant sign saying, “Pepi’s Miracle
Cat Tacos.”
I have another question. Why do we think Mars even exists? Have you
ever been there? Know anyone who has? Have you ever even seen it?
Sure, maybe some teacher pointed to a dot in the sky and said,
“Yay-us, brother, thass Mars. Fulla them little green rascals. Got
canals all over the place too. Go fishing.”
Nah. Red speck. Could have been a red balloon with a flashlight
inside it, or just about anything. We think Mars is there because
people tell us it is, people who got told by other people who didn’t
know anything about it either. Sure, astronomers say they see it all
the time, but they get the money. An astronomer would see Mars if you
put a bag over his head.
Those pictures mean nothing. I’ve seen pictures of an island full
of dinosaurs that look more real than some of my old girlfriends. They
stomped around and ate people, and if you showed them to a
four-year-old kid and told him they lived in Africa, he’d never
think to doubt it. Isn’t it so? I mean, a dinosaur is no stranger
than, say, a four-foot iguana, or a Pacific tube-worm living inside an
underwater volcano, or Michael Jackson, or Democratic social policy.
Fact is, NASA could show us a piece of Nevada with a shopping mall
and a K-Mart, tell us it was Ganymede, and we’d rejoice because
we’d Discovered Life. That’s assuming you believe there’s life
in shopping malls. We’d believe it because we believe anybody in a
white coat. Then we’d have to give the space people a billion or so
more so they could send a complicated prongy space thing to
fingerprint everybody on Ganymede and search for weapons of mass
destruction.
Tell you what: I don’t think the solar system exists. The only
part of it you can see is the sun, except in Los Angeles. Long time
ago, that fellow Galileo hollered that he’d found planets, and a
bunch of moons, Ganymede and Io and Callisto and Europa, sailing
around Jupiter like they had something in mind. (How did he know those
were their names? Was it written on them? None of this adds up.) We
believed it, and then we believed in Pluto which is so far away that
if it was there, you couldn’t tell.
The truth is that we have nothing more than fifth-hand evidence for
most of the things we believe in. None of it would stand up in a court
of law. Atoms, for example. We all know that they are really, really
tiny things that have electrons flying around them like disgruntled
hornets when you shoot their nest with a BB gun. The definition of an
atom is that it’s too small for you to know it’s there. Which
means we don’t.
Attorney: “Mr. Reed, how do you know that these…er…atoms
exist?”
Me: “Well, this teacher I had said she read in a book that some
scientists wrote about some experiments she said some other scientists
did, she thought, a long time ago, somewhere she’d never been.”
Other attorney: “Objection. Hearsay.”
Me: “But it was in a book….”
Other attorney: “So are Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”
Scientists don’t really know anything. In chemistry they have
this thing called Avocado’s number, which is how many atoms there
are in a mole. Seriously.
Six-point-oh-two-three-times-ten-to-the-twenty-third atoms per mole.
It makes no sense. What size mole? Obviously a huge ubermole with
great hairy forepaws like scoops (the only kind I get in my lawn) has
more atoms than a dwarf mole or a baby mole. Why moles and not, say
flying squirrels?
But what I want to know is, who counted those atoms?
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Fred, be reasonable. Physicists
know this stuff.” No. They’re crazier than Rasputin’s loony
brother, who used to stand on his head in a corner and sing the
Marseillaise.
They have what they call the Wave Equation, invented by some
disturbed German. The Wave Equation is full of second partials
derivatives, and del-square, sigh, and all the orphan constants in the
world. What is says is that you can never be sure where atoms are.
Aha! Then how can you count them?
The wave equation says—honest, they told me this—that an
electron can be here now, and over there later, but it can’t ever be
in between where the plot crosses the x-axis because when you square
zero you mostly get zero. (Unless you went to school recently, in
which case it’s up for grabs.) You believe that? I don’t.
What I think is, NASA made up the solar system. It was to get
grants. When the Feddle Gummint wants money, it makes things up—the
Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, nerve gas, Mars, the universe. It always
works.
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