[extropy-chat] Re: SPACE: where are we?

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sat Feb 7 12:39:31 UTC 2004


On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 10:48:47PM +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> Maybe I'm overly naive, but I assumed that the people at NASA/ESA/etc
> are busy performing actual scientific work and don't waste too many
> resources on feeding details to a largely desinterested and

You're describing a catastrophic failure of PR. I agree, the scientific
community typically are lousy reporters. Worse, they've got a bad case of
deficit agnosia.

> scientifically illiterate public, where you have to start out each

PR isn't necessarily about science. It's there to motivate the public to
continue consider science is worth funding. Travelling to distant worlds is
an aspect which is least abstract, and can be used to keep the public
excited.

Failure to provide site updates on a daily basis (not necessarily to to do
with the current state of the mission) is a PR failure.

> time with an explanation that you are not talking about the candy
> bar, and no, no humanoid aliens are going to be discovered.

Deconstructing stuff from Hollywood and elsewhere and debunking popular myths
about Mars isn't particularly difficult, and could have been part of the
mission site.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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