Posthuman Blues

Why must NASA spokesmen resort to tacky comparisons in order to garner excitement for what the vast majority of people view as forgettable science-fair exercises? The present "Mars rush," consisting of four new spacecraft (if all goes well . . .), has already been compared to NASCAR, for god's sake. And a NASA tech is on record bragging that one of the new rovers on its way to the Red Planet is the extraterrestrial equivalent to a "monster truck."

Enough of this condescending crap. I'm willing to bet that only a very small percentage of the "monster truck" crowd even realizes that we share this solar system with eight other (known) worlds. I doubt that alpha proton X-ray spectrometers and aerobraking especially excite them. In fact, I can quite easily imagine beer-swilling crowds in acrylic ball-caps paying to watch fume-belching monster trucks pulverize sissy NASA hardware under their tires. (Imagine the "Flesh Fair" sequence" from Spielberg's "A.I.")

One of the things I like about Britain's Beagle 2 lander (shown below) is the British scientific community's relatively savvy public outreach, free of NASA's typical "expert" pontificating and bureaucratic baggage. Even its website -- with its own domain name -- is excruciatingly hip by NASA standards.





I read somewhere that the word "posthuman" is becoming increasingly mainstream as a reponse to heightened awareness of biotechnology (i.e., cloning). While this is encouraging as an example of meme-dispersal, it's also sort of sad. The term is bound to get cheapened and watered down for easy public consumption. How long until McDonald's starts selling Posthuman Happy Meals? How long until Honda's Insight hybrid car is advertised as "ideal for today's posthuman lifestyle"? I'm sorry, but we're not there yet. Barring cataclysm, we might get there in the not-unforeseeable future . . . in which case I think the last things on our minds will be fast food and cars. Not to mention "monster trucks."

In the meantime, on to Mars.