If you’ve been battered by the slow dripping tap of YouTube videos about the interstellar comet 3IATLAS, you can say you’ve suffered. The sheer range of tired recycled storylines is straight from the 1950s.
It’s “technological”.
It’s about to collide with Mars.
It’s an alien craft.
It’s emitting nickel.
It’s shrouded in carbon dioxide.
One of those links says that 3IATLAS is actually pretty typical, and there are a few of them in the area just about all the time.
So why the sheer mediocrity of the disinformation?
These outbreaks of carefully considered commentary come after the equally uninformative, unimaginative, and stunningly unscientific garbage regarding Oumuamua.
Can we be a bit more uselessly infantile, please?
We just don’t get enough useless infantilism in this world anymore.
It’s not like we’ve got a swarm of mindless geriatric plutobrats inventing utter nonsensical fiction every second, is it?
Is there one single science fiction cliché missing from this shopping list of slop?
We need to put this featherweight pseudoscientific noise in context with current information quality standards.
Mindless irrelevance and made-up trash are fine for politics. Of course the inhabitants of Ohio suddenly eat pets. Thousands of people are dying for any conveniently located ideological reason according to somebody.
Sure.
Nobody cares because they might miss out on the next things that come on the screen.
A lot of “news” is produced much like toilet paper.
It all looks exactly the same, and there’s only one thing you can do with it.
But:
This comet is supposed to be about science.
It’s a working version of interstellar phenomena and there’s a lot to be learned.
3IATLAS Is actually interesting, unlike ready-made direct marketing for wannabe cosmological bin liners.
Astronomy is a strange science. It’s all about discovery, not drab dreck drivel. It includes real people that take the science seriously.
Some of these people are probably very well brought up and far too polite for their own good. That’s possibly why they don’t tell people who produce “information” which equates to poultry feces where to go.
We’ve now had 10 years of “post-truth” and compulsory disinformation. It’s all now very stale and it’s on its way out as tolerance of it goes extinct.
Astronomy, sure, anytime. Astrobabble, no, never.
