Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
YES!
Wheels and shadows on the sands of Mars.
A lot of people worked flippin’ hard and staggeringly well to accomplish this.
To them, Congratulations. And thankyou for sharing the ride via NASA-TV and the intertoobs at their best.
2 billion dollars, about $7/citizen. What an amazing deal we have in NASA. Will never understand the Conservative values that demean these expenditures.
We had NASA TV streaming online and it was just cheers and cheers and, “We got pictures!” and more cheers. It was so exciting!
P.S. Love that it’s all PDT!
How does this make you feel better? Is it because people in NYC are cheering for something that is enough removed you can feel proud about it? What the fuck – I’m glad NY can fatigue themselves into believing that this has some relevance in the midst of us bombing Pakistan. You need to wake the fuck up and look around you (and I mean, outside of New York City – yeah, people live outside that shit hole.)
@Lindsay
1. You need to recognize the fact that people can be aware of and interested in more than one thing at a time.
2. You need some education in science and in history. This Martian landing is humanly relevant from more than one perspective.
3. You need to look up the word “fatigue.”
1. You apparently don’t understand why humanity can be proud of tonight’s historic landing. You need to take your own advice.
Lindsay: Er… given that both Greta and JPL live on the west coast, three time zones away from NYC, what the heck does it matter?
Anyway, it’s important to celebrate the good as well as condemn the bad. Both for emptional survival, and to have a goal to move toward rather than just a a desire to upset the status quo.
The latter leads all too easily to destructive nihilism: it’s all corrupt, so let’s just blow it all up.
@Linsay
You seem to be incapable of paying attention to more than one thing at the same time. Must suck to be you.
golly, Lindsay, nice post. IT’s replete with the narrow arrogance, self-righteousness and ignorance that you could be a poster child for any anti-science advocate. It’s a shame that Pakistanis are bombed, thanks to the religious nuts who want to kill or convert all of us. If you can’t accept that one good thing isn’t negated by one bad, then you have no business in using anything that benefits you, in your hair-shirted ash coated vanity.
I saw this baby launch 8 months ago, but I was asleep while it landed T_T
Heard on the radio this morning, “Blah blah shooting, blah blah terrorist, and finally the successful-” The rest was was drowned out by my cheering.
Go Go Curiosity! Show us what you’re made of, baby!
Who needs church? This is SO much more amazing than anything they try to tell you there!
The awesome level here is off the scale.
Re the PDT – realize now it may not have been obvious. I’ve was born and raised on the right coast, have lived half my life on the left and I stilllllll am irritated by the fact that just about everything that happens nationally seems to be on right-coast time. We left-coasters (pity the poor Hawaiians) almost always have to make the adjustments. We are the ones who have to get up early to call New York. They don’t work late to call us.
So, anywho, JPL is on our time which meant I could watch the landing in real time at a good time, and I can watch the news conferences on my time.
It’s an itty bitty thing, smaller than trivial, but one of my hot button issues (so I’m shallow, what can I say?)
p.s. Obama has proposed cutting NASA budget by 40% (so how many of the hundreds who worked on this project will be out of work? And where do you go if your expertise is landing robots on Mars?) and cancelling our participation in two multi-nation projects. All because Conservatives want to protect the wallets of billionaires.
I loved the if-we-saw-that-in-a-movie-we’d-say-“yeah, right” Skycrane lowering of the lander. I loved the worldwide geek bonding. I loved that everyone was picking heartthrobs from the JPL mission control crew — and that (aside from Mohawked Nerd-Stud Bobak Ferdowsi) everyone had different favorites. I loved that people instantly started comparing Curiosity to a teenage girl when it took a picture of itself first. I loved that Curiosity stuck its landing like an Olympic gymnast and got the same reaction from the rest of the team. I loved the moment when I realized that the odds of success were good, considering that it was just a big game of Lunar Lander.
Happy happy happy for NASA and nerds and science this morning!
And hoping we find some bacteria up there this time. Or a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue.
Rebecca,
It appears that there is a foreign life form:
http://www.twitpic.com/ag34l4
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
[…] immediate reaction to this was speechlessness. Go read Jen McCreight[3] and Greta Christina’s[4] posts. That’s basically similar to how I feel right now. Also read Adam Lee’s thoughts […]