Someone is unhappy that scientists have found water on Mars. It’s Rush Limbaugh. As he says, he’s always right, and he has seen the truth.
…this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda.
Yep, he caught us. It’s entirely true. Leftists are planning to use facts, science, and evidence to promote a reality-based agenda.
Just now the most abused word in the language is “agenda.” And how the knowledge of water on Mars could advance anything at all on Earth other than our understanding of Mars is beyond me.
In the alternate universe inhabited by Rush and Alex, Mars would make a great place for all the FEMA camps they’ve been warning us about.
@#1 That’s just your anti-agenda-hating-folks agenda talking, peterh.
I weep for humanity.
What a sad and tiny world these people live in.
I guess anything not from the mythical/fictional babble is part of the “leftist agenda”, whatever that means. Pitiful display of ignorance.
@peterh: Yes! I had the same thought today: just hours ago, I realized that “agenda” has become the go-to word to cast dispersions on anything. As in, everything _I_ do is part of a plan or a purpose or whatever, but everything _you_ do is part of an (ominous music!) “agenda”…
I’m probably late in noticing this. But there it is. Even _water_ is now part of somebody’s nefarious “agenda”.
Rush may have a point and not even realize what it is. The discovery of alien life on other worlds would put many fundamentalists and creationists in a bit of a bind. If we find even microbial life on a world as hostile as Mars this ups the chances of more complex lifeforms on other extrasolar planets. And with that we must all come to terms with the really tough issue — technologically advanced aliens. They must surely exist somewhere in the universe. And with advanced aliens who needs Jesus?
Voila. There’s your leftist agenda. We go from Martian bacteria to no Jesus. It works for me.
My. Sounds villainous. I’d like some detail about this agenda advancing technique, I’m always up for new innovations in agenda advancing. Yep.
I’ve lost track. Is this the week we’re supposed to be referencing the Leftist Agenda, the Athiest Agenda or the Gay Agenda.
I must be getting old. Last week I mistakenly picked up a copy of The Woodworker’s Journal and accidentally built a birdhouse rather than undermine prayer in public schools.
Running water after massive climate change and , if there is [surviving] microbial life, then it does not matter what we do to the environment because life will survive. It’s a rightist agenda that NASA is advancing and Rush is wrong as usual.
mothra:
I expect most people on this planet would be rather concerned about just what specific life will be surviving, so there’s no need to get your agenda in a knot.
From post #6 “I guess anything not from the mythical/fictional babble is part of the “leftist agenda”, whatever that means. Pitiful display of ignorance.”
I wish the left was also bereft of pitiful displays of ignorance.
I like to think I am a leftist/liberal/humanist (however you want to put it) due to being skeptical, rational and able to evaluate evidence.
But these are rarely the reasons others come to the left, it often seems people just feel like being humane to others is the right thing to do. Which of course it is and people behaving like this will hopefully have positive outcomes.
But does anyone else get really annoyed (possibly irrational so!) by the warm fuzzy feeling type comrades who have not arrived at their political position via skeptical/rational means?
For example I voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the recent labour leadership elections as I believe the evidence shows austerity economics is a sham and that he at least offers an alternative to this. That is great, and he has a whole lot of other rational policies (eg get rid of nuclear weapons) but I cite this example as JC is a guy who signed the March 2007 Early Day Motion calling for the positive recognition of NHS homeopathic hospitals. If he believes that homeopathy is a useful medical practice the chances are he doesn’t understand evidence. It is this sort of thing that makes the warm and fuzzy liberals a “lesser form” (slight sarcasm there, don’t all go mental) of liberal.
I am also sick of having to explain to guardian readers at dinner parties that GMO’s are not evil.
LEFTists agenda is to leave the planet so all the Repubs can destroy the Earth with their carbon gas exhaust. So water on Mars means their is a perfect place to migrate away from the Carbons. Finding waters mean the Leftists will advocate expanding NASA’s already too huge budget to keep looking for more oases on that War Planet.
or so I imagine Rush “thinks”
Re ‘with advanced aliens, who needs Jesus?’…
I’m probably being a bit pendantic responding to what was probably meant a bit flip/throwaway, but anyway:
I could write a whole thing on the relative separation between the findings:
. abiogenesis is common, and
. life we can communicate with over interstellar distances is common
… the devil in those details being: there can be huge separation in what ‘common’ in each case means. It may be there’s unicellular life on Mars, weird smallish metazoans with some odd methane based biochemistry somewhere on a moon around one of the gas giants, algae not wildly unlike the stuff we know from here on dozens of expolanets within a few hundred light years, and still the nearest civilization we could theoretically find something to talk about with is somewhere in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy. It could also be the nearest algae is more than 100 light years out, the nearest civilization not even in this supercluster, though, sure, realizing just how damned many exoplanets there are now, I find these latter numbers far less likely now. I will grant, sure, that life on Mars would seem to imply intelligent life is likely to be closer than otherwise, but it’s still a bit of a mug’s game calling how far out that is…
… but even bothering to come up with this modern stand-in for the Drake equation is all a bit moot, I think, so far as the reactions of Earthly religions are concerned. Said religions have somehow survived multiple demotions of our species, from the center and pinnacle of creation to an accidental byproduct of chemical processes taking place in the thin biosphere of one smallish terrestrial planet among hundreds of billions in one galaxy among also hundreds of billions of galaxies just in the observable universe. Sure, the explanations for the earlier mythologies that made us the special interest of and project of the creator of all this go past special pleading and well into extra special pleading with extra special sauce, but they just keep at it, all the same.
And those explanations going forward may range from the risible to the tormented past the point of detectable coherence (we may be able to detect intelligent life in the Antares disk before we find it in certain pulpits), but they’ll manage, I expect. Because, in part, note first that actual contact with such a remote intelligence is pretty unlikely, even if the numbers do become increasingly compelling that they must exist somewhere (I think given the scale of the universe, it’s already pretty compelling… the key question being, how far away). Note next that even the evidence for life elsewhere may still prove pretty indirect for centuries (actually finding it on Mars would trump this, I grant, but I’m not that confident yet that result will be so compelling or positive)–we may find ourselves making guesses from spectra off bodies far too distant to realistically send a probe anytime soon. So religions will, as they always do, wedge their gods into whatever gaps remain, and, oddly enough, evolve to survive, as they always do, simultaneously insisting their holy canons were the indelible and unchanging word of their deity, and that the current ‘interpretation’ of the same that avoids the most painful embarrassments isn’t somehow a contradiction to this…
That said, yes, I’m absolutely excited about this result. And, whatever a lot of prevaricating theologians and their flocks might say about it (I suspect, under those circumstances, I’d find I could barely care less), bugs on Mars would be awesome, whether we find their descent is common to ours or not (the latter result would delight me far more, I think, but at this point, it’s speculating about how excited you’d be to win a lottery worth millions or hundreds of millions).
Rush Limbaugh – still at war with reality.
Mega dittos, El Rushbo! These leftists will use this martian water excuse to get billions of tax dollars for sending robots (maybe washing machines? hehe) to mars to find if there is some green bug-eyed aliens there. What a waste. We could better use that money for bombs and bullets and bombs this nation desperately needs to defend itself from its enemies like the Muslims and the gays and the Islams and the communists and the Illuminati and the socialistics and the feminazis.
In the quote I saw from this verbally flatulating nutter, he went on the speculate this particular bit of “leftist agenda” had something to do with climate change. He also claimed he’s “right” (apparently meaning correct, not the correct interpretation of being so far to the “right” on the political spectrum he can see the curvature of the Universe (apologies to Terry Pratchett)).
@AJ Milne #15:
It shows just how advanced those aliens must be: they’re driving their galaxy over here to meet us.
wow! rush is pounding on the resentment of the “leftist elites” again for the edification and reassurance of his fearful and angry willfully ignorant audience for money and fame so he can live in a fancy house with a secure drug supply.
he is a pure parasite, a taker in libertarian parlance producing nothing but endless conflict.
uncle frogy
“Pure”? Rotten, decomposed, republican, vapid, and so on all come to mind…
And you owe parasites several apologies.
And now for someone connected to reality (George Monbiot), There may be flowing water on Mars. But is there intelligent life on Earth?:
blf I apologize I was using the word parasite in it’s more idealized form without the Innocent intent of any actual biological parasite in mind.
Rush is no innocent he spews forth his hate filled rhetoric deliberately with no other purpose to create pain and anger. he is an example of and the definition of a troll.
uncle frogy
unclefroggy — “…with no other purpose to create pain and anger.” You’re forgetting profit, which makes him truly despicable.
absofukenlutly!
uncle frogy
Scientists at NASA discovered the liquid water on Mars, but the leftist-leaning NASA plumbers can take the credit for determining that it flows downhill.
grasshopper
Careful. Gravity is just a theory, and liberal plot to cast doubt that Jesus ascended to heaven or that Mohammad flew to Jerusalem one night.
Limbaugh: lefties keep stopping me from realising my dream, to drown the US in a tsunami of gunz.
@12- my comment was a parody of anti-science behavior, with the obvious conclusion that no matter what, Rush Limbaugh is still an idiot. The problem with the this parody is that it is a poe. This is a way that a science denialist would argue a point.
Maybe the discovery of water on Mars is really just an insidious publicity stunt to promote Matt Damon’s movie “The Martian”!
Christians hate the Mars project for one simple reason.
Water on mars means possible life on Mars. Mars isn’t even referenced in the Bible, therefore God did not make Mars lifeforms. Meaning if it’s true, there’s another confirmed 100% method of making life other than “God did it”.
It makes them sweat a lot, since it becomes proof that god is NOT necessary for the creation of life. and if he’s not needed on another planet, then what makes him needed on ours? It becomes proof of everything an atheist has been telling them, in a form they cannot hand-wave at all, for the Bible doesn’t even HINT to other planets. (naturally, given the timeline).
One way I can imagine the Religious Right coping with a discovery of past or present microbial life is that it would be the work of Satan in an attempt to “play God”, so to speak; similar to the mythology of Lord Of The Rings where IIRC the Orcs where created by the “fallen angel” Melkor/Morgoth.
I do not consider this a comforting thought
@32
martian microbial life
BTW, what would we call such life, because even if it was analogous to earth bacteria or cyanobacteria or whatever, such a name would assume that it was connected to Earth life, which it might or might not be. And that might not be even testable depending on the kind of evidence.
@31
Trivially easy for a god-botherer to respond to: The Bible doesn’t have to mention everything in existence*. God created “the heavens”, Mars is “part” of the heavens, therefor He also created Mars and everything on it.
As for finding life on another planet shaking up the faithful. Pashaw, not even. Unless that life is vastly more intelligent than humans, it is just more “evidence” of the wonder of His glorious work. Of course, if they are more intelligent, then they’re of the Devil and will have to be destroyed!
.
*of course, it actually does mention everything in existence, if you know how to read the Bible properly.**
.
**NAFS
blgmnts-
You do not recall quite correctly – Morgoth “can only mock, not make” (according to somebody in LOTR, don’t remember who). Orcs were not created out of nothing (or even sung into existence, like the rest of that universe) – they were bred from captured elves, very early in the First Age.
Somewhere (I suspect that it was in the book The Letters of JRRT, although _I_ may not be recalling correctly!) that JRRT makes a very strong distinction between creation (ex nihilo, which is the province of God alone) and sub-creation, which is the most anyone else can do (Morgoth can make orcs; I can make cookies).
So, I suppose some creationists might get their knickers in a twist over this; however, if they are of the “God can do anything, and does not have to justify His ways” persuasion (which I suspect they all are), they can say that He did two separate creations, and didn’t feel like revealing the other one to us.
Alternatively, I seem to recall that some meteorite material of Martian origin (from really old impacts on that planet) has made its way to Earth; so, they could just say that any Martian life could be terrestrial in origin, from ejected material that went the other way. In other words, it would still part of the same creation.
(Don’t bother telling them about time scales, or probabilities, or anything; they don’t need no stinkin’ time scales.)
“the”