A friend of mine had told me about this as she read a newspaper, and today my brother initiated a thread about it in my forum (in Portuguese).
Basically, Marina Bai, a Russian astrologist, sued NASA for… wait for it… “changing her horoscope” by crashing a probe into a comet, in order to study it.
Now, it’s a fact that there are crazy people (I was going to say “weirdos”, but that’s not necessarily bad - one could say I’m one…) everywhere, people who are, to put it bluntly, completely nuts. This, by itself, should be known by everyone, and surprise no one.
It’s also a known fact that a lot of people don’t have the smallest shred of honesty, and will do anything, whatever it takes, to get rich without effort - and leeching other people, corporations or other entities are, to them, perfectly acceptable methods. So, the fact that someone is trying to get rich in this way shouldn’t come as a surprise.
What should come as a surprise, and saddens me that it doesn’t, is that, somehow, for some reason, cases like this are taken seriously. That people who do this are seen as “having a different, but valid opinion”. That they aren’t laughed out of the room when they try to sue a scientific organization for “disturbing” her baseless superstition. That they aren’t fined, or even arrested, for an obvious attempt at winning a lot of money from a settlement. That these methods do work.
In short, that people - that we - put away with it.
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Off with her head, I say!
None shall go beyond the SQ (Stupidity Quotient) horizon… but she did.
Small correction: Actually, NASA’s mission was not to destroy the comet. The projectile they used was the size of a small car, and the comet was the size of France. Their mission was to make a small hole in the comet and 1. study the gasses that would (and did) spray out of it , and 2. to do a fly by afterwards and look into the hole.
It’s horrible that this is actually making news.
Thanks for the comment.
However, nowhere did I say the mission was to destroy the comet - although the probe did probably affect it in some way. Then again, going through space, the comet probably colides with or is affected (gravity, for instance) by a lot of other things.
My original point, IMO, still stands: 1) astrology is just a superstition, just a particularly enduring one, and 2) this is just a creep attempting to (ab)use the system to get rich without effort.