Julian Assange may have killed the rationale for the Afghanistan occupation
July 26th 2010
In the long run, the little-noted news report that the Kepler space probe has produced evidence that terrestrial planets (small, solid, and cool, like earth) are widespread in the galaxy may prove to be a more important story than the announcement that Wikileaks had 90,000 US military documents detailing what a hopeless clusterfuck Afghanistan was, which has produced “Moon type” headlines around the world.
For the sake of humanity, I hope the Kepler story proves to be more important. It offers humanity a future; the Afghanistan story questions whether humanity is entitled to a future, or capable of surviving into it.
The Kepler story isn’t very sexy. It’s just slight variations of light in stars captured by a space camera. No images of steaming alien jungles with six-legged purple brontosauri munching palm fronds unconcernedly, or aerial shots of vast cities with flying cars and transportation pods. Just pinpricks of light that get slightly dimmer and stay that way for a while, and the amount it dims, times the length of time it dims, tells us how far out from the star the planet is, and how big it is. Even Spielberg would have trouble making that dramatic.
