Sometimes, I have no faith in humanity, and sometime, the gross situations bring faith. For example, the people who sprinted to the finish line of the Boston Marathon and continued an extra two miles to give blood for those who were injured. If you can actually tack on two miles after your marathon, even if you're doing it as a cool-down, you're amazing.
But there is something else that bothers me. While the events of Boston and now MIT are tragic, I think that there needs to be more balance between the coverage of the bombers and the coverage of the other things that go in the world - or outside of it, for that matter. Would anyone hearing the news today learn that two planets that could easily support life have been found?
Maybe people will get outraged that I suggest that we care as much about hypothetical planets as I do about people who have died, or about people who are killers, or that I care more about what is happening light years away than I do in locations several hundred miles from where I live. And I don't, really. What has happened this week really sucks. I don't know anyone personally in Boston, though, but that doesn't stop it from sucking.
I just wonder... the scientists get quoted as saying, "This is really cool!" in articles about planets. Law people are quoted as saying long paragraphs about what's going on. I'm hoping that the reason many astrophysicists don't get quoted as much is that most people don't speak fluent Astrophysicist, while the law enforcement people are calming the public down. While that's all well and good, I think we need to get a bit more of both.
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