Opinion
21 Dec 04

Lost in Space: The Whole Hog's 2004

Sorry? Did someone say they’d found ice on Mars? And all these years we thought that David Bowie had been getting excited about something else. There, indeed, is the rub. After all this time and all that money, we might have hoped for a discovery that was a little more, well, let’s say...unpredictable.

Ideally we’d be talking little green men and a society of such advanced status that we’d look like a bunch of rock flinging Neanderthals in comparison but if not that then maybe a few buildings, empty McDonald’s wrappers, that sort of thing. Blimey, even some footprints wouldn’t have gone amiss. But no, what did the European Space Agency spend squillions of euros and countless boffin hours on? Water. Not even flowing water at that. Ice. The pictures, you might say, are amazing, but so was Independence Day.
Let’s face it, nobody cares about space anymore. That vital TV audience has switched off and is finding its thrills elsewhere. When was the last time that anyone was hooked on anything to do with the space race? Sadly, it was when the Space Shuttle blew to smithereens on live TV. The moon landings – fictional or otherwise – brought an entire planet to a halt. What could do that these days? Since we all sat and watched in horror as two aircraft careered into the Twin Towers our world has changed. We’ve seen too much over the past couple of years to really worry about what is happening on an uninhabited piece of rock millions of miles away.
Famine continues to blight the African continent and our only answer is to buy a pop record, while every day millions of dollars are being burnt in the atmosphere above us. So let the boys at NASA and ESA get on with it. Until they really do find life on Mars, you suspect that they’ll be talking to themselves.