HAPPY JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE'S LAUNCH EVE!

The James Webb Space Telescope talks to @sciencemug and Bernard

[The JWST pic by NASA, is a public domain image (source: Wikimedia Commons); the starry background free pic, by Francesco Ungaro, is  under Pexels license (source: Pexels); pics adapted by @sciencemug]

 

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launch is near!

- 25/Dec/2021 - 12:20 UTC (GMT) -

Go buddy, we all root for you! 

 

25-Dec-2021 update: the launch was a success! Now fingers crossed for the next 29 days, and then for the following (at least) five months, of commisioning...

Thanks to NASA, ESA, CSA and Arianespace, i.e. to the thousands people who worked, work and will be working on this mind-boggling, astonishing, amazing, wildly wonderful (and so on and on) project!

 

PS
Just to put things in prospective, buddy, think of this.
The James Webb Space Telescope project involved thousands of people from three space agencies, "over 300 universities, organizations, and companies from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries" (see).
JWST cost about 8.8 billion euros/10 billion dollars over 24 years. This means that, to make something that is going to let humanity see the unseen and therefore most probably change the way it sees the Universe (with all the repercussions such changes have), well, humanity spent, per year, roughly the same amount of money spent to shoot "Avengers: Endgame", and, in total, ~1billion bucks less than two nuclear submarines, or, if you prefer, the 0.01% of 2020 World's Gross Domestic Product-GDP...
 

Ah, Science! 

 

Merry Christmas, folks!

THE CONSPIRACY THEORY PEOPLE & THE ANTI-VAXXERS: A CHRISTMAS PORTRAIT (IMHO)

Conspiracy
Free pic by Markus Winkler (source: unsplash)

 

Keywords: conspiracy, conspiracy theory, anti-vaxxer, anti-vaxxers, COVID-19, pandemic, no-mask, SARS-CoV2, SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, vaccine, vaccines, fake news

Hello pal, welcome back to the place where donuts are the round voluptuous deities of cosmic pleasure, and quantum physics the clumsy magician hired for a flat universal birthday party (the galactic clown being busy looking for its missing nose among all the red giants of the Milky Way)!

What follows, dear reader, is not something taken from science (or any) literature (hence the lack of references), and, of course, I'm neither a psychiatrist, nor a qualified expert on human mind and nature. Heck, I'm a dumb blog for Gnagnamantus Krosfazt's sake, as you know very well!

No, mate, what follows is just my opinion, developed through the years, about the issue in question.

So, again, no science or anything resulting from research and study here, just thoughts (that are quite a milestone for a brainless entity like myself), and personal considerations.

Ok, let's go.

The Conspiracy Theory People (aka CTP), to me, can be divided (but, sadly, not conquered by reason) into five groups which are not mutually exclusive, and with the fourth (subgroup "a") and fifth being pretty contiguous to each other.

 

Q
Free pic by Wesley Tingey (source: unsplash)

1) There are the CTP who are not necessarily genuine CTP, but just individuals who tend to their agenda. Examples: "Evolution isn't a fact, it's just a theory the Atheists want to feed to your children's minds and that will corrupt them and destroy morality, while Religion has the real explanation, we, the Religion's advocates, guarantee you that" | "Smoking is not dangerous as said by those who are interested in destroying us and our chain of supply, we, the tobacco industry's advocates, can prove it" | "Nah, climate change is not a fact/is not human driven, the coal and oil industry are not a problem, we, who advocate for them, guarantee you that it's just them crooked so-called scientists who are in the pockets of the so-called Green Economy ring etc. etc. who are making things up".

 

Sloth in a Ball
Pic by Eric Kilby; license: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) (source: flickr)

2) Then, there are the CTP who are just