Culture

Humanity Just Landed On A Comet. Cue Twitter Complaining About Everything.

"We can land on a comet, but we can't" - SHUT UP.

by Alex McKinnon  13 November 2014

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Last night the European Space Agency made history by landing a probe on a comet’s surface for the first time ever. It was a remarkable feat; the end-point of over twenty years of preparation and a $1.6 billion pricetag.

To give you an idea of the scale involved, the Rosetta spacecraft travelled over 6.5 billion kilometres, using the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Mars, before it was finally in a position to deploy the Philae probe. By any measurement it’s a remarkable feat, and a testament to human ingenuity and perseverance.

Naturally, Twitter responded to the revelation by snarkily listing all the things we haven’t been able to get around to fixing yet.

Damnit, Dictionary.com! I expected these other rubes to belittle the majesty of humanity’s fledging exploration of the cosmos, but I thought better of you! I thought better!

I’m not even going to link to any of the myriad tweets that go along the lines of “we can land on a comet but we can’t find Obama’s birth certificate hur hur #BenghaziTruthersUnite”.

Alright, you know what, these are actually getting pretty good. I think I can get behind this.

That last one’s the most insightful, and it comes from a guy who goes by the name ‘Krud’. That is so overwhelmingly unsurprising.