Yesterday, a great step for humanity: Elon Musk has sent out in space, well… not the 1977 Golden Record with humanity’s Best Of, that was just ol’ Carl Sagan’s outdated nostalgia condensed on small metal plaques. No, this is a brand-new cherry-red Tesla Car (only the best, what else would you expect?) with a SpaceX suit worn by a dummy at the steer wheel – I thought it was to signal the Era of the Autonomous Cars, by the way – with its speakers blasting David Bowie’s Space Oddity ( how about Earth Oddity??). 

“For hundreds of millions of years,” according to proud EM, Elon Musk for conformity. But, seriously EM, don’t you fear that those aliens might have the same reaction we all have in the pristine waters of the Pacific islands when we hit one more piece of garbage?

And there is this “heartwarming” (the adjective is not mine) message on the Tesla’s circuit board, “Made on Earth by Humans.” I can’t help being moved by the humbleness, and I’m kind of awe stricken… Long Live the Great EM!

But if you sit and think straight, who “on Universe” would stoop down to read the message on the car’s circuit board, in terrestrial English??Those aliens, perhaps, who first had a knowledge of our languages from Carl Sagan’s time capsule in one of the Voyagers – they must have had plenty of time to apprehend and learn them since ’77.

Just think of that, forty years since Sagan’s Golden Record, forty years of striving at the Progress and Advancement of Science. See how far we’ve come? In fact, we are now almost confounding technology with science, and, as far as technology works, who cares about what Real science says?

Concerns such as endemic poverty now afflicting even western countries, climate change, mal-adjustment to the all-intrusive, all-invasive technologies in our lives, poisonous foods and medication, all these, who cares? Medicine is advancing with huge steps in inventing machines that would name our diseases, but would let us die for lack of means to pay for the work of those machines. Because shortly, very shortly, we are going to lose those hated jobs that enabled us to pile up three monthly wages and pay for a 24-hour stay in a clinic for an one-hour CT – MRI investigation.

But science has betrayed us since a long while – it smeared itself with digital-technological pomades and it stopped serving us, the rest of humanity, you and me, US – the ones that EM is claiming to have contributed to his flint.

No, EM, I don’t feel “heartwarmed” by the little note you scribbled on the car you’ve sent in space. Your claim that I’ve contributed to it in any way isn’t flattering me, it is insulting me.

I am writing this to express how I feel duped by Science and its rational, “scientific method”. It has long diverted from its noble scope of serving human knowledge by serving just technology. It became not just heartless, but brainless, too. By constantly chasing promotional feats it is appealing to people’s emotions, not to people’s rationality. It’s all ethos and pathos with not even a trace of Logos.

The same way that the “made by humanity” message is just a hypocrite addition meant not to inform  those aliens, our neighbors in the universe, but just to make our techno-addicts even more duped by the “good intentions” behind EM’s enterprise. I see hypocrisy in all the claims of science that it is objective and rational. Actually, I don’t see objectivity in its servitude to Big Money and Big Companies. I don’t see rationality in its participation to the endangering of life on this planet, human life included; all I can see is greed, hypocrisy and shamelessness.

Now it’s become clear and in plain daylight: science is just a prostitute selling itself to the bigger money; it has long lost the meaning and its initial reason of being, “scientia” – to Know.

Therefore, no thanks EM, I don’t want you to send anything to space in my name – btw, who on earth entitles you to think that space is also yours to send whatever piece of garbage you consider suitable to advance your profits?And all this is also happening in my name.

As I am powerlessly watching our very terrestrian Ego, how it’s been deadly bitten and infected with the Profit and Power Virus, I fear there is no Pasteur around knowledgeable enough to create a vaccine.