Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.mike-jittlov,sci.astro Path: news.cinenet.net!news.atw.earthreach.com!uwvax!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!Sprint!uunet!in1.uu.net!uucp2.uu.net!world!kibo From: kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) Subject: Mars, The Cardboard Planet Summary: Includes a useful URL so it can't be a nuisance post. Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 08:38:26 GMT X-Battlestar-Galactica-Date: 7748 centons, 83 microns, .01 hrothgars Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Nntp-Posting-Host: ppp0a003.std.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: welcome datacomp X-Newsreader: Yet Another NewsWatcher 2.4.0 Keywords: Carl Sagan BHA Followup-To: alt.religion.kibology Lines: 36 Xref: news.cinenet.net alt.religion.kibology:34903 alt.fan.mike-jittlov:1391 sci.astro:48517 The National Space Society, a secret branch of NASA, has a QuickTime VR panorama of the Martian Surface. (Matt McIrvin is about to complain that they didn't use Apple's QTVR authoring tools, because the Stitcher would have fixed those differences in brightness between adjacent photos in the sky mosaic.) Anyway, I fired QuickTime VR up and drove the stupid little rover around the fully immersive environment, being careful to crash Pathfinder into Carl Sagan numerous times, and then I drove the little rover behind a big rock and found -- -- a black limbo set with a white grid painted on the walls. It's a holodeck! MARS IS JUST AN ILLUSION!!! It's all perfectly clear! NASA didn't have the technology to fake a Mars mission (because Peter Hyams used it all up making a bad movie with O. J. Simpson) so they had to use the Enterprise's holodeck. So NASA built the Enterprise, but on its maiden flight it crashed into a swimming pool at the Huntsville base, and this is why it's underwater and all the astronauts have to wear wetsuits over their spacesuits over their Tyvek clean-room suits. TELL NASA TO STOP LYING ABOUT STAR TREK BEING REAL AND MARS BEING FAKE! Also the reason the rover's so small is that if we sent up a big rover with big knobby Bigfoot-style tires with lots of friction and traction and torque and drove it around the planet to the west for several days straight, it would make the planet turn the other way, making time go backwards and then Christopher Reeve would get out of his chair and shout, "MEIN FUERHER, I CAN VALK!!!" and then the Earth would blow up. -- K. The QuickTime VR panorama is at http://www.nss.org/mars/qtvr.html if you want proof that this is all true. Next week I'll talk about the dangers of symmetrical clothing.