j.Bowman Can't Sleep: This Week in Nerd Rage: C'mon NASA!

Holy shit! Yeah! According to an article published earlier this week, A new life form has been discovered. Finally science has a discovery worth talking about. It's about time. Science was getting pretty boring. We are all still waiting on that cancer cure, so science is due to come up with something big if it hasn't figured that one out yet. As far as I'm concerned, not counting the one above, there are only two scientific discoveries I'm interested in:

1. A pill that makes me good at guitar
2. Aliens

I don't care if they are friendly or not. All I want to see is DOCUMENTARY footage of Will Smith punching an alien in the face and then sass-talking it.

(Fictional....for now)

You know what? NO! A picture just ain't gonna cut it this time. Out of respect for the 1996 action opus "Independence Day", I need to kick it up a damn notch. NO! I gotta kick it up 4 notches and get a video of "The Punch Heard 'Round The Galaxy", which was immediately followed by "the Trash Talk Heard 'Round The Cosmos". Here goes my first attempt at uploading a youtube vid directly..... HI-YA!!

Awesome. That totally steps on my Twitter updates over here---->
But the video is too damn good to be contained by the parameters of "j.Bowman Can't Sleep". Think about that, Will Smith punched that alien in the face so hard that it shattered the boundaries of my blog. I'm gonna allow it.

Now a friend of mine sent me a link to the news story and I was pretty psyched. Before I even clicked the link my mind immediately started wondering what this new creature would look like and how hard Will Smith would have to punch it to establish mankind's dominance. It varies, so I created the "Will Smith Welcome to Earth Scale of Alien Threats":

(About a 3)

(Probably an 8. It's totally gonna eat that dude)

So I clicked the link expecting to see something amazing. Science gave me....this:

(labeled in my images folder as "teal bullshit". No lie)

What the fuck science?! This is your breakthrough?! It looks like a bunch of tic tacs in toothpaste. I was pretty mad. It is not threatening in any way. This is apparently an upclose view of it, from "5 Micrometers". I have no idea how big that is, but I'm pretty sure it's substantially smaller than what I was planning to use to stop it:

(We were gonna do beautiful things together, "overcompensation gun")

So I'm pretty upset about this already, and I haven't even started reading the article yet. Perhaps it says something about the creatures cells "multiplying at an alarming rate" or something about "potentially enslaving mankind". Science has to dress it up and make it cool somehow or else Sports is gonna keep beating up Science at the bikeracks after school. Here are some gems from this "breakthrough" article:

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It's capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

Ok, I'm pretty sure arsenic is bad, and I have NO idea what RNA is, so this can still turn around and be awesome news. "This changes everything" you say? Well any paragraph that ends that way must have a KILLER follow up ready. BRING IT SCIENCE!:

NASA is saying that this is "life as we do not know it". The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!?! Talk about the thing that you found!

....have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks

Wait a second. Hold the goddamn phones, here. This was found....in CALIFORNIA?! C'mon! Why is NASA even looking there? You're doing it wrong! Space is up there ^. That is where the cool shit is. I kept reading, hoping at some point they would give me something to show how this is a game-changing discovery and not just a bunch of microscopic crap in California.

The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says: "The definition of life has just expanded."

Science is starting to come across like that jerkoff kid in my grade 12 english class who gave over-elaborate answers to everything. His name also started with a "J". Dude, if you're reading this, and you know who you are, I just want to take a moment and tell you something: The kite does not represent a loss of innocence. It represents...a fucking....kite. Nobody is impressed by your bullshit. You either Science, don't think cause I took a moment for myself that you're off the hook. This "news article" had one more paragraph and one more chance to redeem itself as something I should care about.

NASA's geobiologist Pamela Conrad thinks that the discovery is huge and "phenomenal," comparing it to the Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon-based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon-based. It's like saying that we may be looking for new life in the wrong places with the wrong methods. Indeed, NASA tweeted that this discovery "will change how we search for life elsewhere in the Universe."

Are you serious? What a bunch of horseshi- Wait- Hold on, NASA has a Twitter account? Be right back........

jBowmancouver @NASA ...c'mon!
(less than 5 seconds ago via web)

That was a real tweet I just sent those guys. You can't give me bacteria and then go referencing Star Trek in comparison. So this has not changed a damn thing. I'm still tired. That god-awful "Outsourced" show hasn't been cancelled yet. This is garbage! Then I find out that NASA discovered something else this week :

And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.

Yeah, that's in space. If you didn't have your heads buried in the ground in California maybe we'd get something going. But that is besides the point. Look, we aren't going to find shit, ok? If something is out there, they are going to find us. So we either build a big ass telescope and try and find them first, or everyone on earth has to wear reflective vests.

(I will save you all some time, "Slutty Reflective Vests" do not generate many images on google)

So nothing about this to me seemed life changing. My life is the same only I'm slightly more upset with NASA for getting my hopes up with this "big announcement". I'm sure there are some science majors who got a huge boner over this cluster of germs but for me, I was kinda hoping for something that would at least register on the "Jeff Goldblum Welcome to Earth, Effeminate Slap Scale"

(One of these men....fights like a bitch)

So in order for me to make this news some kind of big deal, at least a little bit, I'm going to take this opportunity to be (hopefully) the first person to hate on this headline grabbing bacteria called GFAJ-1. I wanna be the first one to start some horrible, ignorant prejudices against this new life form. For instance did you ever notice how GFAJ-1 can't read? Or how about the way GFAJ-1 never washes its hands? I even heard, from inside my own head, the GFAJ-1 and NASA are bangin'. I'm going to go so far as to invent a word that is a derogatory name for GFAJ-1 cause I wish to belittle it's importance even further (and I'm sure given the choice it would call me "Powder", which I consider an anti-pale slur). I will henceforth refer to GFAJ-1 as (sneer) "Mugby" (I had to search that on urban dictionary to make sure it wasn't something that would offend anyone else. All clear, gang).

For the record I absolutely realize how screwed I am if all of a sudden this thing's cells "multiply at an alarming rate" and GFAJ-1 becomes an actual threat to mankind. I don't care. Sure, I'd be the first to die, if those stupid illeterate Mugbies were able to read my address...and weren't so poor.