"Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture's field of established images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as 'the nature of things.'"

--Parenti, Inventing Reality

That's a pretty concise description of things, I'd say.

    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's pretty common for great minds to come up with roughly the same idea at roughly the same time. Look at Deep Impact and Armageddon.

            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              It's premised on two points:

              1. They only spot the asteroid two weeks before it will hit Earth, and
              2. They establish that (in-universe, at least, no clue about reality) drilling the type of hole they want to drill is Really Fucking Complicated. It's so complicated that even the drilling experts (Bruce Willis et al.) struggle with the task when they reach the asteroid.

              Now you can't train anyone to do anything Real Fucking Complicated in two weeks, and you wouldn't want to send someone up there who isn't a genuine expert in the task when the whole world is at stake. Of course, flying space shuttles is also Real Fucking Complicated. But they don't train Bruce Willis to fly, they only teach him and his crew how to maneuver in space suits and drive the space buggy (that has a machine gun on it for some reason). All they have to do is survive the journey up there until it's time to drill. The real astronauts fly everyone to the asteroid and do the Real Fucking Complicated space stuff, but then the oil well crew handles the Real Fucking Complicated task of precision drilling through unknown geology.

              This division of labor comes in handy, too, when they land off course and have to drill through a much more difficult patch of the asteroid than they originally expected. Had they given actual astronauts some half-assed crash course in drilling, they and the whole planet would have been fucked. It made all the sense in the world to have your best space shuttle pilots pilot the space shuttle and your best hole drillers drilling the hole.

      • sappho [she/her]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Also the invention of calculus and evolution by natural selection.