Colbert University: Course of the Week – OMG! SPACE!

Happy Sunday Zoners!  With all this talk of Node 3 and The Stephen T. Colbert Book Club for The Literary Excellence’s selection of Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at space, through the lens of The Colbert Report.  No Fact Zone’s sister site, Colbert University, makes this especially easy with the Space portion of the elective SCI 301: Stephen and Science: Confusion, Skepticism and Fear.  “Stephen” may not be a fan of science, but his love for everything space-related is contagious, especially during his interviews with Garrett Reisman.

SCI 301: Space.

This is one type of science that gets Stephen pretty excited. He’s in awe of astronauts, the heroes of his childhood. When he introduces Buzz Aldrin, he’s so enthusiastic that he shouts that Aldrin “walked on the moon!” It’s even better when he’s involved, as occurs when he speaks with WristStrong-wearing astronaut Garrett Reisman from “OMG! SPACE!”

• Jim Lovell tells Stephen how powerful it was to be able to cover the entire Earth with his thumb. Stephen notices that he can do the same thing to Jim Lovell’s head.
• Stephen wonders whether Buzz Aldrin’s animated film about flies trying to go to outer space is based on a true story.
• Astronaut Garrett Reisman spoke with Stephen twice, once from space and once in the studio.
  
• Stephen has concerns about Mars exploration. He worries that Mars rovers might mate and start a species, or that microbes from Mars will attack Earth. To placate the latter, he devotes a section of his show to the interests of microbes in “Microbe Beat.”

Your homework is to post your thoughts below. Any comments or revelations are welcome. For extra credit, check out SCI 301:Physics, which features Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Hayden Planetarium.  In one of my favorite segments ever, Stephen licks a meteor, gets ill after watching a presentation about the Big Bang, and becomes an astrophysicist.