Do you think black holes are interesting news? If one blew up would you think ‘Aww poor black hole!’ Or are they frivolous details with no relevance to the world around us?
What about a plane crash that kills 500 people?
Join Tim and Algy (and a cameo by Diva-Muffin the Barista) as they battle it out for the attention of the world’s media, by anthropomorphising celestial objects and immorally manipulating the feeling of the readership. Yes, immoral!
Sound dubious to you? Sounds like good honest journalism to me. Find the real story, the human story, the heart of the matter… Aww poor black hole!
Part of the Stir-Fried Science Show, at Smiths Alternative in Canberra. April 8, 2021.
Filmed by Jonty Conyngham-Davies. Sound: Bevan Noble.
Leapfrog by Phil Dooley – listen to the whole song here.
Want more from the Stir Fried Science Show?
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The script –
— Hey Diva-Muffin
— Algie, my Man!
— Just the usual
I’m just going to have to duck out and get some macadamia milk
[ABC News theme plays]Hey they’ve found the wreckage of the plane that crashed.
500 people died!
— Shh
Aww, one of the passengers was a little girl
Please don’t
Look at the cute photo – she’s cuddling her fluffy toy alpaca
Stop, stop! I hate the news!
— oh
Look!
–No. No no no.
— They’ve found gravitational waves!
— Forget it!
Why?
I hate science
The news, it just brings you down,
it’s all these disasters and celebrity weddings.
Even if you lie awake feeling sad for the little girl who died and the other 500 people on the plane
And the other 156,000 people who on average die every day, that’s only 0.55 of a second
of sadness for each one of them & you never even knew them.
By trying to make us feel sad about this one little girl with her stupid alpaca toy
they’re just, they’re just, being immoral.
What! Immoral?
–Yeah, in a consequentialist sense
By focussing on one person and making us sadder than
we were before, they’re just increasing the suffering
in the whole Universe.
Look. The news is about what’s happening now. It’s topical!
Science is topical! We’ve just seen Humanity’s most violent event that
they’ve ever experienced in the whole history of the cosmos!
When?
Umm…1.3 billion years ago
[blows raspberry]No, but we detected it this week!
[sigh] Did anybody die?No
Were there any cute photographs?
That’s not the point! The point is that two
black holes collided, and they made gravitational waves
that travelled through spacetime for 1.3 billion years
and then we detected them here on earth,
it’s an amazing feat of technology
So, OK. Let me get this straight. Two dark holes
They smashed together
BLACK holes!
– all right all right, black holes
They smashed together. Maybe one of them died
Oh, a unique specimen, dead and gone
Or, maybe they were joined together, forever, in eternity!
A celebrity wedding?
Or both. I can see the headline now
Beautiful black hole bride breathes her last!
Shockwaves felt across the galaxy!