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Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago

Well when you’re tired of hunting old Nazis, you can go hunt the aliens they were working with during WW2.

NASA is hiring defenders for our planet to presumably fight giant space bugs.

Would you like to know more?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/02/nasa-hiring-planetary-protection-officer-protect-earth-alien-harm/532221001/

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago

Only if it comes with a license to burn heretics and mutant degenerates. 

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago

If it involves being a intergalactic ambassador as well as being able to deman tribute of dozens of alien prostitutes weekly to ensure that planet USA does not invade then it will have the minimum required benefits for me.

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago
The pay is pretty sweet for a job that, well, I'm not sure you can fail at.

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago
How does one go about acquiring 'advanced knowledge of Planetary Protection'?

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago

Start with the basics. I learned all that vital stuff back in the 80s with Space Invaders, Galaga and the like.

Not sure what the hell they're teaching the kids today what with this Mass Effect diversity shit.

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago
It's the lizard people controlling the media that push that shit. They're brainwashing our children.

Terra Prime Forever

6 years ago
I saw this, the articles' headlines are terribly misleading. Basically, the job is preventing life from Earth getting to other planets unintentionally, and vice versa. That involves building cleaning procedures, safety checks, and pretty advanced infrastructure (that costs 10s/100s of millions) for material going from Earth and returning to Earth (i.e. later manned Mars missions). This isn't entirely new, astronauts were put in 'isolation' back in the 60s and 70s during the space race, of fear of tracking back alien diseases (which thankfully never happened).

The modern discussion on this topic (and need for that job) is because as of now Mars is a pristine untouched landscape, except for whatever contamination landed via the probes (some bacteria did manage to piggyback then, when protocols weren't as strict), leading to the problem of contaminating the historical data. There are two sides to this debate - those that say that all the scrubbing protocols unnecessarily add to the cost of space missions, making them unfeasible, and the other side that asserts that you wouldn't want to unintentionally ruin the pristine ground before you can study it. I believe the phrase for the latter group is paleoxenobiologists, which is a fairly cool name as things go.

Basically, there's a school of thought amongst astronauts that seeing how life on Mars grew and died (through examining its pristine biological history and core samples), we can find clues for Earth's future and maybe even about the origin of life on Earth if panspermia holds true, but it entails multiple safety procedures that add time and cost delays, which the pragmatists don't like. Personally, I'm all for increasing cost to prevent the risk of losing that information.

Long story short, the job has more to do with scrubbers, white rooms, and janitorial work than building secret alien defense forces (aka the X-COM initiative)

My sources? All the research I did for the aborted Martian-Earth floatstone storyline