Planetary Science and Media

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Currently people have high expectations from these discovery missions; they want to know that there is “twin earth” out there, that there is life beyond our solar system. These unreasonably high expectations arise from the romanticizing of space exploration by the media. With the movies like The Martian providing a realistic look on how a human colony on Mars would work and look like, and Interstellar, which give us a glimpse of interstellar travel in search for a new home. That makes it hard not to get excited about the future and whatever it holds for us. But in reality the world of science moves slow, even though new breakthroughs are made every day, it still takes years before we see its effect in the real world. By putting exaggerated claims in the titles and linking artist renditions of exoplanet we barely know anything about, the media preys on the nostalgic and the curious and leaves them unsatisfied. There are a couple of really newsworthy stories that can influence our lives; the initial discovery of 51 Pegasi b was truly newsworthy. However majority of news stories are for pure entertainment, exaggerating claims, presenting hypothesis as facts giving us a distorted view of reality. This type of news will never really affect us, the news agenda is shaped by the general public laziness and inability to perform their own research.

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References

Charbonneau, D., Brown, T., Latham, D., & Mayor, M. (2000). Detection of Planetary Transits Across a Sun-like Star. The Astrophysical Journal, 529(1), L45-L48.

Mayor, M., & Queloz, D. (1995). A Jupiter-Mass Companion To a Solar-Type Star. Nature, 378(6555), 355-359.