Wired just published a rather long but very good and detailed article about HAARP, a $250 million facility in Alaska with a 30-acre array of antennas capable of spewing 3.6MW of energy into the ionosphere. My insane mother is one of those credulous people who believe every conspiracy theory under the sun. I’d never talked with her about it, but I’d bet that she even believes that the 9/11 attacks were plotted by the Federal Reserve to bring about the biblical apocalypse. Or maybe aliens. There’s never any telling with her. It was in fact through her that I first learned of HAARP, and around the same time that Nick Begich’s self-published book Angels Don’t Play This HAARP came out, which spawned yet another conspiracy theory for the masses of uncritical thinkers to pine over. Of course the conspiracy theory is bullshit, fuelled by bits of fact that — when strung together and seen through a biased lens — look a bit shady. The truth is that it’s just a giant, expensive research facility, built and maintained by the military (just as many other products of science, like the Internet, begin) and funded by congressional budget earmarks thanks to former U.S. Senator from Alaska Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens. The project actually is not classified, nor are there any classified documents related to HAARP; there’s even a webcam — two, actually — which allow people to stare all day if they like at the facility’s antennae, and they even hold an annual open house at which any and all are invited to visit the site. The facility exists for one thing: science.

And what science it does! From the flashy (like triggering visible auroras) to the practical (like using the ionosphere to send low-wavelength communications signals to deep-sea submarines) to the stuff purely for advancing scientific knowledge (they recently used it to echo radio waves off the surface of the moon, bringing with it a lot of data about the composition of lunar soil and the satellite’s topography). The only thing I worry about is that the aforementioned Nick Begich, who thinks it’s all a giant conspiracy for weather control and mind control and all kinds of other things, is the older brother of newly-elected U.S. Senator from Alaska Mark Begich; if Nick can convince Mark of his wacky conspiracy theories, then Mark might start pushing to close down the facility. Hopefully Mark has a cooler head on his shoulders than his brother.

Forty years ago today — 11 years before I was born — Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the LM Eagle and became the first human to ever step foot onto a celestial body. Stop and think about that for a minute. For uncounted millennia, people had looked up at these strange lights in the sky, weaving fantastic yarns to explain their origin and composition. But now we were there. It really was one giant leap for mankind. Throughout my life, it's served as an inspiration. At one point in my youth, in fact, I wanted to join NASA and get onto the first manned mission to Mars. I had it all planned; on the way there, I'd convince everyone else to go along with the plan. Whether it was me or not who stepped off the ladder first and made the historic speech didn't matter, but whoever it was would step onto the Martian regolith, start in with the speech, and then interrupt his or herself, saying something like "Did you see that? I swear that rock just moved!" Then a black form would zoom by the camera, and the screams would start. More forms zoom by the camera, one of them knocking it over; and as the screams grew to a crescendo, we'd cut the feed back to Earth, coming back on 8 hours later to cheerfully say "Only kidding!" and getting on with the mission as normal while the people of Earth recover from their collective heart attack. I mean, come on, we'd be on Mars! Who would be able to stop us? It would have been glorious.

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