Deludia

Rocks in the head

If you have watched the new reality program Meteorite Men then you have just taken a IQ test. If you didn’t find at least 10 things majorly off kilter in what is said then you failed. You have the IQ of one of the rocks these guys hunt for.

The Meteorite Men have an interesting way about them. They talk as if finding meteorites was important and contributory. Oh sure, some meteorites do have a certain scientific value, but like Storm Chasers, the information they produce isn’t very useful. Storm chasers have been taunting tornadoes for a couple of decades under the banner of science and so far not one single piece of useful information has derived from the efforts. The chasers continue their mantra that they are developing the science that can predict the onset of tornadoes in spite of the fact that the only thing they produce is the certainty that if a tornado happens, someone will chase it. That’s actually more than the Meteorite Men contribute.

They have started to generate an entire social genre for meteorites. According to them, meteorites have meteorite lore. They speak of this as though they’re talking about a tribe of Native Americans. So called “tribes” have lore. The Yukon area has lore. Meteorites don’t have lore, they have the Perseids in August. That’s not lore, it’s a freaking schedule for crying out loud.

The Meteorite Men talk about meteorite fields which they call “falls.” The rest of the world has a name for these fields since they happen everywhere. We call it “the ground.” Then too these intellectual giants take a FLIR camera out to hunt meteorites in the belief that they will somehow be more heated by sunshine than the similar looking rock next to them. FLIR is forward looking infrared, a technology used to find people by their heat signature when lost, by the police to track fleeing suspects from helicopters, and by heating and cooling specialists looking for the places your home leaks heat from. The military uses FLIR to seek targets by their hot exhaust gasses, among other things. But it took the Meteorite Men to try to use it to differentiate between rocks where temperature wasn’t a factor. I guess that’s what comes from cutting school to hunt for meteorite fragments.

Aside from their banal preoccupation with hunting for rock shards, they are doing something that we see in many other areas. They are creating an artificial marketplace for meteorites with an equally bogus valuation of their finds worth.

This fragment weighs in at just over two ounces and that means it’s worth $70! claims one of the rock hounds. His partners  jumps in to chime that they once found a meteorite so heavy it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay, to WHO?

I can understand why some folks might shell out bucks for a fossil. There is history, science, and beauty in a fossil. But a meteorite is a rock and its only claim to fame is that they’re attracted to magnets. So are old soup cans.

Okay, okay. Some of the meteorites found contain more than traces of precious metals, and some contain some interesting crystal formations. But it takes a sizable meteorite and the destruction of that meteorite to get at the desired middle of the cosmic Tootsie Roll. Ergo, the meteorite didn’t have value, some of what made it had value. But wait! Meteorites can tell us how old they are through carbon dating and stuff like that! So what? I’m sixty two years old. So what earth improving science will benefit from knowing my age? Answer: none. Neither will knowing the age of a meteorite, especially considering that we have nothing but guesses as to where they came from. All we can learn from a meteorite we pretty much already know: the same elements and compounds exist all over the universe. Wow, that was worth a hour of my time and the endurance of 28 commercial advertisements.

A huge meteorite with some special attributes may indeed have monetary value, but only to whoever needs it to answer a question or fill some personal need for art. For the Meteorite Men to claim that X grams of magnetic rock has a value of Y dollars is ridiculous. The next time they come on, they should tell us WHERE these rocks have the value they are claiming they have.

I have some original Mount Saint Helens volcanic ash. I collected it from the mountain myself during a driving trip a friend and I made. This was before the eruption; my collected ash was retrieved nearly five months before May 18th when the volcano exploded. So MY ash has a lot more value than any of the tons of ash which scattered itself across 12 states. Why? Because I say so. If the Meteorite Men can do it, so can I.

The Antiques Roadshow has turned every old piece of crap found in an attic or basement into a prize. Companies like eBay thrive on this bogus evaluation to drive their commissions up. Now we have the space bunnies trying to convince us that their tiny chunks of stone have an established marketplace value. Gee, even the Antiques Roadshow disclaims that their valuations are only good at auction, where people are all excited and propelled to stupidity by mob logic.

I don’t know why I spend as much time watching television as I do. It seems like more and more the quality of the material and content departs as the banalities and their exaggeration rise.

It’s almost like the people in all of these shows like Meteorite Men have rocks in their head instead of on their minds.