[Deckard]

It is a shame. As is the general ignorance of science generally. Maybe that's what happens when you stretch the idea of personal freedom and supply and demand to its inevitable limit. A large part of the news media - and the media in general - now give people what they want, and little if anything else. And the problem with that is it leads to a downward pull. Instead of understanding how stars form or how telescopes can peer through dust and gas, people know more about the marital break-up of two Z-list celebs, or who's appearing in this year's Big Brother.

When you think about it, for centuries, the most powerful and intelligent minds on Earth would have given anything to posses the kind of knowledge that most of us today have at our fingertips - about the cosmos, how stars form, what the sun is made of, about time, space, gravity, about how different reality actually is to the one we experience in our daily lives - and yet so few people today appear to know any of this or appear bothered to know any of it. Instead, we just occupy ourselves with trivia, with bubble-gum.

It would have surely taken months for the most powerful and wealthy medieval King to seek out the right sources and obtain a fraction of the knowledge that we have available today. And even then he would have been badly misinformed. Today, ever more since the internet, we have an obscene amount of instant and free information - or, at a push, a book from Amazon costing less than a tenner - not just related to astronomy or cosmology, but the world in general: other cultures, natural selection, politics, etc. So much knowledge, and yet so little interest.

It's f*cked up, that's what it is! Where is the thirst for knowledge these days?

Perhaps it was always that way, but the disinterest is now merely more obvious and less excusable, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in developed nations with time to go down the pub or watch TV.