Hell might not be on Earth and even on Venus but definitely a little bit closer to the Sun, and Mercury's cries of anguish must be about Eistein's mistakes about the
Perihelion Motion of Mercury
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In an unusual press conference here today, NASA released a batch of bizarre sound recordings and video from the Messenger spacecraft moments before it impacted the surface of Mercury. Scientists are struggling to decipher what the data mean, but some contend they sound like human voices crying out in agony.
Messenger had been orbiting Mercury since 2011, but it used up nearly all of its propellant and was drifting closer to the surface of the planet. So last week, NASA officials decided to point the probe nose downward for a controlled crash. “We were hoping it would kick up some soot for spectroscopic analysis,” says Messenger Principal Investigator Angra Mainyu, a planetary scientist at Columbia University. Just what it did find instead is not entirely clear.
At the press conference, Mainyu played grainy recordings of what sounded like anguished voices in various languages. And she showed even grainier images of what appeared to be writhing figures. When asked by a reporter how NASA interpreted the data, Mainyu shrugged her shoulders and said, “How the hell should I know?”
Reactions to the news were swift and, in some cases, decisive. Welcoming what he called “ineluctable evidence of hell,” Father Felix Flammis, a spokesperson for the Vatican Observatory in Italy, said: "This wonderful discovery shows that science and religion can work together to discover the truth." But Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist and atheist, rejected the finding. "This is clearly a bunch of drivel," he says. "Wind whistling past the spacecraft, electronic noise—there obviously has to be some other explanation." Even if the evidence holds up, he quips, "proof of the devil ain't the same as proof of God.