Engage the plasma drive, Mars here we come

Not one agency picked it up. I alerted the various news agencies and ANU did as well.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.

Wacky stories are everywhere. Did you know that infidelity was genetic? That there are allergies to electricity? Apparently scientists can now write love as an equation - you get the idea.

My favourite is the paradoxical health story. TV Current Affairs will almost certainly run the "red wine and chocolate is good for you" story sometime between Christmas and Easter. Or, how you can lose 10 kilos by eating nothing except sea kelp.

Scare stories are a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. Recently scare stories include rising sea levels and killer meteorites.

Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, which makes the danger appear disproportionately large. So it’s almost a dead certainty that a killer meteor will hit the earth within the next 25 million years. Keep in mind that man has only been walking on two legs for less than a million. But that meteor is out there somewhere.

The last category is the media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical worldview, is only about tenuous, new, hotly contested data.

Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases.

And this is where Dr Charles and her plasma drive comes in. It’s a breakthrough story that is developing. But its slow, complex work. The fact that one-day an Australian rocket may take men and women to Mars and beyond apparently isn’t worth a mention in the media.

“We all need a common dream and space travel is a good one. But there is a lot of discipline and complex technology involved in sending a manned spacecraft in to space. One of the payoffs is that in the process we learn a lot on how to manage our own planet, how to train young people and how to transfer technologies,” Dr Charles said.

What we need is science media who can recognise news stories from PR spin.