When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

Since then we have had some interesting projects take off; the Dawn misson to Ceres, for example, but nothing that really captured the attention of the common man. The space shuttle is, let’s face it, boring.

I remember one episode of Farscape where our lead character, who piloted a ship through a wormhole and discovered all kinds of interesting things, speaks with reverence about his astronaut father who was … a space shuttle pilot. I started laughing even though it wasn’t supposed to be funny. That’s how far the space program had fallen - the only recent thing that young people could idolize was the equivalent of a high-altitude delivery truck.

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If I hear one more thing about Pluto … well, never mind that. “Astro”-physicists have officially replaced mathematicians as the favorite toilet monkeys of real scientists everywhere. Why? Because when something is proven in math, it stays proven. Same way with physics. It doesn’t matter how many weeks the International Astronomers Union meets that apple still fell on Isaac Newton’s head and it will fall on yours too. Committee meetings and compromises can’t change gravity.

Take this quote from Becky Lomax when asked by her kids why there are only 8 planets now; “We just did the solar system last year,” she said. “I guess we have to revisit it.”

No, the last thing you should do is revisit anything. You are just encouraging these numbskulls. Even 6-year-old David Lieberman of Bethesda knew these sub-literate sock monkeys were out of their gourds. “It has to be considered a planet because it circles the sun,” he said. “Pluto’s not even the farthest planet.” Sometimes, he has learned, Neptune and Pluto switch places.

And he’s SIX, people.

Enjoying your Ipod? Why not just chain an Asian kid to your radiator and make them work for you?

Scientists will find it a lot tougher to get laid because of this website. Hate the game, not the scientist.

Your kid will never need to watch Thomas The Tank Engine again. Why? Because I am making a kids’ series called “The Little Spaceship That Could” and it will be about Voyager 1, because it just keeps going and going and going.

People keep asking me about the three new planets and how we will remember them. I am more concerned about how kids will ever take astrophysicists seriously again. Can you hear a kid asking, “What do you mean last week there were 9 planets and now there are 12? I am supposed to believe you people about vague things like the definition of a point or what a magnetic field is or how there can be Evolution without actual fossils and you can’t even figure out how many planets there are?”

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Almost any kid today can spot bad CGI a mile away. Have a kid watch Raiders Of The Lost Ark, for example and, when that fighter plane crashes into the tunnel, kids will start giggling because it looks so fake to them.

How is this possible? Eyes are trained by experience like anything else and special effects are a lot better today.

This is why NASA now has to pretend they lost the footage from the original moon landing.

There are two things that all scientists know: first is that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu and is even now communing with Hyperborean gods in an underground Antarctic base from which he will lead a fleet of UFOs to establish the Fourth Reich; and second is that the moon landings never really happened.

Sure, they showed stuff on TV but NASA had an excuse for the odd visual quality even then - their equipment was not “compatible” with the TV technology of the day, they said, so the original transmissions had to be displayed on a monitor and reshot by a TV camera for broadcast.

“We’ve got all the data. Everything on the tapes we have in one form or another,” NASA spokesman Grey Hautaloma said. Uh-huh. I guess we’ll just go ahead and drink your Kool-Aid then, Grey. How does one lose 700 boxes of precious film of the most important scientific achievement of the U.S. space program anyway? Hautaloma then said it is possible the tapes will be unplayable if they are found because they have deteriorated over the years — a problem common to magnetic tape, he notes. How very convenient.

Since we’re dealing with how technology can make us believe almost anything these days, I submit these pictures of Heidi Klum in September’s Esquire magazine:

Okay, Nazi aliens are in a remote Arctic base and a group of guys with the computing horsepower of a Commodore 64 put a man on the moon? Maybe I can buy that. But asking me to believe Heidi Klum looks like this without an airbrush is too much to ask. Thank you, Hollywood Tuna.

*Which Futurama episode did they find in its place? “Roswell That Ends Well” the one where the crew is mysteriously flung back in time to 1947 and President Truman orders that Zoidberg be taken to Area 51 for study. When they tell him that Area 51 will be used for the fake moon landing, he orders that NASA be invented for that instead.

R.I.P.