Let me try to put this in some context.
Many people, for reasons that are not always entirely clear even to me, care a great deal about the disposition of Sigma 957, especially with respect to the issue of long term human habitation. I know this because some people who should have been better did things that I consider unethical because of their strong feelings about the issue. It should be decided by the evidence, of course, and yet there are those who might think that applying pressure at critical junctures -- say, during the first, undermanned expedition to the planet -- might tip the scales in the short term one way or another. Once such scales have been tipped it's hard to undo early decisions even if they turn out to have been wrong.
Several weeks ago I noticed some anonymous markup associated with my field notes. Anonymity was a minor annoyance on the global Roam, but it had 15 billion participants. Our Roam is something like 8 orders of magnitude smaller, and yet the reaction was little more than a yawn. I flagged the repulsive content, it was quietly removed, and nothing more was said. It could be that the senior researchers found and disciplined the anarchistic auditor and don't want to make a big deal about it. That would be OK. It's just as likely, however, that they agree with the rogue markup and would rather not have to recant it publically. I can't tell the difference from their actions, so in the absence of evidence I'm inclined to believe the worst.
One event would be no big deal, but here's another I just found today. I had been struggling with calibrating my fuel cell model, so I had set it aside to get some more important work done. Over the last few weeks I realized that what I should do is use the test runs from my prototype hab to compare with the actual data as a baseline. The prototype should be a worst-case scenario and if I was at least doing better than that I suppose I shouldn't complain. So I went to look it up today. It's not there! I have the only one-person hab on the whole mission. There are two and three-person habs; those have data from test runs. The one-person hab: no data.
We carried the complete works of Jane Austen to another solar system, but we didn't bring the data collected from the testing of one of the habitation modules that would be used by actual mission personnel. That makes no sense. Or rather, it makes sense only if there was some reason; if there was a reason to keep me in the dark about my power system; if there was a reason to want to undermine my research data with unattributed annotation. Is Sigma 957 that important to someone? Is my raw data threatening to their desired outcome? Is my limited sustained amperage, which does hinder my work, a leverage point in forcing the kind of outcome that someone wants?
I'm just asking questions. I'd really like an explanation that doesn't lead where I think it leads.
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