The same volunteers queued from dawn for a new crisp flavour in the hallway machine.
A lab showed 400 volunteers footage of six NASA helicopters dropping onto Mars. Heart rates fell and one man asked if the video was nearly over. The next day the same group queued from dawn for a new crisp flavour.
My lab watched people watch NASA's Skyfall preview. Six helicopters. They drop out of the sky over Mars, with no crane and no rover, then fly off in different directions to look for water. Launch is set for late 2028.
We showed the clip to 400 volunteers. We measured heart rate, pupil size, and whether anyone said anything at all. One man asked if the video was nearly finished.
Heart rates went down. Two volunteers put their phones away, then took them back out. The word most often used to describe six flying machines on another planet was "fine".
On day two, the vending machine in our corridor got a new flavour. Salt and pepper. The queue formed at ten to seven in the morning.
One volunteer called it a defining moment of the century. She was talking about the crisps.
My colleague ran the numbers twice. "We have measured the exact point where a species stops looking up," he said. "It is in our hallway, next to the recycling."
You can read the original account of the helicopters here, if you like. Most people did not.
The sample size was adequate. It was not.
Footnotes.
