You Can't Make Mistakes

This sci-fi is fortified with extra “fi” and low in “sci”

I read this article on Slashdot and started thinking.

Never good.

The idea is that climate changes on Mars happened more recently than we previously thought. Maybe our Sun used to really kick out the jams and Mars was warmer. As the Sun lost some steam over 3 or 4 billion years, Mars cooled, glaciers form, then recede. Canals and trenches, etc are created in the process. Atmosphere changes. Suddenly, nothing more than a frozen little rock floating around the Sun.

In the mean time, the very, very hot Earth next door has also started to cool and settle down. Volcanic activity is down, rainfall is up. It is becoming more habitable.

In the mean time, Venus next door is still rocking and rolling with the greenhouse gases. Hot and smoky: no fun for a vacation.

Let us introduce a race of intelligent beings into the mix. They are hanging out on the homeland, doing their thing. Then there occurs what is called an Extinction Level Event. This may have been caused by a weapon of some kind which the folks decided to test or use against one another some sunny afternoon, or an meteor. Who can say? It kicks up the dust. The planet cools, the Sun is cooling anyway, freezing, glaciers, we’ve heard it all before.

These guys have very little time to get out of Dodge, but they have the technology. They gather together a group, lie to the rest—who are, by all accounts, totally screwed—by telling them that they will come back for them, and blast off.

They head for the nearest safe-looking haven and land on, that’s right, Earth.

Perhaps that is where we are now. We’re the Martians. Our new digs aren’t so new anymore. We’re approaching critical population mass, Earth is warming up.

Do we need to think about calling up Two-Men-and-a-Spaceship and heading for Venus? If so, be sure to make your reservations early.

We ask all the wrong questions

I read these two articles this week:

The Future of Space Games

The Physics of Zero-G Whipped Cream

I realize that when presented in this manner, the two articles seem a little bit more tawdry than they were probably intended.

Or are they?

My question after reading these, and following up with a bit more research, is this:

“Has anyone—or, more appropriately, “Have any two (or more)—ever had sex in space?

If you tell me that you haven’t wondered this, or even at least thought about it for a second, then you are lying to me. You can’t tell me that you can think about what it would be like to float through 0-gravity attached to a makeshift medicine ball of your own design without thinking: I wonder if it would be difficult to stay engaged while copulating at 0-G’s.

Or maybe that is just what I think about when people start talking about “games” aboard the International Space Station and “whipped cream in space.”

Come on people. Lighten up. We went through the whole “space toilet: everybody poops” scenario about 15 years ago. I think that it is high time that we discuss the realities of performing “the deed” while floating, unencumbered through the void.

And, if none of the ISS crew nor any Soyuz or space shuttle crew from the USA was ever done it, I will eat my words. But, if this is the case, then we have a whole new—and really fascinating—set of experiments to carry out, don’t we?

Thankfully, humans have finally discovered a planet out there that seems to be similar to Earth. What is the popular media response? Well, to suggest that we go there after we have totally destroyed this planet, of course. And why not?! We will have at least proved ourselves worthy of one thing: the ability to destroy a planet with complete disregard for the consequences of our actions. Even right now we see the ramifications of everything that we as humans do, and yet we make little to no effort as a collective to deal with it.

Such a response to a discovery has little to do with environmental disregard, or political faux pas. This is just a new kind of manifest destiny. We believed that we had not only the right, but the obligation—as new colonial Americans—to spread our population and growing technological influence from one end of this continent to the other. Now we can do the same things in outer space!

Was our first concern about whether or not there might be life on such a planet? No. Who cares! Even if there is, we’ll have to take a space-ship filled with whiskey-drunk, syphilis-ridden space sailors there and spread the love to the locals. Then, once we have paid them off in fire-water, raped their women—or whatever permutation of gender they have that can be seen as vulnerable, and run them off their land, we can put them in camps and give them few rights other than the right to own and operate casinos—which will eventually be taken over by some sort of immigrant crime syndicate.

Basically, our discovery of this little planet in the Libra constellation is the worst thing that could have ever happened to them. Even though it will currently take 20 years traveling at the speed of light to get there, we will. Besides, in no time we will have figured out how to move through space and time faster than that, just like we did with ships and airplanes. So the first couple of thousand years of space colonization will be a little rough, moldy bread and kegs of whiskey in the hulls of ships and all, but we will get through it and shall eventually prevail.

This sort of thing has been the wet-dream of science-fiction writers and enthusiasts for years and years. When there was world left to conquer, the heroic fiction of humans was all about conquering it. When there was no longer world to conquer, we shifted our attention heavenward, waiting for that moment when scientists would say, “Hey guys, we got one.”

It’s scary; we’re scary. We are a terrifying race of creatures who think first about ourselves, then about others of us who look the same, then others who don’t, and so on. We have complete disregard for the world—and now the universe—around us. And to top it off: we tell ourselves that our creator—who is oft billed as a benevolent, just, omniscient, and omnipotent being—supports us in our quest to dominate all things great and small. This creator must be benevolent, but taking a nap, or omniscient and omnipotent, but with a little mean streak—like a kid on an anthill with a magnifying glass—because it allows us to do some terrible things in its name with regard to conquering new frontiers.

Well, gods or not, we’re going to the moon, and from there Mars, and from there Gilese 581 C to set up poolside condos, strip clubs, casinos, and fair systems of taxation. Buckle up kids, the future is here and we’re in for a long ride.