Comme The Stars Perfume

Soviet "Globus" navigation instrument, a mechanical/clockwork positioning display used aboard Voskhod spacecraft, starting with the first human space flight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

1967 cover art by Jerome Podwil to A. Bertram Chandler’s The Road to the Rim

Circling the Sun

queer astronaut sticker

see you space cowboy

Earth’s Rotation Visualized in a Timelapse of the Milky Way Galaxy by Aryeh Nirenberg

They never look at me with the telescope

stars

you’ve heard of: getting emotionally attached to your roomba

now get ready for: genuinely mourning the mars rover like a deceased loved one  

Every few months, someone with more money and fame than knowledge spouts off a Grand Plan to leave Earth for somewhere else to escape our problems. And everyone who has dealt with the complexity of dynamic systems heaves an enormous sigh.

We can’t even create a stable sealed biome on Earth, where we’re operating within the geomagnetic field at standard temperature & pressure.

It’s the simplest version of a faked environment, yet we repeatedly fail. We don’t even bother pretending the space station is independent.

How exactly do we expect to successfully terraform another world to be Earthling-friendly when we’ve made our planet less hospitable?

We didn’t maintain Earth’s climate & we’re failing to correct back despite it getting noticeably less pleasant. We’re un-terraforming Terra.

If your dream is humans scattered across the planets & that’s what inspires you: Cool. Great. Love it, and you can push that dream forward with sustainability on Earth. Space requires intense reduce/reuse/recycle & green tech. Help us pass on Easy Mode so we can up the challenge.

In space, yesterday’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee. If we don’t have that level of sustainability, we don’t have a shot of moving beyond Easy Mode.

Yes, the planet will survive our shenanigans. But people are substantially less hardy than rocks. Our survival depends on what we do. We can be smarter than algae, or we can follow the path of stromatolites. It’s our choice.

And this idolization of recreating company towns, but in space, where the boss controls the air supply? That’s a low-hanging fruit of dystopia. We don’t even need to look at labour history to recognize what a bad idea that is.

Source: https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon/status/1218716524795568128