Thread by @sim_kern

"One reason we find the fantasy of outer space colonization so irresistible is the prospect of starting fresh. Our global society is enormously complicated, with baked-in bigotries and illogical ways of doing things that seem impossible to untangle here on Earth.🧵

On another planet, we assume we could start over and get it right. Realistically, though, there’s no leaving our messiness behind, no matter how many light-years away we travel. I can’t think of a better illustration for this than the fact that the moon is already a toilet /

When people think of what astronauts left behind on the moon, they might picture Buzz Aldrin planting an American flag. But I picture all the literal shit we left up there. Because NASA, unlike any respectable hiker, didn’t value “packing out waste”. /

The pooping protocol for Apollo astronauts involved wearing adhesive bags stuck to their asses, which notoriously tore out pubic hairs when removed. They sealed the bag – hoping nothing escaped to float around the lunar module – and crushed an antibacterial capsule inside /

mushing it around with their poop to prevent a future biohazard. Then they chucked the bag out the airlock. Over the course of the Apollo missions, we planted five flags on the moon and ninety-six bags of human excrement. /

We also left a plaque on the Lunar Lander reading, “We came in peace for all mankind” – never mind that at the time, the US was carpet-bombing villages in Vietnam, killing kids with napalm. /

Anywhere we travel, we’ll be bringing all our shit – literal and figurative – with us. And as any Apollo astronaut can tell you, shit is much easier to deal with on Earth than in space. /

If you care deeply, as I do, about the long-term goals of space science, it’s imperative to put a stop to the world-eating overconsumption that creates billionaires, rather than indulging their pet projects. /

For now, the best thing we could do to ensure humanity’s long-term survival in space is to figure out living sustainably here on earth. If you’re a sci-fi lover like me, think of it this way: we are already living on a magnificent spaceship uniquely suited to our needs. /

It is enormous, big enough to bring all our friends and family along. It has excellent gravity and radiation shielding in the form of a breathable atmosphere. It comes with a nearly-unlimited renewable energy source – the Sun – which should last us another billion years or so /

Our spaceship is peopled with more than eight million different alien life forms for us to study, whose behaviors and languages and intelligences we’re only beginning to understand. These other-species friends provide us with air, food, medicines, water filtration.../

some even sing for us, perfume our air, and make our ship breathtakingly beautiful.

Unfortunately, we have a plethora of captains on this ship, and they’re mostly awful. /

Duty rosters are largely assigned based on racial hierarchies and nepotism. For half a century, our science officers have been shouting, “We’re running the engines too hot!” But the captains didn’t listen, or they did and decided to lie about it, assuring us everything was fine/

Now the warp core is overheating, and the life support is failing, but our captains keep saying, “Faster, faster! More speed, more extraction, more profit!” Because these captains have been CHARGING us for the service of driving our spaceship into meltdown. /

They've hoarded obscene amounts of ship's resources, so their crew quarters look like a dragon's lair while millions of their crewmates kids' starve. /

Now all the water is poisoned, the corridors are full of trash, a vicious disease is ripping through the ship, and the life support is so bad on decks 43-56 that hundreds of people are cooking alive in the heat. /

Meanwhile, a few of our captains have started taking joyrides on pitiful little escape-pods. Anyone can see they have no chance of escaping our sorry, shared fate, yet still they spend piles of resources on these pet projects rather than fixing the mess they’ve made of our ship/

And then they have the audacity to tell us that their efforts are for the common good. These are terrible captains. This is like one of those episodes where the chief science officer must relieve the captain of duty, or everyone dies. /

Except we don’t have a protocol like that in place.
Maybe we should try mutiny.

Read my full piece in the @Independent: independent.co.uk/voices/bezos-m…