Get it?
When I founded this journal in March 2005, I got a little purple notebook in which to keep ideas for future entries. On the first page, between two ideas I never used — “Skin, Gut, Wood, Bone, & Metal in Banjos” and “Chemistry of Red Clay Halos” — is the following idea, also unused: “Astronauts in Diapers”.
So, before moving on to more recent news, let me recap where my head was at — what I would have written — 22 months ago.
Nobody loves the space program more than I do, I would have written. I grew up with my room wallpapered with galaxy posters and, at one point, I listened to little else but Vangelis. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as I wrote more recently, was an early cornerstone of what you might call my spiritual life. Every solid body in the solar system should be crawling with Spirits and Opportunities, I would have argued.
And this would’ve been a bargain, if we would only shut down the “manned” space program, which I found increasingly pointless and grotesque.
It’s true that if the Galileo spacecraft had carried a crew, they could have climbed out and shook loose that stuck umbrella antenna, giving us orders of magnitude more data from that mission. On the other hand, for what it would cost to feed the mission’s astronauts, supply them with air, give them a way to crap and pee and take a shower, entertain them, satisfy their sex drives, keep them from killing each other — I would have written — we could have had a flotilla of 500 Galileo spacecraft, of varying design, that would have swarmed around Jupiter like bees around a nest.
And nobody would have died. The main reason for maintaining the Shuttle Program is to finish the wildly over-budget, useless Space Station Freedom, my argument would have gone. The claim that we need the station for scientific purposes would have been called a lie — the only thing we could learn from that station that we couldn’t learn more easily, cheaply, and safely in other ways would be how to keep people floating around in space.
Why do we keep hurling these brave, bright, strong, idealistic people up on these monsters designed in 1970 to play nurse maid to billion-dollar junior-high-school science-fair ant farms? Just to have them die painful, fiery, long, terrifying, lonely deaths? Or for a massive welfare program for defense contractors? Have we no shame? Is nothing sacred? … I would have asked, had I written that post 22 months ago.
The argument is often made that “the young people of today” need heros to look up to and to stimulate their imaginations. Again, a concept from 1970. (Aaaahhh, remember when “disposable” was synonymous with “expensive”?) Young people today find it wildly stimulating to sit behind a computer, issuing commands to robots. They may well find it irrational and regressive — backward and idiotic, even — to risk death just to fly around in circles in the dark. Or so I might have speculated, had I written that post.
And the emblem for all these ideas would have been The Diaper. Yes, those brave explorers spacewalking in the new frontier are wearing DIAPERS (which really inspires the teenagers, in my experience.)
Well, I could go on … I mean, I could have gone on … like this forever, oh so long ago. I think you can see why I never wrote that entry — hysterical rants are simply against the editorial standards of The Celestial Monochord, which attempts to put forth a rational, contemplative exploration of ideas. When one of our writing staff submits such a screed, the Editorial Board politely rejects it.
Anyway, that’s where I was before this week. Then, two news items caught my eye.
First, the pilotless drone story. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle started using messages that readers leave on the paper’s voice mail for the Chronicle’s podcast. The first such experiment became a huge internet phenomenon. It was a guy enraged by the Chronicle’s use of the phrase “pilotless drone” — a drone, you see, already implies the lack of a pilot. The caller’s off-the-rails tirade (“DRONE! DRONE! DRONE! Pilotless airplane! GET IT?”) is hilarious, as is the attention it has received.
Mostly, I like the way the caller’s hysterical chanting roughly reflects my actual position on an important public policy issue.
And then there’s Lisa Nowak. Yes indeed. As I write this, I haven’t yet seen what fun the late-night comics will make of her. The woman is clearly having what used be called, in the old days, a “nervous breakdown” and I don’t want to exploit her mental health crisis. Leave the exploitation to the cable news networks and the Florida prosecutors.
But I can’t help pointing out that I was right — and what’s a blog for, except to point out the rare occasions on which you were right — about astronauts and diapers. Something needs a second look here. Maybe we need to go focus on real knowledge, on missions like the Voyager Spacecraft, which to my generation were so inspiring, so beautiful, and so dignified.
Editor’s Note: This is installment seven of my increasingly bizarre attempt to post one entry every day for a whole month. THIS month, as a matter of fact.