Squidolus [Day:1171 Hour:0]

The Last Scene In The Movie by Eleanor Hsieh

drunken attempts to capture the night sky over møn, denmark

*winks at the sky* for the aliens

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

“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”

— Terry Pratchett (via hot-elf)

buying a pintetest-y wall hanging with twee cursive lettering that reads "this place is a message, and part of a system of messages, pay attention to it! sending this message was important to us. we considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. this place is not a place of honor, no highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. what is here was dangerous and repulsive to us." to hang in my living room

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