Complex Numbers

In Space, No One Can Watch You Drink

In the future, if space travel became possible, would you want to go? What would most influence your decision whether or not to leave Earth?

If you'd asked me that when I was 15, my answer would have been, "Hell yeah, sign me up."

At that time, I had every reason to believe it was not only possible, but inevitable. For fuck's sake, we'd just lofted people to the goddamn moon. Certainly, Mars would be next, then maybe a generation ship to the Alpha Centauri system or some such science fiction trope. And I desperately wanted to be involved.

What took me by surprise was that we spent all the time since then never leaving Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Oh, I know there are reasons for this: political and financial costs, greater awareness of the effects it would have on a human body to leave the safety of our natural radiation shield, whatever. And I guess I should be glad we didn't abandon even that, but we could have done so much more, especially as technology advanced.

We went to the moon using little more than a slide rule. It would be another ten years before you could stuff a real computer into a spaceship. Whatever you're using to read this, laptop or desktop or tablet or mobile phone, has orders of magnitude more computing power than Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong had access to.

We've done other stuff, of course. We populated Mars with robots, and sent probes throughout the solar system and beyond, and that's all very cool. Nothing like boots on the ground, though - or floating in a capsule.

But I digress. I tend to do that when we're talking about space exploration. I'm convinced that Western civilization hit its peak on or about July 20, 1969, and we've been on a downhill slide ever since. But that could be age talking; I don't know.

I've heard all the arguments against space exploration, and I summarily reject all of them.

Now? Well, now I realize that there's no beer in space. Oh, I'm fully aware that astronomers have identified entire clouds of ethanol out there. Not the same thing, though. You'd also have to find barley, hops, and yeast, and there are plenty of those things right here on Earth. To go the rest of my life without beer? You couldn't pay me enough.

Happy to sit back and watch other people endure the trips, though. Go for it.