Mission: Space

Mis­sion: Space — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

If there’s no other life out there, it seems like an awful waste of space. Maybe that’s why we’re so fas­ci­nated with sto­ries of adven­ture in space. It seems we dream about going to new places, encoun­ter­ing new species, piss­ing them off and hav­ing glo­ri­ous bat­tles that put our Mother Earth in dan­ger until some famous Hol­ly­wood actor comes along and almost single-​handedly saves our skins.

What I don’t under­stand is why we just don’t shoot the Hol­ly­wood bad-​ass into space first so we can avoid the whole “Earth in dan­ger” phase of the script. Of course, the prob­lem now is that all of our bad-​asses are too old for that kind of thing any­more. The actors we send into space now will try to teach the aliens how to get in touch with their feelings.

We’re doomed.