Talk nerdy to me — Heinlein Month: This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race

via.

This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year’s Day of the Year One. If we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race.

And we’re going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we’re going to spread. I don’t know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I’m an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it’s utterly inevitable: we’re going to spread through the entire universe.

(Robert Heinlein. Interview with Walter Cronkite. CBS News. July 20, 1969.)

Is it gauche to use a Clarke cover in a Heinlein entry?

Happy forty-second birthday to the Apollo 11 mission (Hey, 42!). Which was apparently for nothing since we’re not going to colonize it even at all. Not under the aegis of organized government-funded scientific think-tanks, at any rate, which it seems are going the way of the Betamax and Karen Carpenter*. Privatizing space travel/exploration is about as dicey an idea as any I’ve heard in this life. There will be a Wal-Mart on the moon before a fucking hospital. Depend on it.

(I’m just bitter because I have always wanted to live on the moon. Sorry. This is not a joke: my ultimate fantasy would be to make love on the back lawn of my terra-formed moon house — by EARTHLIGHT. Picture it, you look up and the planes of your lover’s face are illuminated by light from Earth. HOW AMAZING WOULD THAT BE? Crazy amazing. Crazy. Plus outside sex.)





*Oh, my god, why would you even make that joke? Because I am a terrible person.

Burroughs Month: Man is designed for space travel

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Postulate that there is no privacy and no deceit possible in space: Your innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions are immediately apparent to those around you. So you want to be careful who is around you.

(William S. Burroughs. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Arcade, 1993. p. 85.)

I did a lot of Burroughs reading in October to get all primed for the take-two of Burroughs month this November, and one of my favorite pieces from The Adding Machine was this little gem. I plan to share more later this week, about shit-spotting. But as far as this excerpt goes, I drew a lonely and ugly conclusion from the parameters of Burroughs’ postulate in this passage: if there is no privacy in space, I would not want to go.

Astronomy Domine by pequeñísimo ser on the flickr.

If that’s part of the rules, that I can be in space but people can read my thoughts and my feelings? My first instinct in the face of that stricture would be to reject the chance of space travel, which is something that I have wanted to do my whole life, to the point that I mist up when I think about how I’m getting too old to ever be approved to colonize the moon, which means giving up on my dream of making love on the lawn in my terraformed backyard by Earthlight (the most beautiful thing possible — just think about it), yet here I am saying “no-go” to space travel if it means tipping my hand about all my secret romantic notions. That is crazy. I need to work on tearing down some of my walls.