Joy Riders, Unite!

For the most part, we should plan for life on Mars the same way we might plan for life after a nuclear apocalypse. That is, we can expect to live in underground burrows, like rabbits or prairie dogs.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/09/who-wants-a-one-way-ticket-to-mars-2016/

There must be gold, oil, diamonds, copper, and lithium to even think of something so incredibly dumb. Something must be driving the itch to go there. Something must be messing with the balls of the big boys hoping to get enough lucre up to go. And, except for totally fouling the nest of this place Earth [once] called home, it is no surprise that some wonky South African punk, a generation removed from the Apartheid oscilloscope, is hungry for it.

Sort of like moving out of one shitted up chicken coop into maybe another one? For instance, just imagine anybody going family camping around the ruins of Chernobyl. No takers. But if you’ve got minerals and a way to make money (and, hell, all the externalities blowing upon the vacuous emptiness of space, who cares?!), guess we’ve got a wagon train and folks lookin’ for a new 40 acres and a mule.

Just leave all the tar, and chemicals, and waste, and unsolved nuclear pollution, and post-industrial indestructible indissolvable human debris behind for a new little place to…befoul? No, that c’aint be it! And it ain’t some kind of wanderlust. As for the science angle? Nope. It’s just death, like here. So why, Santa Claus, why? Well, li’l Wendy, iz just anotha opportunity to be lookin’ fer them free raw materials before th’other fella gits ’em first, yee-haw! Ride’m, girl! Ride’m, cowboy! Into the solar system!

Robin Ames

There had been tiny, little, baby praying mantises clinging to grass in the swamp. I had watched them. Protected by the government, I learned in life later that it had been a crime to kill them, if I had. I did not. At the shop, the chemicals they had used way back when, did babies ever really eat the paint chips off the window sills? Did this ever happen? Today, there are no toxic emissions at all. Beijing became what Detroit had been in America in the 50’s. People die going to work, die breathing in their own apartments. Rock n Roll died. Buddy Holly died. RFK died. And so did the others. The fen and swamp that became St. Petersburg, too, killed thousands and thousands of Russian peasants. People who used to live just like human beings in medieval times who just expected themselves to be used up like stones and that was it for a human lifetime used to live like that. That’s the way it goes. It would seem to be that that’s just the way life goes sometimes, anyway. The codes I follow from the catalog just for the customers: R6 B14 C42 W13. Then shake it up on the mixer, dab a bit on the lid wet for later, blow it dry with a blow dryer, tap it down. And you’ll be good for the next seven to ten years, ma’am, sir, I tell them. And my thumbs which are turned out and are only good for milking, just like my mother’s, were never used that way for milking for thirty years in the field for that now.

 

(read & experience egbertstarr.com)