Space Station 'nauts could repopulate planet

(737 words)

At times like these, the native optimist in me is at war with my inner doomsday realist, the one who senses an existential threat.

It looks like in order to keep the economy humming, many people are willing to risk the continuity of the species. I find the idea of a whimsically imposed  Easter deadline ludicrous, especially when our best experts predict by Easter our major cities will be seeing long lines of dead.

I used to trust in the Biblical balm of Matthew 5:3 that states “the meek shall inherit the Earth.”

It’s a lovely sentiment because it automatically seems to rule out obnoxious talk show hosts and their guests. But  the rise of social media reveals a more obvious flaw in the declaration. 

There are no meek left! I know a few folks who can be described as demure, coy, and refined — and you’re all reading my blog. You’re sexy, too!

Just not meek.

So who will inherit the earth?

Their names are Andrew Morgan, Oleg Skripochka and Jessica Meir.

Or as I call them Adam, Adam and Eve.

They are currently the only earthlings not on earth. Commercial flights (already infected) don’t count.

The trio have been manning the International Space Station since prior to the advent of the coronavirus.

It’s a stupendous failure of marketing that we know nothing about these highly accomplished individuals (all white) who appear so rigidly straight arrow the odds of them having ever told a fart joke, much less farted, are astronomical.

But for them what isn’t?

On paper at least, this is an impressive trio.

Morgan, 44, is a Morgantown native who now considers New Castle home. A West Point grad, he is an MD with a specialty in sports medicine. He’s served with the special forces and has four children.

Skripochka, 50, is a Russian cosmonaut and a recipient of the Hero of the Russian Federation. That may be impressive or it may be one of those fraudulent honors Putin gives away like candy. Trump maybe has a drawer full of ‘em.

One interesting fact about Skripochka. In 2010 — and this was all unofficial — he while on a spacewalk slipped from an unsecured tether and began drifting to certain annihilation in the great black yonder. Miraculously, he bounced off an antenna and was able to grasp a fortuitously positioned hand railing before drifting off to a grisly demise.

That brings us to Meir, 42, of Caribou, Maine, and to me the most impressive of the crew. Not only is she an astronaut, she’s a marine biologist, a physiologist and a Harvard professor of anesthesia. Her bio says she studied diving habits of emperor penguins in Antarctica and migratory patterns of bar-headed geese over the Himalayas.

One possible complication to her assuming the role of Eve v. 2.0. 

She’s never been married. She’s, perhaps, a lesbian, which would be an inconvenience to say the least for any woman with a mortal duty to repopulate the planet.

More likely, she’s never found a man her equal. I don’t doubt it. I’ve sat next to men in bars nearly my whole life and if I had a choice between studying your typical male in a bar or, say, a bar-headed goose, I’d pick the bird.

Imagine the head start humanity will get with a gene pool seeded by these three achievers. You might be dismayed that Skripochka, a man who forgot to secure his own lifeline, is one-third of humanity’s future, but I hate to think of a future that didn’t include for purposes of levity some Three Stooges elements.

I doubt you’ll hear about it, but some ISS drama may soon take place.

Morgan, Skripochka and Meir are due to be replaced by a new (tainted) crew in just a few weeks.

What if they refuse to answer the door when the replacements knock?

That’s what I’d do. Yes, I’d  slide the little chain over the door, shut out the lights and just pretend no one was home.

In space, no one can hear you ring the doorbell.

It’ll make a great movie.

I’d cast Viggo Mortensen as Morgan because we love him in “Captain Fantastic;” Ana de Armas as Meir because we love her in “Knives Out;” and I’d cast Kevin Spacey to play Skripochka.

Why him?

Despite his recent troubles, I think any movie about space ought to have at least a little Spacey.

Related …

Earth’s plans to occupy Kepler 22b

NASA flagged for excessive celebrating

Space Station reality show has astronomical potential

Sally Ride in OUT-ter space

8.8 billion Earth-like planets, worlds of possibilities

Space needs more, not less, junk

NASA worry warts are once again saying the sky is falling, and this time they may be right.

The once-pristine heavens are starting to resemble Earth’s trash-strewn streets.

Experts estimate somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 objects larger than a centimeter (half an inch) are in Earth orbit. At orbital speeds of up to 17,500 mph, even a space bottle cap destroy a satellite or the manned space station.

The gist of the news is there’s too much junk in space to which I respond: Garbage.

In fact, there’s not nearly enough trash in space.

We need to think of creative ways to litter space with our litter.

Think about it.

We have way too much trash here on earth, both land and sea (check out my Great Pacific Garbage Patch post).

I see it everyday on my two-mile strolls through small town America.

I vowed long ago I’d pick up and dispose of any trash carelessly left in my path, and just in my path. I would not go out of my way to pick up debris in the gutter or caught in the shrubs.

There’s just too much. Weaving to pick it all up would take too long and observers would mistake me for a stumbling drunk about six or seven hours before I actually become one.

It’s on these walks when I think about how I can solve the world’s most pressing problems.

And I keep coming back to ways to launch our trash into space.

There’s nothing deceptive about the name Space. Space is what fills up a totally empty closet. Except in the case of Space there’s a whole bunch more of it.

Space is space. It is empty. There’s nothing there there.

That’s why words like landfill drive me insane. Land is land that’s already full of land. You can’t further fill it. You can only pile all our unsightly crap up on top of it.

Space is something that needs filling.

That’s one reason why being an astronaut in an unhappy marriage is so convenient.

When an astronaut says he needs some space, he (or she) can really truly get some.

So what’s to be done with all this trash and all that space?

Ideally, someone will invent a machine that will transform all our trash into ozone. That way some future space craft can fly into orbit and just empty the boxes full of artificial ozone where all the natural stuff used to be.

But that may be years off, at least until the geniuses at Apple get bored figuring out ways I can carry 20,000 songs, rather than a measly 15,000, in my pocket and decide to do something sensible.

Another solution is to equip every piece of disposable trash with a really tiny little rocket that would ignite after a detector signaled the waste had become trash.

The innovation would have the added benefit of keeping snoozing airline pilots in a lively enough state to dodge skies filled with projectiles.

Less expensive might be the application of a new generation of super magnets. Again, all disposable items would be implanted with tiny powerful magnets that could be activated when the human touch goes undetected.

They’d work in concert with a Rhode Island-sized magnet orbiting the earth. Every few weeks this magnet would sail overhead and all the trash on the streets would magically rise to heaven.

It would be a beautiful phenomenon reminiscent of the above-pictured rising lamp scene in the captivating Rapunzel movie “Tangled” (see it, now! It’s wonderful! Honest!).

The magnets would also clear up all the pesky space junk endangering all the crewcut bores so devoted to tending International Space Station ant farms.

Sadly, those are likely solutions that will be enjoyed by our children’s children.

See, I’ve come to realize the men and women who could make this stuff happen lag in the kind of creative thinking readers of this blog enjoy basking in -- God bless each and every one you.

Just imagine the scorn they’d heap on me if I ever tried to bring these ideas to our corporate big shots.

They’d say I was nuts. Crazy.

They’d say the same things about me they said about Galileo when he was ridiculed for the then-heresy of declaring earth revolved around the sun.

I like to think me and the historic genius have at least one thing in common.

We’re not lunatics.

We’re just both just a little bit spacey.

Special deliveries in space

I had an alarming thought when I read the mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis was to bring supplies to the International Space Station.

What if they’ve run out of toilet paper?

“Just try and hold it, Mikhail! It’ll just be another day!”

I can only hope they weren’t serving Mexican last night.

Try as I might I have been unable to find a complete manifest of the supplies they’re bringing. I have to imagine toilet paper would be included.

But what kind of toilet paper? And I’m not talking Cottonelle, White Cloud or Charmin. I talking about what’s bound to be hi-tech TP.

How will future toilet paper differ from current earth rolls?

Will there even be rolls at all? Probably not. That will disappoint me.

I’ve for years enforced a custom in our house that whenever a roll is finished the last user must remove the cardboard from the wall holder and toot -- Doo! Da! Da! Doo! Doo! DOOOO!” -- to trumpet the news a fresh roll is required.

It’s a joyful sound and the kids have so much fun with it I feel glad I didn’t decide “Taps,” also fitting, be played instead.

The thought reminded me of the great American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1964) who during the darkest days of the Cold War was asked by an earnest student at an august symposium what this great thinker would consider foremost for stocking a fall out shelter.

Sandburg paused thoughtfully, leaned forward and said with grave import, “I would be sure . . . to include plenty of containers . . . to secure . . . all the what Norman Mailer . . . calls . . . shit.”

I understand it was an electric moment. Many were outraged. But I’ll bet just as many ran home to their basement bunkers and started swapping out big cans of baked beans for empty containers with really tight lids.

We know hardly anything about what’s going on in the International Space Station, which has been circling our heads 16 times a day since 1998.

I guess they’re busy, but how could you tell?

A busy scientist is a person with his or her right eye slammed shut tight while the left eye squints into a microscope.

But what could be so fascinating or helpful to warrant that kind of devoted space study? Microscopic porn? That would certainly turn the idea of earth porn on its surgically enhanced head.

There’s now been an uninterrupted human presence in space for 10 years and 248 days. In that time, 197 different humans have been on board.

If there’s been any compelling stories stemming from the $100 billion adventure I’ve not heard them.

There’s been no romance, no passion, no feuds, no fun.

The microbes they study seem to have more interesting lives.

Are we sending uniformly dull people into space or is space just making them uniformly dull?

If I were on board I’d be stir crazy and longing for something more vital than freeze dried salisbury steaks, spare parts, and all the sundry supplies we need for our daily doings.

I’d be longing for a goofball.

I’d beg NASA to send me someone who can quote lines from Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back To School,” someone who’d think smuggling cigars on board was neither inappropriate nor dangerous, someone who’d have trouble sharing the plots of the latest “Messin’ with Bigfoot” ads without cracking up.

Send me one guy to liven up the dying space program and let the earthlings know this is an otherworldly adventure that should be captivating the entire planet.

And make sure he brings a pizza. I’m sure I'd be craving one of those, too.

Tell him to be a fool every so often

And to have no shame over having ever been a fool

Yet learning something over every folly

-- Carl Sandburg, 1936