NASA says it’ll cost a trillion fucking dollars and 25 years to go to Mars. It took 8 years to go from Yuri to Neil & Buzz’s stroll, and now NASA is saying they need to basically start over and take a QUARTER CENTURY to take on Mars?
Look, Mars needs women.
If we want to get to the “Three breasted prostitute” scene from Total Recall, we’ll need to get started now. Considering the massive costs associated with anything government, the actual first manned landing will probably need to be done privately, or mostly privately.
10 years ago, that would have sounded like an impossible fantasy, but with companies like SpaceX that have the passion to innovate and spend SMARTER instead of BIGGER (see Scaled Composite‘s SpaceShipOne for an example), it’s possible. Hells bells, we’re getting to the point where one really dedicated billionaire could buy 3/4 of the hardware needed off-the-shelf.
Mars on the cheap
Heavy launch? Fuck it, the Soviets pioneered assembly in orbit, now there’s no need to create a whole dedicated launcher like the Ares cargo monster. Just buy a bunch of Proton boosters (dirt cheap compared to equivalent US launchers) to chuck everything up.
The Soviets^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRussians will sell you the remaining Salyut core module. It’s identical brother was the core of Mir, and another brother is the ‘Zvezda‘ module on the ISS. It’s a 40 year old design lineage that has proven itself at keeping people alive for years at a time and comes with an exercycle. You chuck this up there with one of the Protons and let it screw itself into the stack. Voi-fuckin’-la, you now have crew quarters that will, properly stocked, keep your astronuts alive for the duration of the trip, assuming they don’t accidentally space themselves. And shit, you can use it to build the damn rocket too because you can have a crew up there to catch the payloads and hook up all the wires.
John Carmack made this for the lulz, imagine what he'd build for reals.
For the big stuff, assemble with KURS automated docking systems (now with almost 30 years of successful use in orbit). Proton goes up, upper stage finds the growing “Mars or bust” staging location, KURS drives it into dock like freakin space LEGOs. “But Thunderscreech”, you mew, “isn’t that what caused the collision with Mir?” Fuck no, that shit happened when they turned the docking system OFF to do it manually.
Ten or twenty Protons later, you’ve got a huge fucking booster assembly in orbit built out of upper-stage assemblies that are usually used to chuck comsats into Geosynchronous orbit so fat housewives can catch all their ‘stories’. “But Thuuuuuuunderscreech”, you honk, “isn’t there a lot of waste in the form of redundant systems and mass by having all those complete booster stages up there? FUCK YEAH, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than making an untested booster that needs a whole new rocket to put it into orbit. Spend SMARTER, not BIGGER.
The Mars Lander and re-launch assembly is the wildcard. You probably drop your return-stage first under an assload of parachutes with some sort of soft-landing rocket system. Let John Carmack build it, he’d fucking love a chance to actually put his code on the planet that made him his first million. Similar issues for landing the person/peoples on the planet, but that can be solved. This is the main place to insert speculative dollars, rubles, or whatever the hell we’re spending in the future. And be “we’re” I mean whichever software billionaire takes a break from tennis to say “Fuck it, let’s do it.”
Finally, you cram a couple folks into a Soyuz and kick ’em into orbit to dock with this structure the way they’ve been doing since the early 60s. Light the candle, and sit back and wait.
Total cost? Maybe a couple billion, maybe a little more. Shit, let’s say ten and make sure the whole thing has a kick-ass paintjob of a naked lady wrestling a dragon or something on it.
FUCK YEAH, the news says the recession’s over! Hot damn! I haven’t checked my 401K yet, but I assume this means that it’s tripled in value back to where it was a couple years ago! Boy oh boy, I can’t wait to get my next paycheck with it’s big chunk of money that retroactively brings my salary up to where it should be, and I sure am looking forward to having my dollar go a lot further later today when I go buy stuff!
Phew, I thought for sure that my upcoming mortgage payment was going to be late, but it looks like everything’s going to be fixed!
I’ve got friends who don’t read the news because they say it’s prone to making exaggerated claims that don’t affect my day to day life, but they’re saying the recession’s over, so woo-hoo! I can finally pay off some of that crippling debt!
You know, I don’t have the check right now, but I bet I can probably just take a print-out of the news to the store with me, they should just extend credit based on this fantastic news, right?
One of the most perplexing examples of mob dumbfuckery to show up recently is the “AntiVaxxer” movement. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically an organized effort to kill off young kids and bring back an age of disease and pestilence among the uneducated and easily conned.
"It's ok if your kids die as long as people think I'm still relevant."
Oh, that’s not how THEY describe it, of course. Luminaries in their group like Doctor Jenna McCarthy (she is a doctor, right? I mean, she’s setting health care policy, so she’s qualified, right?) talk about how great it would be to get rid of vaccinations because people aren’t getting sick any more. The little logic flag that just popped up in your head? Yeah, that’s just your “profiteering center”, according to Jenna McCarthy and her followers, because that’s the only reason people would support these procedures. Certainly, it’s irresponsible to make any connection between worldwide vaccination efforts and the huge drop in sickness, right? Whoops, your “BULLSHIT!” circuit breaker just popped. Go ahead and reset that, we’ll be discussing some more of their claims shortly.
To the antivaxxer hoards, the fact that worldwide health has gone up in regions where vaccines are administered is incidental to their feelings. “MERCURY!” they cry, referencing some of the preservatives used, despite the fact that you’ll get roughly the same amount of mercury from eating a small piece of fish. If you believe their strident pleas, receiving the shot essentially means that mercury will seep through your pores and turn you into a highly toxic, autistic version of The Silver Surfer.
“Autistic?” you ask, scratching your head. “Where’d that come from?” Well, about 15 years ago, Andrew Wakefield published an article in the Lancet making a link between MMR vaccines and autism. The world reeled! “ZOMG!!!!” read the headlines, and everywhere, people began to talk about deferring their children’s vaccinations. ….except that the claims weren’t true and the study was discredited almost immediately when it was discovered that a group of people paid him to say this so they could sue a vaccine company, but the damage had been done.
So, we’re left with the AntiVaxxer movement today. Their entire belief is based upon the disproven work of a discredited doctor who got caught faking evidence for money…. and they don’t care.
It’s as if stupidity has been bred into a generation of perfectly normal looking people who you don’t realize are batshit crazy until they open their mouths, but then it’s a non-stop torrent of drivel. Their movement is a sham, sort of a modern day version of not wearing your seatbelt because you want to be “thrown clear of the wreck”. They point to their own health and say “See? People just don’t get these sicknesses anymore!” without a trace of irony about the face that THEY themselves received vaccinations as children. Also, the causes they take up reflect their ‘crazy levels’ quite nicely too. This year? Swine flu.
“Oh noes!” they cry, “the H1N1 vaccine is ‘new and untested’!” The fuck it is, it’s made the same goddamn way flu vaccines have been constructed for decades.
Is anybody exploring alternative vaccinations?
You know the real reason the H1N1 vaccine is panned, the reason they REALLY subscribe too but don’t mention? Because some radio host told them the vaccine is part of a government plot to genocide their asses. What. The. Fuck. Seriously, there are radio hosts out there who talk about body bags and medical camps and “the government is gonna reduce your population to free up land and money!” and they claim the vaccine is part of this conspiracy. Holy goddamn hell in a handbasket.
This conspiracy theory, of course, is horseshit. “But why, good sir?” I hear you ask through the whispering tubes of the Internet. “And how do you know?” Simple: they’re just not competent enough.
To believe that the US government can put together a big secret plan to kill off most of the population as part of some great conspiracy against its own citizens is to imbue them with skills in leadership, organization, planning, etc that they have consistently failed to demonstrate. It’s like accusing your dog of being the leader of a world-wide diamond theft cartel.
I could disprove this theory so many different ways, but the sheer lack of ability our government has at doing anything big and secret is such a deal changer, I don’t need to go any further.
So back to the antivaxxers… it would be funny if they were just making this decision for themselves and dying off, but here’s the rub: All of these parents saying ‘No vaccinations for my child!”? They’re vaccinated! Their parents were not retarded, so they got the various vaccinations when THEY were kids. The only people who die from horrible, preventable diseases?
Nice fucking job, guys
Their kids.
FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU-
Yet strangely, if I were to go out and punch each of these poor excuses for parents in the face for being so viciously, short-sightedly stupid, somehow I would be considered the villain. There ain’t no justice.
While collecting my morning gruel, I saw the shirt over to the side here being worn by a fellow grubber.
Now, I’m a huge nerd, so I like me the Star Wars just fine. Hell, I even waded through almost all of the books over a 5 month period recently to find out what’s been happening to me good ol’ friends Han, Luke, & Leia. (An aside: Lots of really dumb crap, as it turns out, with just a little good stuff mixed in. It’s like knowing there’s a small handful of gold nuggets in a barrel of sewage, it’s worth the unpleasantness of sifting through to find ’em, but you don’t always enjoy the trip).
But… I’m a Star Wars fan who, like most of my fellows, am able to exist without wearing shirts that immediately announce my undesirability to all women. I’d prefer they learn that by talking to me, see…
Well, this anonymous breakfaster, with his fashionable camo shorts and optimistically crew-cut hair is not only wearing a dorky Star Wars shirt, but it’s also one of the “Big Dog” series. “Big Dog“, if you are not familiar with it, has essentially moved into the shirt genre previously occupied by the “Big Johnson” line of apparel. They’re like jokes, only smaller. Humor for leotarded people, let’s say.
Now, this might seem like a long post for what’s otherwise a pretty benign issue, but the real problem here is the cheapening effect this has on a very serious subject:
The effectiveness of funny shirts.
Just in case you can't clearly see this silly design in my poorly lit, improperly framed and amateurishly taken iPhone photo
Some of us invest some serious time and thought in selecting shirts that are actually clever and/or funny. When we wear these shirts instead of something with buttons, we expect people to look at them and be amused. “Hey, that fat guy is actually slightly less repulsive than I thought because he has a funny shirt! Ha ha ha! I would like to have his children” is basically how the thought process should work. Instead, things like ‘Big Dogs’ shirts have flooded the market with asinine attempts at cleverness that serve to basically bankrupt the comedic economy.
I’m sure that this dude looked at the shirt in some mall shop and said “Hey, that’s some seriously funny shirt. It says ‘Sith Happens’ which is almost like ‘Shit Happens’, but it is socially acceptable because the word is actually different! Ha! Oh, and that Darth Vader figure on the back is actually… a St. Bernard dog instead of David Prowse (who, as Star War nerds know, was the actual person in the suit, not James Earl “Awesome Voice” Jones) and dogs are FUNNY HAWHAWHAWHAW” to himself, then whipped out his bank card. “Shopkeeper, good sir, sign me the fuck up for this wicked shirt! No need for a bag, I shall wear it out of the store!”
Meanwhile, my Threadless shirt of Vader pruning a Death Star-shaped topiary receives an occasional chuckle at best, obviously because people are no longer investing the time to appreciate the sublime humor of T-Shirt art because shirts like that goddamn ‘big dog’ line have ruined it for them. FFFFFUUUUUU-
If I can reach just one person with this rant who might otherwise stray in this fashion, I’ve done my duty. Once you start down this ridiculous path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
After a recent meeting, I found myself with a big bag of hamburger buns that, while not moldy, were not quite tasty enough to save. Always looking for a way to avoid waste, I decided it would be a nice exercise to feed these to the ducks with my kids.
Picking them up from school, we drove out to the local duck pond. “What are we doing here, Dad?” Child One asked as we pulled in.
“We’ve got too much bread, and these ducks are probably hungry. Let’s solve two problems at once!” I responded, excited at the upcoming magical adventure in animal interaction.
"Hey, don't mind us. We're basically just big ducks. Big, friendly ducks."
As I pulled into my parking spot, I noticed that there were quite a few geese wandering around the area and pecking at the grass. “Hmm, geese. I wonder what they’re doing here?” I thought to myself. “Plotting”, is what my future self would have answered.
As we got out of the car, I grabbed my bag of buns and we walked into the park. Some of the surrounding geese had turned to watch our progress silently. As we walked into the area where the water ponds are and the ducks hang out, I began to realize a number of vital facts.
1. There weren’t any ducks. Well, there were maybe three or four token ducks, but for the most part, no ducks.
2. There were geese. Possibly hundreds of them.
3. Geese are bigger than ducks.
Finally, as we entered the open area beyond the shielding bushes, I realized one final thing.
4. Geese are tall.
Apparently, we were not the first humans they had seen, and they had grown to understand that humans often produce wonderful bread. The birds began to wander in our direction, so I opened a small tear in the bag and pulled out a pair of hamburger buns to give to the boys. “Tear them into small pieces and throw them”, I instructed. As I pulled out my own bun, I noticed that the birds were wandering a little faster than before, less of a meander and more of a walk.
“Dad,” mentioned Child One, “there sure are a lot of geese”.
“Yes”, I responded jovially, “and they look hungry. I bet they’re going to like this!” I tore off a piece of bread and threw it towards the nearest birds. The ‘walk’ I had noticed gradually transitioned to a light trot, and the birds closed with us even quicker.
One goose walked up to Child Two (who was dutifully trying to tear off a piece of bread to give to it per instructions) and struck. It’s beak flew out and neatly grabbed the lower half of the bun out of his hand.
“Dad!” Child Two squawked. I began to turn towards him when I heard a scream. Child One had suddenly been surrounded by geese and had thrown his bread away. While the geese had turned away from him to go after the bread, he was still surrounded by tall birds and was quite intimidated. “Don’t worry”, I re-assured him, “they just want the bread.” Child One pulled his arms in and smartly tucked his face into his coat, yelling continuously. I needed to act, so I headed towards him.
The birds, however, didn’t care. As I lurched towards the mob, I turned to check on Child Two and discovered that he had disappeared, but as there didn’t appear to be a pile of feeding birds concentrating around an kid-sized lump on the ground, I turned back to Child One who was still yelling. I stepped towards him, and the birds advanced on me. Their heads were higher than my waist, and they stared at me with unblinking avian eyes and opened their large mouths, and I suddenly had a flash of insight. I remembered that after the age of the dinosaurs had passed, the only living remnants of their great monstrous age were animals like Alligators and… the birds. The dirty white birds clustering around me and closing in on me were, I realized, descendants of the Velociraptor, a pack hunting animal of fierce ability.
Also, this pack of Raptor-children knew that I had their food.
The Enemy
Trying to keep my voice steady so Child One wouldn’t be scared any more, I re-assured him again that the birds just wanted the bread, and as I said this, I began to almost desperately tear at the bag in my hands to free the rest of the bread. I was hoping that the birds understood that the bread was in the bag and not buried deep within my abdomen because if I was wrong, this situation might get even uglier.
The birds keep advancing. I step back once, they waddle forward twice.
My casual backwards motion towards Child One started as a casual repositioning, then became a withdrawal and finally Full Retreat. The white feathered Velociraptors (because this is the only way I can see them now) are swarming on us from all locations. The birds despondently picking at the grass by our car have heard the cry of ‘BREAD!’ in gooseltongue and my situation is becoming a cinematic mash-up of the Jurassic Park and the Burly Brawl scene from the second Matrix movie.
Finally, I get the bag open and throw another bun into the crowd. At this point, I learn that geese are not brilliant. The only ones that detect the bread are the ones that are hit in the face by it. The ones I’m worried about (which are standing right in front of me with their cavernous mouths fully open) do not see this and continue to advance. I drop some bread in front of me the way a firefighter deliberately creates firebreaks to stop a raging forest inferno and gradually, the most menacing of the birds drop back to feed on this. I throw the last of my buns into the middle of the mob as I reach Child One. I pull him away from the birds and towards the car.
“Alex!” I yell upwards, knowing that wherever Second Child is, he’ll start coming. I see motion out of the corner of my eye and my stocky five year old comes charging from around the other side of a barrier behind which he had retreated. I glance back and all of the birds are now clustered around the central bread carnage, feeding. Their tailfeathers bob up and down in the air, and the resemblance between them and the creatures of Jurassic Park is unmistakable. These Velociganders surround their prey, and their razor sharp beaks tear at the starchy corpse in front of them with vicious efficiency.
As Child Two runs up, he sees my empty hands and howls with outrage. I later discover that while Marcus and I are locked in a battle for our lives against the hundreds of dinosaur-analogues, Alex’s finely tuned sense of justice has kicked in and he has realized that the geese are bullies and that there must be ducks somewhere else. Running, he finds a small cluster of them milling about far away from The Hoard and has carefully torn up his remaining piece of bread and made sure that each of them gets a piece. He angrilly stomps up to me and yells “But I only got one piece of bread!” Worried that the flock will soon realize their bread supplier has left, I turn the kids towards the car and try to casually urge them into the safety of the car before the second wave attacks.
In the distance, I see one, then two, then hundreds of heads pop up from their feeding frenzy and look around. A few of them begin to wander in our direction, so after re-assuring Child One (who remains quite distraught), I bundle the boys into the car and start the engine.
As we drive out, I find myself glancing in the rearview mirror from time to time. As far as I can tell, they aren’t chasing me, but whenever we drive through a shadow, I check the sky briefly to make sure we’re not being followed.
“Dad”, begins Child One, 6. “That scared the… the HELL out of me.” I can relate, and I re-assure him again that they’re just birds, but deep inside, I can’t quite make myself believe it.
One thing’s for sure, I now know where I will test my net-throwing gun.
What kind of deity would allow the following in a world where all the fat fuckers like me are trying to lose weight?
I read an article about how ducks and geese being fed bread at lakes are developing a nutritional malady called ‘Angel Wings‘ that leads to deformed bone structure because of the crazy mix of calories in the high-carb treats. This, of course, merely encourages me to feed them more, because I fucking hate birds.
I’ll write more about that later, right now I’m working on a plan. This is what I have so far:
Put a bunch of spoons into a cup.
Tape the cup next to the ‘Ready-to-eat Cheesecake filling’ display.
…
Actually, I guess that’s the whole plan. I thought it would be more elaborate, but that’s pretty much it.
“Why?” I can hear you asking (actually, that may be the medication speaking, it seems unlikely that I’d actually hear anyone ask me that while I’m in the process of writing this). Well, I figure there may be an alternate approach to the whole weight-loss thing that other people haven’t considered: Fucking up the grading curve.
If I can just get everyone ELSE to get fatter, then suddenly, I don’t look as huge, right? This is basic relativity physics here. If everyone else gains 20lbs, then me being 50lbs overweight becomes 30lbs overweight without me having to put down my cake.
FUCK YEAH.
The german blood in me loves the efficiency of this, because if I do decide to lose weight, the actual amount I need to lose is almost halved. And if I get some sort of wasting-away disease, I might actually transition to “skinny” (well, relatively speaking) even faster!
Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes is Latin for “Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”. Also, it sounds fucking wicked when you use a different language, because as a nation, we’re a bunch of dumbasses who automatically assume that anything other than English or Spanish is dripping with brilliance. Anyhow, while usually used as a metaphor for your achievements being possible because of the hard work others did before you, I’m wondering if there’s a semi-literal interpretation I can use once my plan takes place.
Of course, in my version, ‘dwarfs’ becomes “Cool Skinny Dudes” and “giants” becomes “newly fat(ter) fucks who ate a bunch of cheesecake filling”. Oh, and “standing on the shoulders” becomes “fucking your girlfriend”.
NASA says it’ll cost a trillion fucking dollars and 25 years to go to Mars. It took 8 years to go from Yuri to Neil & Buzz’s stroll, and now NASA is saying they need to basically start over and take a QUARTER CENTURY to take on Mars?
Now, I’m a huge nerd, so I like me the Star Wars just fine. Hell, I even waded through almost all of the books over a 5 month period recently to find out what’s been happening to me good ol’ friends Han, Luke, & Leia. (An aside: Lots of really dumb crap, as it turns out, with just a little good stuff mixed in. It’s like knowing there’s a small handful of gold nuggets in a barrel of sewage, it’s worth the unpleasantness of sifting through to find ’em, but you don’t always enjoy the trip).
As we drive out, I find myself glancing in the rearview mirror from time to time. As far as I can tell, they aren’t chasing me, but whenever we drive through a shadow, I check the sky briefly to make sure we’re not being followed.
What kind of deity would allow the following in a world where all the fat fuckers like me are trying to lose weight?