Spaaaaaaace
As I write this, my spouse is sitting downstairs raptly watching the Artemis splashdown.
I'm not going to say this anywhere more public because I already have far too much of a reputation as a grouch, but, for the record: I don't fucking care about Artemis.
That's a horrible and out-of-character thing for someone to say, if they're a person who frequently writes stories which could be said to be science fiction, by some definitions.
I'm ambivalent about that genre label because to me science fiction has science, and what I write that people think is SF is fantasy that happens to be set in space and/or the future, and I handwave a lot. For the record, I call the Quitclaim stories "space opera" or, better yet, detective procedurals -- they're neither of those things exactly, but those terms get closer to what they are than "science fiction." What they actually are is Lone Wanderer stories, a genre that really needs its own label -- Randa rides into town, solves a problem, maybe has sex with someone, and then rides away leaving everyone thinking "Who was that masked lesbian?" (In one story I even had her humming the Lucky Luke song at the end.) But the problem is, you can't call a lot of things that are fantasy "fantasy" because certain subgenres of fantasy stole the entire label for themselves, and people lost the ability to understand that fantasy sometimes is a very, very long way away from elves and dragons.
Here's the thing: I am very much in favor of space exploration. I think we should be decimating (old, strict definition) the budget given to our national defense, and take about a third of the money we save and invest that heavily in space exploration. (The rest would go to fixing all the shit Republicans hate spending money on.)
But we have never yet, in the history of the planet, gone into space for the right reasons.
The Space Race was founded on military paranoia. We paid all that money for Mercury and Gemini and Apollo because we wanted to make sure the Soviets didn't put missile batteries in space -- or, more impractically but scarier-sounding, on the moon -- before we did. We wanted to claim that territory to make it militarily untenable. All the talk about the science, discovery, knowledge -- that was complete bullshit. Oh, we did get some useful science dividends out of it. But that was a side effect.
This footnote is for my wife: if you remember that Gemini is the twins and we kept adding astronauts for each series, then you will have no trouble remembering that Mercury = one-person crew, Gemini = two-person, Apollo = three. You're welcome. Again.
Now, I admit I haven't read up on Artemis but I gather that one of the reasons we've dusted off our space program after decades of neglect is that suddenly people are interested in commercial exploitation of the moon again? That before it was about war and now it's about profit?
This is complete and utter bullshit. And with everything literally burning down around us on the planet, it seems to me like there are higher priorities to spend our time and money and attention on than figuring out how some rich people can get even richer by exploiting the moon, or enabling the Elon Musks of the world to get a little closer to their wet dream of fleeing the planet and establishing their sultanate in the stars.
But I don't want to piss in everybody's soup in public, because so many of my friends are clearly getting joy from this, and right now, we need any little sources of joy we have, from any direction.
Since I said up there we should be spending a great deal of money on space exploration, you may wonder what I do consider to be its legitimate purpose. That's very simple:
We need to get all our eggs out of one basket.
All our efforts and time and research in this direction should be directed toward making that miracle happen despite very large obstacles. And there is no other purpose I consider valid here. We need to establish permanent, viable, self-sustaining human settlements ... somewhere else.
Because we live in a universe with a one-two punch combo of very cruel random numbers and very destructive stupidity and malice. And it is only a matter of time before either that big, unpredictable meteor hits or these assholes destroy the entire planet. It's really just a question of which happens first.
This planet contains, as far as we know, all the intelligent life in the universe. (The odds are infinitely high that there is other intelligent life out there, but given the size of the universe, the odds are infinitely low that we will ever meet it, so we need to think as if we're it.) We are very, very fragile. We need to establish humanity somewhere else besides Earth and we need to do it yesterday.
But there is no graft to be had in that, so the odds are good it will never happen, unless humanity somehow manages to achieve a massive change of character.
Hell, for that matter, maybe we should just get wiped out.
10 April 2026