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To Mars, Damn It!
By Mike | May 2, 2007
The NASA propellerheads are busying themselves with figuring out all the moral details of a trip to Mars and wasting a lot of time, meanwhile it appears up to half the red planet may have water ice hidden beneath the surface.
It amazes me how concerned they are about the little things. They can figure trajectories and acceleration through three dimensions and engineer spacecraft capable of reaching the outer limits of the solar system, yet they’re letting a simple question of “what do we do with a dead body?” slow the whole thing up.
Before the bleeding hearts out there start going “Boo-hoo, but Miiiiike, it’s not that simple!” Wrong. It is. It has to be, or this thing will never get off the ground.
In fact, the solutions get downright simple when you remove peoples’ feelings and religion from the equation.
Take death, for example. If someone dies on a submarine, the body goes in the freezer. In space, that’s apparently not an option. Okay, fine. Blast it into space. Personally, I think it would be fitting, perhaps even a little romantic. It’s no different from a burial at sea, and it’s already been played up in science fiction (which, lest we forget, drives a lot of modern science). If a potential astronaut can’t handle that, if their religion demands they be buried or created, then their ass doesn’t get on the spaceship.
Next up we have critical illnesses involving coma or life support. You hope it won’t happen, but they’re right in trying to foresee as many of these things as they can. In this case, the decision has to rest with the rest of the crew. First of all, I’m assuming one (or more) crew member(s) will have a reasonable amount of medical training so they can make an educated prognosis. However, when it comes right down to it, if the crew feels the downed man is threatening their lives and/or the mission, they’re going to do what they think needs to be done and they’ll tell the dweebs back in Houston to pound sand.
Think people can’t make critical decisions when it comes down to life-and-death situations? Two words: Donner party. Again, if the shrinks say an astronaut can’t make that kind of decision, then again, their ass stays on Earth.
Then we have sex. While you can take feelings like love out of the picture, good luck taking plain human nature out of it. Crewmen are going to get horny, period, and as we’ve learned from Lisa Nowak, even astronauts aren’t going to be able to keep their hormones in check (and consequently feelings like love and jealousy wedge their way back into the equation).
In this case, I think the simplest solution is hope for the best. You can’t send a married person up because if they stray, it complicates things. If you send a couple up and one or the other sleeps with another crewman, it really complicates things. Best guess? Find a compatible crew — even if it takes using something simple like matchmaker software — and blast ‘em into space. Vasectomies for the men, IUD’s for the women. Not to mention multiple screenings for STD’s.
As long as we’re being cold and calculating because we have to be, you might say “Hey Mike, as long as you’re in asshole-space jock mode, what about chemical castration?” It’d be nice, but a) I’m not sure it’s 100% effective and b) it relies on the astronauts to be diligent in taking the meds. Along that same line of thinking, maybe they can mandate masturbation and send them up with a few gigabytes of porn and a few toys. Unfortunately this too relies on astronauts faithfully following the plan for three years. Good luck.
I realize the days of the space cowboys are long behind us, but if they continue to let these things hold us back because it may hurt someone’s feelings or offend their sensibilities — or worse, refuse to even talk about such things — they may as well kill the program right now. Astronauts know there are risks. They accept them as part of their job and minimize them as best they can.
All you can do is tell them what they’re in for as best you can, strap them in, and send them on their way.
Topics: Politics & Religion, Science & Space |