I just watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time this week.
And my thoughts were 1. Mos Def is most awesome 2. I really thought when the dude asked him what to “leave out of new earth” at the end, he was going to say “seaworld” (‘cause of how it began with the dolphins leaving the earth from cruel orca captivity when it was about to blow up).
The idea of a second watery rockball like in the movie is always kind of cool.
When science talks about mega-planets like ours, light years away, I always think about a whole world of our doppelgangers just living their lives – like in “Another Earth”. Do they have internet? Is George Clooney still single there? Can I kidnap myself, bring me back, and celebrate finally having found the perfect lover worth putting on a pedestal?
Sadly, there is no clone globe or lover waiting for any of us. Probably.
But what we do have, is that when Stephen Hawking’s and a bunch of other scientists’ planetary predictions (see: FUBAR) finally come to pass, we’ll always have Mars. And although going spacesuitless over yonder right now will land you a nice, explosive, Arnie Schwartz eye-popper of a time, there’s a workaround: “terraformation” – making planets more earthlike. Options to make that happen include things like building massive mirrors to melt polar ice caps and shooting colossal comets at it – the same way our own air ingredients like water and minerals helped jumpstart the breathe-o-sphere.
Or – given its current sitch, the status is: “One trash from mankind… (insert giant air-suck in in from Oxygen tank)…One giant treasure for Mars…” – because all of our destructive-here-on-earth CFC’s would be exactly what mars would need to become habitable. Although it’d be super convenient to just take the junk from here and put it over there like some turdy compost heap that grows into an Eden waiting for us in space, sadly it doesn’t work that way. We’d hafta build factories, and then our germs would get on them, and then the aliens would get pissed off and come back and blow up our brand new home. So, so far the best, most logical, most reasonable option when we get there is…
…42.
Wait no. The answer is – comets.
An asteroid option’s looking best because it’s most natch. I’m still just not clear on how we’re gonna manage that – but I guess I’ll hafta wait another six million years to ask Helen Mirren robot. Until then, even though I have fond dreams of leaving my spherical residence and visiting celestial locales, it’s just wanderlust and I quite like it here. Sure, I have fantasies of visiting other places where every hour of the day looks like golden hour back here #dreamcometrue But the truth is, I’d always wanna come back to the priceless pebble I was born on. So, on second thought, Arthur should have told the host of new earth to leave out money. If everything was on a barter system, there’d be no need for greed and profit to be made over the shiz that’s causing the gases that are making us to hafta leave and go to Mars in the first place.
Hey, at least if we have to mass-exodus to planet red before we can comet-it-bro, we’ll know how to eff it up with CFCs.
Maybe the alien overlords will take pity on us as we rebuild our second home.
Ya know, like they did with our first one in the movie.
