Wait, We Left The Earth?

Okay. Very exciting. This is high on the list of pairings-gone-right – you know, the list topped by the The Muscles from Brussels and The Worm. NASA and The Discovery Channel have come together to produce a spectacular series called When We Left The Earth. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s essentially a documentary chronicling human space travel thus far – please comment with a better description if you know it – and last night I finally got a chance to check out an episode. Don’t worry that it’s already started, I’m sure they’ll be rerun a ton and if you follow the hyperlink above you can buy the thing on DVD. The footage is unreal – especially on daddy’s hi-def TV – not only because NASA apparently films everything they do (I’m still looking into the toilet cams) but also because the quality is top notch despite the age of the film.

So I’m sitting there watching and realizing that the general public I’m a member of has a severly limited knowledge of human space exploration – its history, accomplishments, milestones, etc. I imagine that, like me, most people reading this experience space travel on screen far more often in Sci Fi than in, say, NASA archival footage. So, we tend to be disappointed that we haven’t colonized Mars or the Moon or figured out how to get around the pesky speed-of-light issue.

This is similar to a phenomenon I experienced after my premature discovery of hardcore pornography. The year was 1992, George Bush hurled into the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, Mr. Big wanted to be the one To Be With You, and Jay Leno was starting a reign up late-night ratings supremacy that in-and-of itself would justify any alien race’s total annihilation of our species. On a day that will live on in infamy, my innocence was shattered when I stumbled upon a stash of about twenty (20) seriously hardcore videos. I think one of the videos was called More Cunts. How awesome is that?! Was it a sequel? This was the era when porn was transitioning from bush to brazilian so the experience was not simply hot, it was physiologically and anamatomically revealing. Not to mention I was a hero to my friends to a degree far greater than when I got the Spinjas Battle Stadium. So I found myself unleashed on the 7th grade world armed with a serious sex-edvantage (worst pun ever) only to discover the girls my age weren’t quite ready for the shocker. Nickiocentrism stomped reason to convince me that they were scared off by my face-slash-manboobs-slash-cargopants rather than my neverending inquiries about their sexual preferences poorly disguised as small talk. So that sucked.

All that eventually changed though, thanks to college, the internet, that fucking criminal tool behind Girls Gone Wild, my tribal tattoos, and, not to be forgotten, GHB. Before then, though, I suffered through a series of lackluster experiences (I was as lacking as the rest of the luster, btw). But each of those was a learning experience and got me closer to the post-celebrity-sex-tape porntopia that is the 21st century. In the same way, each time we accomplish the underappreciated feat of breaking earth’s escape velocity to toss something into orbit, we get one step closer to our space-faring fantasies. Shit, closer? We're already doing it! And we're reaching deeper not just into physical space but into the depths of our knowledge of our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. Each contribution that we make, whether as vocal supporters, donors, educators, or whatever not only helps the human race reach the impossible imagined in our favorite fiction but also reminds us what we're capable of when we focus on a common goal.

I’ll probably link a lot in this my new blog to space-exploration-related articles and posts from many brilliant bloggers whom I’ve had the pleasure of discovering in the past year. I hope people will take the time to read, as it’s certainly worth at least the effort we all put into a different type of exploration online.