My Name Is Ludd

I don't want be all 'downer' on a Friday, but those astronauts are all gonna die you know. There was a problem with the insulation tiles, big enough to cause the fatal failure of the last one, but they couldn't work out what caused the problem, so they sent the shuttle up anyway. So now they're hanging in space, and there are big holes in the insulating material that's meant to stop them burning up on re-entry. No one knows for sure if that means they will burn up on re-entry. NASA's official public view on the question seems to be:



We don't have a fucking clue. But that's science. Science is what you call it when you don't know what will happen if you mix this chemical with this other chemical, so you mix them together to find out. Sometimes I wonder how many things we only still don't know because of what happens when you try to find out...
But that's just the way it is. Airoplanes for example. You can design a plane, run the design through simulators, build it, test it with electronic instruments, test fly it, put it though maneuvers in the air that it'll never have to really do to push it to the limits of its design, but the point at which you find out that something is wrong with your plane is when it goes wrong. And the point at which we the public find out what's wrong with a plane design is when one crashes. That's the way the aerospace industry works. And it's all very very wrong.
The supersize Airbus Bigfataths is delayed because amongst other things the landing gear is unreliable. A gear-less landing is a pretty dicey maneuver at the best of times, and the best of times is in a very small plane landing on a huge flat expanse of sand. Not in goodness knows how many tons of untested behemoth on a concrete runway. A gearless landing in one of those would be at the very best dangerous and messy, at worst fatal to all on board and anything within a few hundred yards radius. Like other planes and the terminal. Mind you, the problem with being really high up has never been being really high up, it's always been getting back down again.
When I see the space shuttle and the International Space Station hanging in space with the planet earth behind it I get the fear. Every fibre of my being screams No! No! It's too horrible! Human beings are not meant to be in space. There is nothing there for us. No air, no food, no protection from the sun, NOTHING TO STAND ON. Floating in the void, having strapped yourself to an enormous bomb to get up there is the first place, with a toasting coming on the way back down. It's just STUPID. We should stay out of space. Either there's nothing there, or there is and we'll just spoil it.
The fact is that we daily risk lives to do the most utterly unimportant things. And it's not just poncing about in orbit, it's life. Our daily lives are vain and careless.
If you look at physiologies around the world, they vary enormously. The African distance runners that do so well are a good example of how people evolve to deal with their locality. They are built very very sparely, they're tall, but not very far across at the shoulder, and many of them can run comfortably without shoes. This is because they are a people who have evolved for their environment, and can thus walk all day across sand. They do not have too much body mass to fuel, they're not putting a lot of weight through their joints when the foot hits the ground, and they have incredible endurance. In the environment that physiology evolved in, the extreme situation you are best served in being built to deal with is having to walk all day across sand or dust with little food or water. That is the emergency you're most likely to have to deal with.
Because Moses Kiptanui and his long-distance running pals are so different to the average European bred person, it's easy for us to see how well evolved he is. It's not that we are less evolved than him. It's that we have evolved differently. Another extreme is found in the arctic circle. Way up out in the ice the diet tends to be very fatty red meat and fish. You just cannot get lettuce to grow in snow. If you ate that you'd get ill quickly and probably die far earlier than you'd expected. If you ran on hard ground all day with no shoes on you'd be utterly crippled the next day. You are evolved to eat what grows in the area your ancestors came from, to do similar physical activities to them, and to travel over the sort of landscape they lived in. You will be at your most healthy and long-lived if you do this. People are better who live in the country.
It's not a big surprise to me that so many people here and in America are fat. Virtually no one in America belongs there, and the diet both there and here is specific to nobody. It is interesting and enriching to our sensual experience of life to eat food from different cultures. However we tend to have pasta one day, curry the next, Chinese the day after. Those are very different types of food which have come about as a part of a diet. If you ate Indian food (home cooked obviously, processed food is processed food) in India every day, you'd be perfectly healthy. But the food of a culture tends to be what is suitable to the environment and type of activity that culture is mostly experiencing. It grows there because it can, you eat it because its there, by picking it and eating it you help it propagate itself, so it grows there... Also, your body is meant to be able to get used to the kind of energy you're giving it and the kind of matter you're expecting it to process. If it's not able to do that you get indigestion and general less than nice guts.
What do you think would happen if you put a mouse in a jamjar and shook it? Or strapped a baby to one of those paint-shaking machines in Homebase? They'd be physically mashed and probably die. These are extreme examples, but that just means it's the same only harder. We are not designed to be continuously vigorously shaken up and down. The kind of continual shaking that you get if you can't get a seat on the tube cannot possibly be good for you. You may not notice it being bad for you, but I, who have loose joints, notice it very hard. Even the bus is a problem. If I have to stand all the way home it is likely that when I finally do get sat down getting up again will cause my hip to dislocate. Even if this doesn't happen I can barely walk the next day. The damage is more extreme to me, but it's being done to you too. Day after day, little by little, you are being shaken and vibrated and gradually doing for your joints. On a boat you are being continually rocked from side to side. In a plane you experience G Forces, cabin pressure, vibration.
I am increasingly of the opinion that for our own good none of us has any business being anywhere we can't walk or swim home from without being fucked the next day. We damage ourselves getting there, aren't suited to the environment, and don't do well on the food.
So bollocks to space.