I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.

well I also wanted to be a writer and a superstar athlete man and a Power Ranger and the president, and even though you can argue I landed somewhere in the middle of all that as ringleader of the pleasant uprising the fact is I wanted to be a spaceman!

...and so Earlier AJ was obsessed with the Universe beyond our singularly bounteous home planet...the proverbial fish who wasted years looking for The Ocean instead of this boring old water.

when I say I wanted it, I REALLY wanted it...like, started pointing my life that way.

spent most of my time reading about space and the exploration thereof, quasars, neutron stars, and life on Mars...I was all about it yall. 

to this day I retain more information than most about fighter jet types because I identified the most direct path to the stars as going though pilot school...listen I was like 8 years old, how was I to understand that the world's leading air force used countless billions of dollars developing highly effective tools for killing suntanned children Elsewhere, it was the other half of the battle GIJoe never mentioned!

ever think about the fact that all the ultimate exponents of human ingenuity--the fastest flights, the hardiest materials, futuristic robot brains, an entire ship dedicated to ice cream delivery--are dedicated to killing us?

moving on, the fascination somehow stuck into adulthood...recurring online handle cosmicoffee9 is a pretty obvious marker of my past enthusiasms..."cosmic latte" being the scientifically proven average color of all things across The Grand Panorama.

(if you're curious about "9," it reflects the duality of the human animal...these 2 practical hands plus the dash of dumb luck requisite to any real success.). 

let's get started here: my childhood as a space cadet all came back to me the other day watching 2014's "Interstellar" again.

hell, post-2020 it hit even harder.

see, I never thought it was all that great a movie--it insists upon itself--but when a special event in town showcasing the 3-hour film accompanied by a live orchestra materialized in the fabric of local life at some point, I had to check it out.

...and by "had to check it out" I mean "place was across from the supermarket so why tf not."

okay so the movie starts off fine enough...at some point in the future--let's call it 2049 or something, practically next week--our formerly lush jungle world has become fallow and barren for unspecified Plot Reasons.

staple crops such as corn are given just a few years to continue flowering. (movie is damn near old enough to die in a war so I'm pretty sure spoiler statutes have expired?)

phrases like "climate change" are conspicuously absent, but like...yeah the whole planet is one big Dust Bowl, and society has been radically restructured to reflect these changes. 

social services have been all but eliminated. children are essentially sorted into scientist and farmer classes in their youth.

any existing resources are zealously maintained, citizens drive beaten-up vehicles patched with rust if they're lucky, and even the Actual New York Yankees are shown playing an afternoon game in some random Midwesterny dirt field because as COVID demonstrated, professional sports must continue at all costs.

naturally, taxes are still canonically due in this timeline.

we find our protag um...James Miller? (don't care enough to look up the character's name midflow and it's shorter than "Matthew McWhatsisface") at the ballpark, pretending everything is normal with his son and daughter in the creaky, rigged-up bleachers.

a passing dust storm puts a sudden end to the afternoon as both fan and athlete alike are sent running for cover, sanctioned Major League Baseball game left forgotten in its wake.

the struggle is ever so real...worldbuilding out of the way, we can start pedaling toward my points today.

in this broken, starving world, where even long-comfortable Westerners have to wonder about where their next harvest is coming from, NASA continues to exist on taxpayer funding as a secret government program way out in the Forbidden Zone, raising many of the same concerns Gil Scott-Heron mused over in his treatise on the Apollo landings. (or hell, in my own words: "why should my cousins starve while other humans ride a rocket?")

anyways this is portrayed in-film as Noble and Good, the highest calling of humankind, which must sound pretty fucking insane in a world where maybe rice is a vague childhood memory.

...but never mind all that! 

former ace fighter pilot James Miller is The Chosen One, advancing us to the next act by just rockin' on up to the Secret NASA Facility, where the scientists onsite conveniently need his particular set of skills to pilot the secret 80-story spacecraft that will save what they consider humankind.

the masses are left to die...so long and thanks for all the cash! 

a look around the lab reveals a remarkably consistent demographic among those eligible for techno-salvation...guess in real life NASA got most of the way to The Moon under segregation, and let's be honest, the moral arc of the Universe wouldn't have given the foremost fuck if the space administration had managed just fine under color-coded fascism. 

unburdened by the avaricious ruination of our homeworld, the orchestra swelled as Miller and crew set out to explore new places to fuck up...why not squeeze the juice out of some other perfectly good planet?

...and so off they went, Capt. Miller, a couple of other jobbers to make him look cooler, love interest Dr. Dumblady, whose main role seems to have been giving our MC additional problems to solve, and a wisecracking robot pal to keep morale up.

honestly the robot might have been the most important staff member, given that the first leg of the trip took TWO CALENDAR YEARS.

let's skip over the fact that real-world submariners start to crack up after just a few months in the little metal tube...as recent events clearly demonstrate, confinement of more than a couple weeks is enough to drive the average person shit-throwing crazy, so I completely understand BuddyBot's inclusion in a way I could not have before.

in fact, now that I'm typing this it is also unclear why these missions were manned in a future with highly advanced synthetic intelligence but whatever WE WERE EXPLORERS MAN, ADVENTURERS

one 10-minute real time wormhole sequence later (it was admittedly cooler in IMAX back then) our intrepid crew arrives in a solar system with THREE possibly livable planets...an absolutely unfathomable jackpot given that we only know of the one anywhere across galaxies, this one, the one where the movie was shot.

(Mars does not count unless living in Irradiated Antarctica sounds fun to you, and anyone who tells you it does is not your friend...our world could be hit by a meteor the size of a small town and STILL BE FAR MORE LIVABLE than Mars because of the...um...air and water.)

Planet 1 is an ocean planet, ship lands in water shin-deep after an action-packed air brake landing and Dr. Dumblady wades out to collect The Data.

Capt. Miller takes some time to evaluate his surroundings...water seems non-corrosive, mountains rolling in from the distance, air tempe--wait, mountains rolling in from the distance??

a sky-scraping wave rolls into view...obviously this is not the planet to put up condos, let's get outta here...but wait, Dr. Dumblady's foot is stuck or something, oh and she's All the Way Over There!

drama!

naturally the main duo escape with their lives, somehow getting into space on a single-stage launch like a 4:30 flight out of LAX despite needing a full system of booster rockets to get off Earth but we're not here to pick out plot holes in this flick...we're here to point out the plot holes in society.

like, how does anybody get paid in this endeavour, how are goods and services distributed a few light-years over from the nearest ATM?

is collective access to resources the standard state of human existence?

of course...but this is Hollywood, so it's time for our action star to make a visit of our next possible source of venture capital speculation, a popsicle planet just outside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole (which has implications I'm not gonna get into here, you wanna watch the movie schedule a full day off and do it yourself).

love or hate winter, can you imagine having no other option? even Siberia gets a few seconds of summer every other year...I'd easily rather be dead.

some plot stuff happens along the way but as I just highlighted, you don't care all that much so let's just take in the reminder that this here planet, ours in real life, does not have to be the way it is.

one might argue it ain't gonna be.

still right this second we're just far enough from our home star to warm the world to room temperature while not being close enough to incinerate us all into a single ember.

really shows just how incalculably fortunate we are to live on such a perfectly placed rock in space.  everybody born on this planet has has hit the lottery of sentience--warmth, music, flavor, delight--at least, before all their lovely prizes are stripped from them by criminal psychopaths.

sure it's better than it used to be. my grandfather's grandfather did not get days off (so I think I'll take an extra one this week).

...but life on our planet is nowhere near as good as it should be for reasons that go unaddressed across the movie's 1,267-minute runtime.

wait I stopped paying attention...now here's an extra impossible spinning spacecraft maneuver yes indeed our super big hero man comes through again in the nick of time because it's not possible it's necessary oh Capt. Miller just has the biggest pecs and lots of sex truly the finest example of the indomitable Western spirit

[fast forwards through next hour and 30 minutes]

in the end, having preserved a future for the best off among us through some spectaculary silly shxt, Miller departs from a giant muffler orbiting Saturn, the new home base of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, to join Dr. Dumblady on her new world infinitillion kilometers away...you see she got stranded on Livable Planet 3 during another Heroic Act by Capt. Miller and has stubbornly begun the long march toward the disasters of the Industrial Revolution.

We The Species have become a virus, a concept triumphantly scored as "Interstellar" fades to black. happy endings for ~1 percent of humankind.

can you tell "Interstellar" is one of my all-time favorites?

hell, there's a bunch of assbrain theoretical content I didn't even get to...time travel and accelerated aging and the power of friendship...but given that a core selling point of the movie was Actual Scientists quacking about how Incredibly Realistic and Plausible it was we're just sticking with the facts today...and the fact is that being obsessed with leaving the only place we could possibly live out our finite lives is a child's dream.

unrealistic. unfeasible. straight-up stupid. grow up, kid.

as even TV-spaceman William Shatner found out for himself during his quick trip off the planet, there is nothing out there for us.

NOTHING.

every spark of possibility that has ever existed for our kind is all down here, right around your feet give or take a few flight levels.

...because the thing about what we call society is it's not where you live--people have made homes of the desert and the jungle and the frost and even the ocean--it's who you live with that makes it worthy of maintaining. the future we create togther, the possibilities for each of us and all of us.

we are adventurers...but adventure is best served family-style.

maybe if a plan doesn't at least work for most, then it could never.

maybe if we can't get it right here on Earth, with EVERYTHING WE NEED HANDED TO OUR KIND BY DEFAULT, we don't fucking deserve any planet at all.

all power to The People.

--Flor!!