Assholes are like a nerd’s complaint about why we haven’t gone to Mars yet: everybody’s got one. The trailer for Chris Nolan’s Interstellar is balls-out blatant about it: this planet is shitcanned, you want to save humanity, get your cool-ass spaceship to a new planet. I like a good metaphor for class struggle as much as the next guy but Malthusian theory just won’t get its dick out of a prolonged space voyage’s ass long enough to let it happen. As much as I really *want* to get wet for the latest Snowpiercer trailer or Syfy’s new fake trailer for Ascension its doing that thing where – goddamit realism! – is optional.
The pocket version of Malthus goes like this:
As a kid I read Farley Mowat and really got into what noble creatures wolves were. So I read a lot more about them. And I found out wolves share so many social similarities to humans that they are, in fact, total bastards. There’s this island where at some point at least one pair of deer and one pair of wolves swam over and set about making little wolf and deer babies. It’s a tiny contained environment, perfect for studying this sort of thing and the results played out exactly like Malthus described. First the wolves have a hot and cold running deer carcasses, lots of food, no competition, so they eat and bone and (presumably) snort blow like Never Cry Wolf of Wallstreet. So after the cocaine-sex explosion in the wolf population they eat the place to the bare walls and start running out of deer. At that point the wolves a) get sick and weak, b) start annihilating rivals to get at what’s left of the deer population. They die off to a sustainable level pretty damn pronto and then the deer population can replenish itself and then the whole thing starts all over again.
It’s that last part, the ugly business of scarce resources, which people always gloss over. We’re not talking some Never Cry Wolf noble creature scenario (sorry Farley) I mean pack-on-pack warfare to the burger (literally). Which btw, is always the story I use to interrupt hippies whenever they start that ‘man is the only animal that invented war’ business. Sure, war by the Nth generation improvement of a supremely socially advanced species is pretty fucking horrible due to scale and technology but its sure as tits not unique to homo sapiens. I mean, you really want to be disillusioned look up what rival chimpanzee tribes do to each other;those fuckers could make guys on trial at Nuremberg throw up. We’re talking chewing off their enemies’ balls and eating babies. Like I always say, nature is fucking horrible.
This`ll be you when the chimps take over. It`s either cash, grass or ass in their world.
If you want to know why that simple concept is so hard to get through a thick screenwriter’s head we go to another example of resource scarcity; reality TV is the circus freakshow of the 21st century. Oh we pretty it up a little and pretend that a show about little people or hillbillies or the morbidly obese are portraying them in an effort to be inclusive but we’re really just charging a penny a show to see a two-headed dog or a goblin from jersey shore bite the heads off chickens. And like the job of any good freakshow, the role of reality TV is to remind us some folks are fitter than others to survive and we’d all better keep our heads in the game.
This is not really a story about reality TV. It is, however, funny as balls to hate-bait.
Early on in the whole reality show era, ssn 2 of Survivor (Survivor: Australia) taught film and TV producers one thing and that’s there’s nothing sexy or entertaining (I know, redundant) about watching a group of people slowly starve to death. For a whole season we watched the survivors waste away to Bergen Belsen weight scales. Accurate? Maybe. Not entertaining. When you boil it down, the acquisition of resources, both for survival and comfort rewards, is the central conceit of all reality TV shows. Even The Biggest Loser is simply reverse engineering the concept.
My point is that as romantic as the nerdgasm of a generation ship may be, nobody on TV ever gets it right. And they don’t get it right because if you really show an environment of scarce resources there will be nothing fuckable about it. And now nobody (especially internet nerds) has any kind of perspective on where shit comes from if you have to replace it. The average Mars-mission enthusiast is a doughy soft-brained creature that reacts to sunlight about as well as Udo Keir in Blade and his contribution to survival of the fittest is generating more page-clicks to his blog post about how Game of Thrones has gone off-book.
I mean, shows like Battlestar Galactica, and more recently The 100 on Netflix, make a token effort to address the scarcity or resources for a whole society stuck in space: black markets, food shortages, lifeboat mentality. But do you know how long the fresh vegetables and penicillin would last if a bunch of people grabbed what they could, packed a bag and escaped to sea on whatever boat they could squeeze onto at sea? About a week. Break the glass on your iPhone? Fuck you, no more iPhone factories. Break the zipper in your jeans? Fuck you, no more Walmarts; should’ve learned to sew, now your dick’s gonna be hanging out. Want to write your GoT blog post on paper in the hopes it’s saved for posterity? Whoops, where you going to get paper? Or a pen when yours runs out of ink.
So yes, it’s cool that in the Snowpiercer trailer the rich kids are in this perfect 1950s school classroom making papier mache dioramas, but where they fuck did they get the paper? And sure it’s a fun concept that a generation ship launched in 1963 has a society of people still dressing and acting like an episode of Happy Days, but goddammit those bouffant hairdos require a shit-ton of hairspray that comes from where? The colours of those immaculate letter sweaters are pretty vibrant after 51 years because they brought a cargo container full of them? Tilda Swinton’s menacing effete upperclass oligarch is a perfect villain and she got those coke-bottle glasses from what glasses factory? Sure you can put down the first class riot with your automatic rifles but now you’re out of ammunition, what happens next time when your AR-15 is a club now that its unloaded and they have machetes? The concept of the entire story unravels if you tug on those strings so most writers just don’t bother.
The fact is most post-apocalypse TV shows and movies have given the average nerd an unrealistic expectation of how easy it would be to send someone to Mars. Lash an RV to a Saturn V rocket and let’s go already, NASA. Quit skateboarding off your own dicks long enough to get us some triple-breasted hookers, you sack of inverted cocks. How hard could it be? Well, like they say, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. If it were just a matter of putting a couple guys in crash couches, pointing their shuttle at Mars and firing the rockets in the right direction, then sure, we could’ve been to Mars a long time ago. But it’s not just doing the math, it’s the logistics of how you give them food, air and fuel to get there. And water. And clean underwear. And shaving kits. And tampons. Because you know what a real long-term space voyage would look like? Guys in stained loincloths with Duck Dynasty beards. That’s why we aren’t on Mars; it would be televised. It wouldn’t matter how good a job they did to get there if they didn’t look good the whole time. Anything less than a clean cut all-American hero in a pristine white spacesuit would be taken as a failure.
That’s on you, nerds, not NASA.
SPOILER ALERT: False Positive 