Space, The Phony Frontier

I’m Swearing off Neil DeGrasse Tyson Haters

You know what I’ve had it with is all the “clear pictures” of impossibly distant planets, because there’s always like ten know-it-all Reddit dweebs replying with “Myeahhhh, those ‘pictures’ are Photoshopped from a video game and enhanced by an AI bot” and a lot of the time that turns out to be true.

Please just stop spoiling people’s space fantasies, man. I mean, yes, we live in a hideous, horrible timeline and many of us are just waiting for the US empire to collapse so the world can finally live in peace and coherence and start actually exploring the cosmos without interference from insane quacks like Bezos, Elmo Musk and that creepy-looking Virgin Records guy. But for now, it’d be okay if you’d just let us believe that we’ve seen “stunningly clear pictures” of the surface of Venus and stuff.

It’s all we’ve got, us sci-fi nerds (I’m still trying to contain my excitement over the fact there’s a standalone sequel to Alien coming, regardless of Ridley Scott’s reckless destruction of the canon with Prometheus). No one reading this will be around when humankind discovers the technology that’ll allow us to take leisurely cruises to Neptune with the fam to take selfies of us collecting a few pounds of diamonds that fall like rain there.

Lol, doesn’t that kind of suck?

Yeeeep, we’ll never know if there are actual alien civilizations or even floating manta ray bat bros that eat tree roots or any of that other stuff, and it bums me out. So be a chap already and just let me enjoy Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s G-rated normie Twitter with all the fake AI-enhanced pictures of Titan or Io or whatnot and stop killing my pathetic excuse for a buzz.

Oh, as for the aliens, they’re not here and never have been. Why the gosh-darned heck would some mega-intelligent species of lizard-ape-skunk that can travel through wormholes for free ever even want to visit this polluted dump? They wouldn’t, unless it was for an episode of Alpha Centauri’s Animal Planet, where they laugh at the spills, falls and bons mots of the hundred-year-old reptiles we “elect” to run the place. Barf barf barf, hard pass, Jeeves, let’s just head to the planet of two-headed waitresses, that’d be great.

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If you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my last book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. A second book is about to be announced, but meanwhile, my Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com, my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9.