by Jared Logan, Blerds Staff Futurist

The problem with space travel is the distances.  I’m no scientist, but I know it can take several weeks to get to the moon and back.  To get to Mars?  More than a year.*  And after that?  Forget it.  We don’t have the technology to get a guy farther than Mars and then get him home without killing him.

One day we will have the technology to send a manned space mission farther than Mars, but, due to the incredible distances, this mission will be a one-way trip.  The astronauts will be unable to return because they would die of old age before they ever made it back.

One day there will be a pair of kamikaze astronauts.  Two men will volunteer to die so that mankind can land on the surface of Saturn.  “We will go to Saturn,” they will say, “It will take us forty years, and we will die without ever returning to earth, but we will go.”

And NASA and the Russians and China will all work together to send them up and they’ll take off one day into a clear blue sky, up up up and out of our atmosphere.  And then every year on that day for forty years we’ll celebrate their launch, and on that day every year we’ll think “Gee, I hope Bob and Tim are okay.” 

And every year on that day, the kamikaze astronauts, Bob and Tim, will send us a video transmission.  And we’ll see their two smiling faces on our television screens all over the world.  And we’ll wave at them and say “Hi, Bob and Tim!”  And they’ll wave back at us, the people of earth, and we’ll watch them eat cool astronaut foods, like dry neopolitan astronaut ice cream.

Then, in 2081, eleven years after their launch, the video transmission from Bob and Tim will reveal that, much like inmates sharing a cell in a St. Louis prison, Bob and Tim have entered into a homosexual relationship with one another.

Their wives will be heartbroken.  The world will be shocked. Some experts will say that the isolation made them gay.  They just spent too much time together in that tiny space pod.  Other experts will say they were always secretly homosexual.  Religious leaders will scream “It’s a choice! It’s a choice!”

“This is who we are now,” Bob and Tim will say, “We’re in love.”

That turn of events will split the world in twain, resulting in the formation of two new political parties.  One party will be composed entirely of people who are, you know, cool with the whole Bob and Tim situation.  The other party will be entirely composed of people who really have a problem with it.

These two parties will go to war.  It will be the most devastating global conflict since World War II.  The atomic bomb will be dropped a total of twelve times during this war.  On Cleveland, Ohio all twelve times.

Still, the atomic aftermath will be brutal, and as the world buckles itself in for a long nuclear winter, we’ll realize we’ve been so busy fighting that we forgot to look at the video transmissions from Bob and Tim for the last nine years.

When we finally celebrate the anniversary of their launch again in the first year of the rule of the “You Can Feel However You Want About Bob and Tim Just Don’t Kill Anyone Over It” Party, we are sad to see that the kamikaze astronauts, Bob and Tim, aren’t doing so well.  They’ve broken up.  Bob isn’t speaking to Tim.  Tim is beginning to think the entire trip was a mistake.  There’s a lot of crying.  They’re thinking of turning around and coming back home.

But “No!” the world cries.  “So many have died so that you could go to Saturn!  So many have sacrificed their lives so that Bob and Tim would set their feet on Saturn’s surface!”  And also: “You guys used to be so cute together!”

It costs all the money in the world to build a radio transmitter powerful enough to send Bob and Tim a new transmission every day, but we build it.  And every day we send them a different reason to complete their mission.  This is challenging.  Because they can be offered no material wealth, bribery is eliminated as an effective strategy.  Because they are destined to die shortly after reaching Saturn, the reasons we give them to complete their mission tend to be really abstract and unconvincing.  “Finish the mission,” we tell them, “because it will give you closure.”

“A job worth doing,” we say “is worth doing right.”

“It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich,” we tell them.

“Quit bullshitting us,” they shoot back via radio wave from the outer regions of our solar system, “We’re seriously thinking of turning this rocket around.”

Finally, the earth hires the world’s greatest couples therapist to talk to Bob and Tim every day for several years, and he gets them to agree that, even if their relationship is broken, and they don’t love each other anymore, they can still work together as friends to step on the surface of Saturn.

After being elected President of Planet Earth in 3006, that couples therapist is assassinated in 3008.  He is assassinated by a member of a political party made up of extremists who believe Bob and Tim should have never gone up in the first place.

Then, on the anniversary of their launch, in the year 3010, Bob and Tim send us their final video transmission from the surface of Saturn.  Their faces light up the viewscreens of every home on Earth that day, but they are not the faces we remember from our youth.  They are the faces of two old men, withered and grey, wrinkled and worn, but bi-curious and happy.  And when we look into our mirrors, we see that we have grown old with them.

At the end of the day on the anniversary of their launch, in the year 2010, the kamikaze astronauts, Bob and Tim, don their space suits and step out of the space pod onto the surface of Saturn.  They wave at us.  We wave back.  They draw pistols, stand back to back, walk twenty feet in opposite directions, then turn and fire, killing each other dead.

A cheer goes up from every person on earth.  That day is remembered forever.

It is the greatest moment in human history.

*These scientific facts have not been checked or verified by the author, but they sound true enough.

23/02/2007
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