Space Cadet

“It’s a conspiracy I tell you.”

“Don’t be crazy, they’re stars!” she says.

“I’m not crazy, I just have a wild imagination.”

“So wild you believe the stars are really planets and thousands of them circle our sun?”

“How about so wild that I accidentally stumbled on the truth because I imagined every possible scenario and that's the one that makes the most sense.”

“Sense of what? How is that not crazy?”

“Sense of where UFOs come from, why president’s hairs all turn gray four years after they’re elected, of the conspiracy theories that don’t make sense like alien abductions and area 51 and the world trade—an alien attack—why the president carries around a nuclear football, why the Bush administration attacked Kuwait, why nobody voted for Bush but Al Gore lost anyway, why....”

“Stop! Just stop it!” she says.

“Why the moon landing hoax was covered up...” I continue.

“Now that I do believe,” she replies.

“Well you shouldn’t, but no, we cant leave the atmosphere, our best ships would implode, crushing the astronauts into pancakes, or actually explode, tearing their limbs apart as the strong force of vacuum pulled them in a hundred directions. Wearing some fancy space suit won’t keep you warm at temperatures of 3 kelvin. Do you know how cold that is? At like 200 Kelvin you die within seconds from the cold even with a warm parka on. 200 Kelvin is so cold, it would actually burn the skin on contact, leaving instant frostbite that would require immediate surgery. The universe out there is 3 kelvin. That means you can be in a spacesuit inside another spacesuit then wrapped in two dozen down comforters and you’ll still die 2.4 seconds after coming in contact with something that cold. It would crystallize your blood and your heart would solidify like fragile glass. Your brain would be instantly hardened and rendered useless within 1 second of that temperature even with a spacesuit pumping in heated air. The pipes holding the heated air would crystallize and float away like dust particles. 3 Kelvin is so cold, even the laws of physics and chemistry no longer apply. The chemical reaction needed to thrust a shuttle through space would diffuse in that cold coupled with the lack of air, there would be no chemical reaction. Forget that! Whats this thrusting through space nonsense? You cant thrust through a vacuum!! Theres no air! No air means no flames. No air means no drag. No air means no friction. There’s nothing to push off of. You cannot travel through space on a ship powered by fire-based engines. It’s simply not physically possible. The metal of the ship would get so cold it would crack into tiny pieces within minutes. Remember the Challenger? That was the only ship built to take on the space beyond the outer atmosphere and it didn’t even last 5 seconds out in space. Nothing we build will stop the empty burning cold of empty space from tearing it apart into shreds unless we start thinking outside the box. I bet a diamond could last a good solid 20 minutes out there. Then all you need is a machine that continually creates a skin of diamond layers that protect the inner compartments from the cold in wave after wave of bitter assaults by the creeping cold containment.”

“I want you to see a doctor,” she says.

My heart sinks.

“Why?”

“You’re not well,” she says very matter of factly.

“I’m fine. In fact, I’m better than fine. I can see clearly now,” I try to explain, but she’s not hearing me. She’s listening. The words are registering in her brain, but she’s not hearing me.

“I’ve already made you an appointment,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I answer.

“Oh?” she responds with a glimmer of hope that I might snap out of it.

“We’re trapped here. This planet is our prison. All the other planets get to travel all around the galaxy meeting millions of other life forms, and we just sit here imagining we’re God’s children and there’s nothing else like us in the whole universe. I bet there’s 78 billion with a B, billion other planets just like this one where the inhabitants are forced to farm fruit and vegetables for export by alien forces. It’s amazing that in order to survive, we have to enter a blackhole, find a planet, fill it with water, then let the firelight grow the magical fruits and vegetables we need to nourish our bodies, which don’t last very long inside black holes in the first place. So we have to kill ourselves to survive because plants need darkness to yield fruit and outside of a blackhole, darkness does not exist. But boy is that fruit delicious!”

“Where do you come up with this?”

“It makes sense doesn’t it?”

“Yeah kind of,” she answers.“You know how in the bible people lived to be a thousand years old?”

“Yeah, so what? That was a long time ago.”

“Do you think the earth travelled closer around the sun back then? Do you think they couldn’t figure out math or how to add or calculate a year on a calendar?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Do you think the bible is wrong and it’s a misprint? They actually lived that long because the solar system was not inside s black hole. Long ago, humans disobeyed their superior races and were cast out. Then the shenanigans following Christ’s murder was the last straw. Thats why its called the dark ages, because all of a sudden half the day was dark, which we then termed as night or nighttime. Truth is you only need sleep when in a blackhole because the pull is so strong it literally sucks the energy right off your bones, weakening you the moment you are born.”

“Tell me more!”

“That’s enough for now, you don’t deserve to know the truth.”