I’m in a Facebook group that, like many facetious Facebook groups, is relatively unstable and gets deactivated and reactivated by different warring admins, where the stated purpose and group name change constantly. This particular one is called “one sentence startup pitches,” which consists of exactly what it sounds like. Here is my one sentence pitch: a personal kit for setting up your own moonmoon colony.
A moonmoon is a moon of a moon. Just today, scientists revealed that they have calculated that such things exist. They sound so nice and peaceful. Tired: yeet me to the moon. Wired: I will yeet myself to my own personal moonmoon, and no one may follow me.
Kickstarters, as a concept, have lost all of my goodwill — they basically never end up happening — but I can’t in good faith say that if someone made a Kickstarter to make a package that included everything I needed to get myself off of this planet, that I wouldn’t have a sincere interest in exercising that privilege. I’ll build my own spaceship and terraform the moonmoon, set up the moonmoon farm, figure out some way to make water out of moonmoon rocks, and maybe I will be lonely but at least I won’t have to watch people continue to argue about whether climate change is real; Twitter will be absolutely forbidden under the moonmoon regime.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced earlier this week, in some 695 pages of data and analysis, that we have one to three good decades left, if we do absolutely everything we can to save the planet immediately (people have been saying this, but never mind). Of course the reason climate change is such a massive problem is that people in power have a vested interest in not thinking about larger consequences; they ignore the long term, make their money, and let everyone else burn or drown. Most people who do care don’t feel empowered to stop the cycle. This is learned helplessness, and it’s so easy to be this way and do the sweaty-eyeball thing where we just let the 17 devastating big stories of the day about undocumented immigrant children being sat in booster seats in court or Trump saying he doesn’t believe scientific facts or a women’s pain is real wash over us to a point of absolute paralysis.
But maybe we are thinking too much about saving a world where all the power and control is locked up with a few people? Realistically they will be the first ones to depart to a resort moonmoon as soon as they can’t squeeze this place dry anymore. They don’t even control the moonmoons yet, and they control them already. As long as that’s the case maybe we should stop arguing and fix what we have. Is anyone going to do that? The apathetic millennial forecasting model projects a “no” but… to say I remain hopeful is a stretch, but I’m at least extremely angry and maybe if I can stay angry every single day and not think about the moonmoons for the next one to three decades something will happen.
