EPISODE 406: WHEN OPPY MET CASSIE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

For a moment last week, the story was that the Mars Opportunity rover (aka “Oppy”), which after fifteen years of doing tasks for NASA on Mars (14 ¾ years longer than it was supposed to last) seems to have finally given out. And just before it finally died it sent those words at the top: “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

(As it turned out, that wasn’t quite what it said, but more the journalist’s poetic translation of its two final comments, which were that it had basically no power left, and that the daytime skies were incredibly dark, because there’s been terrible dust storms there. I don’t know about you, but in some ways I find its actual comments even more powerful.)

People online of course went crazy about that final line and then some went crazy about us going crazy, because internet and also would you rather we argue about whether Bernie Sanders should be running and walls and the meeting at the Vatican and Russia?

I didn’t think so.

One writer at the Ringer did a wonderful piece in which they argued with themselves about whether or not we should be sad about Oppy or disturbed that people are allowing themselves to get emotional about “a camera on a skateboard”whose descendants are soon going to probably take over the world and then send us to other planets to work for them and then watch their circuits slowly dim for a long moment when we send final letters of goodbye before finally passing away.

It actually left me thinking about Cassini, the remote spacecraft we sent to Saturn twenty years ago, which spent 13 years orbiting the planet, taking amazing shots of Saturn, its rings and its moons (also landing on the moon Titan, the first spacecraft ever to land in the outer solar system), before we finally crashed it into Saturn in 2017. It seemed so ungrateful in a way; we sent it out there and then not only did we abandon it, we crashed it into a planet (and at 77,000 miles per hour. I mean, Jesus.)

There was a good reason we did this: one of the things that Cassini uncovered is that two of Saturn’s moons have the potential for life. And so once Cassini ran out of fuel, we had to destroy it so that there was no chance of it crash landing onto one of those moons and being the Titan Amoebas Extinction Level Event.

I’ve actually imagined that decision quite a bit; in my mind there’s a story to be told there between the person who launched that into space and Cassini, a parent/child relationship that sort of evolved like ours do, with the child eventually excitedly leaving home and then discovering so many new incredible things that affect not only it but the parent too. Our lives are permanently altered by the fresh perspective our children bring to the world.

Except the Cassini story has these dark twists: the child never gets to come home (I imagine her sent into the great beyond not knowing that, only being told when it’s too late, because humanity); and then, in the end, as if that’s not terrible enough, she has to sacrifice herself for some unknown oh so distant future of Saturnians. And this time, I think her creator absolutely refuses to accept that reality, is fighting for her life for years beforehand with his superiors, and in the end she figures it out herself and makes the decision.

I wanted to write that into a movie, in fact, but I could never quite figure out who is with her on this journey. And now I think, ah, maybe it’s Oppy and a couple other satellites, maybe one of the Voyagers. We’ve sent them each away into the darkness; maybe in the end the only ones that could really understand what that felt like, what they were witnessing, what their lives were now, were one another.

Maybe Voyager was like their grandparent, someone they could barely understand at this point, but every once in a long while they would connect and her words would help them accept, maybe even see the beauty of their fates.

I can see how it’s all quite silly, having these emotions for a camera on a skateboard and a radar dish which spins through space. Maybe they move us because we feel alone ourselves, if not physically on some more existential level; or maybe we have some deep-seeded sense of our planet as just another such tiny object moving through this infinite universe.

I think there’s something so powerful in the idea of a thing that has left absolutely everything behind, sacrificed all that it had for some greater purpose – discovery, exploration, beauty, love. And as brutal as it would almost certainly be in the living, there’s also something incredible about flying out alone into the black.

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I got some great feedback to 405 and Three Quarters, most of which can be summarized as “You’re not that old, kid, get over it.” Writers, you made me laugh! Always good to have your reality get checked.

I don’t know if I came off sounding a little too woe is me; I actually think it’s kind of fascinating, this whole getting older thing. And really, even though I’ve heard it all before from people who are older than me, man is it a different thing when it’s happening to you.

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Beside writing my life has been devoured the last month by this four book series Fractured Europe by Dave Hutchinson, which is about a near-future where What if instead of Brexit, Eurexit, aka a million new countries are breaking off from Europe and each other all the time, and now there are so many borders to cross with so many different rules and relationships with other countries that European postal service is basically the bailiwick of mercenary spies. It’s a fantastic John LeCarré-type read that only seems to get more prescient with each volume.

Get it here. (And hey, no volume is more than $6 on Kindle, too. So there's that.)

If you’ve got Netflix and want to try something unusual, I really loved the Umbrella Academy. It’s a very hard concept to describe; a mad-ish scientist adopts 7 kids and raises them to be super heroes. One died. One never had powers and was isolated from the others. One ran away at age 10. Oh and he never gave them names; they’re just Number One, Number Two, etc.

Now they’re adults, long estranged, when his sudden death brings them back together. And there are assassins and donut shops and violin lessons and talking chimpanzees and maybe the end of the world.

I thought I was Comic Book Show Exhausted, but the poignancy of some of their stories quickly overwhelmed my defenses. Again, a lot in here about heroism, loneliness and sacrifice.

Also I like manikins and pink donuts.

++ LINKS ++

One big recommend in the links today. It’s to a Q&A the LA Times food columnist Jonathan Gold did with a journalism class a while back. It’s the kind of article that will make you want to pay better attention to the food you eat. It’s like a fine seven course meal in and of itself.

Like this, on Why Food Matters Enough to Write About It?

I mean, food is a way to look at the world. Everybody eats, everybody prefers foods of one sort or another. Or if they don’t prefer food, maybe they eat Soylent. I’ve talked to people who eat Soylent and that’s weird too, that’s interesting. As a writer, if you’re going cover a lot of things, people don’t want to talk to you, or they’re going to lie to your face. People who are obsessed with food are usually pretty interesting and have stories to tell.

And two, you know, you could talk to a general about what’s going to happen in Iraq and he’ll lie to you up and down. But if you ask them how he had eggs that morning, he’ll tell you the truth. It’s maybe a small truth, and it maybe in the large scale of things is a less important truth, but I think that makes it something worth writing about. I think it’s worth learning about it, and it’s something that we all have in common.

Or this great couple lines:

I used to sort of collect absinthe. It was strange. But it was like forbidden, then somebody would have a bottle himself and then you’d get like 50 ml of it.

And then somebody figured out that absinthe wasn’t technically illegal and he started to be able to get it into every bar in the world. Absinthe went from zero to douchebag in a couple of days.

Also, if you’re a Church-ish person America let me write something about how the current issues in the Catholic Church are a lot like the Netflix show Russian Doll, and maybe we can learn something from that. (Like, you can’t break the cycle just by condemning your mistakes. There’s a reason we keep repeating the patterns we do.)

And the New York Times had this powerful set of interviews with gay priests about what that’s like for them. (Spoiler: It has not been all that great.)

Lastly, I just saw this piece from the writers of the Oscar nominated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse about how they made you care for Miles Morales in his first 45 seconds. (Hint: It’s so much about that song.) Really hoping it wins for best animated film; The Favourite for best original screenplay and Beale Street for best adapted and Black Panther for best film.

I can dream, A Star is Borners.

Am I really supposed to be blown away by the fact that Lady Gaga can act and sing?

When you get right down to it, what makes the Oscars special is seeing people who seem like they've already achieved everything be revealed to be just kids with their eyes wide who took a big risk a long time ago and wonder what the universe thinks of them, just like the rest of us.

And maybe that means all the risks we've taken in our lives, all the sacrifices we've made and the nights and weeks spent out there in the dark were not wasted and not forgotten either.

See you next week.