Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, something truly nasty escaped Earth. They call it giardia, a microscopic organism that their Planetary Protection Officer called “pretty dumb” and “not too bad, really, a week of digestive upset and then it’s over.”
Yes, Earth has a Planetary Protection Officer. They have a Planetary Protection Office, and have had one since they were sending probes around their own solar system. Doctor Ma-et had found it a bit silly, like a child concerned about the cleanliness of their toys, until she learned that the job of the Planetary Protection Office had always been protecting other worlds from Earth.
i love this so much.
i love this individual piece of writing, and i also love the narrative tumblr has been developing around Crazy Primates From The Death Planet Just Want To Love You. it feels so real and so US. it feels like maybe if genuine contact happens, this is how it’ll go down.
we’re too young, as a species, to do any galactic business of our own. we’re barbaric and awkward, still fighting amongst ourselves for resources. we’d probably make the galactic powers very nervous. but the thing is, there is nothing more dangerous to a human than another human, and hasn’t been for centuries, and this is on a world where half the ‘habitable’ environments regularly kill people and the rest only kill people on occasion with floods and stuff. we make buddies with our predators, we make our diseases brew us chemicals and fuel. we turn everything to our own use, and would bloom through the universe like a horrible all-consuming plague – except that we already sorta did that a little bit on our own planet, we were THAT powerful, and we learned not to.
we are the infant titans who, having seen our siblings eaten, swore to protect instead of consume. we police each other – and ourselves – at the deepest levels, down to the bones of our spirituality. even the most vicious warmonger knows, KNOWS, in their heart of hearts, that what they do is not right, and will not be allowed to go on.
more advanced species didn’t have to learn this lesson, because they weren’t violent to begin with, or learned it a long slow way under the tutelage of older powers. and here we are already, these holy fools, who hold death itself in our hands, and have the hunger for infinity in our eyes, and they ask us what we plan to do with this power, and we say: “where can we help?”
“and also, can we pet your dog?”
I love this meta so much!
The other half to Space Australia, in my mind, is that it’s an exercise in looking at us – our culture, our environment, our habits, our very selves- and saying “hah, that’s so weird!”
And that’s not just an exercise in mockery or self-parody. That’s putting ourselves in incredibly different shoes, considering ourselves and the universe at large from the perspective of someone not at all like us. That’s empathy, which is kinda important.
We are weird, when you get down to it. Phage medicine is a thing that exists, and has since before we even knew about DNA or what a virus even was. Experimenting on ourselves is basically a tradition, and much to Ma-et’s dismay, we have celebrations in which we blow things up for the sake of blowing things up.
And being able to acknowledge that – to see what we’re about and why we’re weird, is so very important. The western white hegemonic culture I exist inside is so very hard to see sometimes, it’s so very easy to normalize it as “that’s just the way it is”, and it’s not. It is a culture, with all the trappings of every other culture out there.
This is what the anthropological side of Space Australia is about. Who are we? What do we look like to outsiders? Why do we do things the way we do? What should we maybe be thinking about fixing?
Science Fiction creates the future. Verne dreamed of going to the moon, Star Trek predicted flip phones and 3-D printers and tablet computers and arguably the cloud, Google happily borrowed the idea for Earth from Neal Stephenson. Our dreams of tomorrow shape tomorrow, in incredible and unknowable ways.
I dunno, I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that looks beyond its differences. I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that would look at a galaxy in pain and say “we are going to fix this.”
And, of course, we will totally see a galaxy full of fluffy puppies and we’re going to pet all of them.
absolutely. sci-fi doesn’t just predict technology, it predicts culture.
Space Australian Medicine
Published
just moving along like everyone else 