MOONDOGGLE™
Is the Moon even real?
Since the dawn of civilization, people have gazed at the night sky and thought: What’s in it for me? As Artemis II speeds back to Earth very quickly because there’s not a lot of traffic up there, I find myself thinking the same thing. And the answer is not very much. Sometime within the next 30 to 40 years, I’ll probably be dead, and the odds are that I’ll never go to the Moon myself, unless they invent a way to fly there first class with limited motion sickness and jet lag.
It’s painfully obvious to me at this point that there’s nothing out there in space except for stars and planets and moons and black holes and the infinite mysteries of the universe. But so what? We have a lot of things here on Earth as well, like trees, and TikTok, and sushi, and pianos, and none of us have spent nearly the amount of time that we should exploring those.
As Robert Goddard once said, “sure, I invented the rocket, but I was just kidding around. There’s nothing out there in space, and there’s no reason to go.” Humanity has spent countless billions of dollars on probes that have revealed nothing to us other than distant worlds and magnificent interstellar formations composed of heretofore unthought-of elements that may reveal the origins of time itself. But I haven’t even seen every season of Midsomar Murders yet.
Here on Earth, we still have problems, like war and poverty and coffee that’s more bitter than it should be, and we haven’t even come close to solving those yet. I have nothing personally against the Artemis astronauts, though none of them has, like me, published a novel and also reviewed novels in places that publish novel reviews by people who write novels. I have penetrated deep into the human soul and emerged wet and sticky. Meanwhile, NASA, in what would be my worst nightmare, can’t even make a proper space toilet.
This is less a voyage to the Moon, and more of a Moondoggle™. We stand on the precipice of a great nothing. I look at the sky and see only the emptiness of my existence. No one has yet proven to me that the Moon is even real. Those rocks on display could have come from anywhere. There’s a man living in a tent under the nearest highway interchange to my house (35 miles). Will he ever go to space? No. So why should we even try?
