conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Another Fine Mess about Arlington, Massachusetts, Indiana with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor. End with the sentence ' Since 2005 he has taught in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at the University of Nebraska.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a writer, teacher and DJ living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He is the author of three books: Indiana Gothic (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese), about the murder of his great-grandfather; Charlatan: Americas Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him and The Age of Flim Flam (Crown), about the most successful quack in American history, and Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrows Moon (Red Hen Press, forthcoming), a work of what might be called speculative nonfiction. His articles have appeared in GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, the London Sunday Times Magazine and many other publications. Since 2005 he has taught in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at the University of Nebraska.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Another Fine Mess
  Space travel is a theology that needs no god. Some find one anyway—moonwalker Charles Duke returned from his trip a born-again Christian—but the presence of great wells of faith in something out there, something infinitely discoverable, doesn't mean there has to be a king of it. In this religion, science and dreams finger outward to the very rim of possibility, the Cheshire Cat and Schrodinger's romp together, and the worshipper's one desire is the chance to play too.
  So it is with the moon: beyond the solutions to food and shelter, beyond the practicalities of trade, all brilliant enough, a nimbus of the marvelous rings the whole, hints of dreams beyond the obvious. One of these, barely crystallized yet, takes our survival instinct and beams it through a sort of giant prism. As we've seen here on Earth, bunkers are proliferating as we speak (did I mention doomsdaydwellings.com?). We've got our Norwegian seed vault. We've got a "charitable frozen zoo project" in Britain storing DNA samples of endangered species. We've got Vivos Cryovault (not a charity) filing sperm and eggs so that post-Armageddon your grandiose genes can help repopulate the planet. But all of them are candles in the wind compared to the lunar Doomsday Ark.
  Maybe you picture at first, as I did, a hulk and a ladder and no one about, but this is not on its face a nutball scheme like some. Conceived by the NYU-based Alliance to Rescue Civilization, the Ark project would begin with burying "all human knowledge" on hard discs on the moon. In the event of a global disaster, this information would be transmitted in six major languages to "4,000 heavily fortified radio receivers stationed on Earth" so that those left moaning in the rubble would have the blueprints to rebuild. But that's nothing really, that's the prosaic part, for as Bernard Foing of the ESA, a champion of the project, described it to me, this "lunar lifeboat" would be more than a library, more than a DNA bank: it would be a breeding site as well. So for example if we killed off Earth's last giraffe, new ones could ship from the stock already on display in lunar zoos. "In the long term," he said, "you could re-create whales. And then later, when we build whole biospheres on the moon, we could have lunar seas for our whales to swim in."
  Theoretically I get what he's saying—well no, I don't, but I'm willing to believe it's possible. The hardest part, it seems to me, lies in re-creating a good first whale. In 2010 dart-gun samples from 955 whales found "high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium" in virtually every one. "You could make a fairly tight argument," said the project chief, that ocean contaminants represent "the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species," and as for whales themselves, "I don't see any future... except extinction." So you see the challenge. With a prognosis like that, if we're going to have a whale we can work with, we'll have to get the lead out as it were. It would be bad for morale to ship toxic DNA to the moon, grow new whales and watch them die out all over again.
  Hard-core skeptics of the Doomsday Ark see a more basic flaw. It goes back to those radio signals sending Earthward the knowledge to regrow civilization: how will survivors (if any) find those receiving stations (if any left) and utilize the information (with what?)? But I don't see why that's so complicated. People on the moon could fly down with coffee and blankets and explain it to them. If people on the moon are paying attention, that is, if they're not too drunk on the rest of the universe to care.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Perhaps that's overstating the case—I would expect some raucous jitneys to be running by then—but the fact remains that the hot science in moon transit has coalesced around a vertical railroad made of "buckyballs" rising 62,000 miles into the sky. "Buckyballs," named for Buckminster Fuller, are carbon nanotubes of recent discovery; inside a dizzying shell of them passengers would ascend in a car along a thin diamond wire to a sort of platform... You know, I'll just pass this from my imagination to yours. The point is that in the very long run the elevator would be safer and cheaper than a bunch of launches.
  The usual corporate monoliths are behind this project, but it hardly signifies; the elevator is so much pixie dust to me. However, as the tour groups arrive—the moon at last!—I suddenly see it all perfectly. I can see myself, part of the herd reeling from the ride as we're funneled through passport control. I see the armed immigration officers stationed in booths or lurking in offices, hosing up baksheesh, beating undesirables down with paperwork, letting the toothsome through in exchange for sexual favors—just another day on the distant edge of civilization—till at last, clutching what's left of our belongings, we reach the parking lot and the shuttles that will take us to our hotels.
  As big as he dreamed, one thing Mr. Hilton got very wrong was the probable quality of the food. He had no idea I'd be peeling back that snowy napkin to reveal items as succulent as they are strange. He thought, quite naturally, in the antique future of his time: "Today a four-ounce hamburger can be reduced to 1/5 ounce; a steak to the size of a silver dollar. When reconstituted, these foods will be as tasty and nourishing as any served on Earth." Drinks at the bar, he believed, would be on the Tang model: push a button and "out will come a pre-measured, pre-cooled mixture of pure ethyl alcohol and distilled water.... Into the mixture the bartender drops a tablet—martini, Manhattan, scotch, gin—you name it. Instant drink!"
  At any rate, that's the Hilton, our case study. When we iris out to take in the full range of lunar hospitality we find—Las Vegas! No, really, that's the goal. "It'll be like Las Vegas," Bernard Foing told me, "each hotel a fabulous, self-contained world completely disconnected from the environment." I sat with architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut in a Dutch café as he spread out plans for what he called a "sensation engine," a lunar resort where guests would stay in teardrop-shaped "habitation capsules" in constant vertical motion, set in two glittering slanted towers offering views of other guests indoor-mountaineering or coasting about like bats. It's much the same at Escargot City, the Nishimatsu Corp. complex of three ten-story units shaped like snail shells—inside, a perpetual brain-pummeling present and outside, yes, "Las Vegas–style flashing neon signs..."
  Here on Earth, if you were to jump straight up with your legs together, you'd spend about 0.7 seconds in the air. Do the same thing on the moon and you'd stay up 3.5 seconds. Now let's extrapolate from that. Let's take for example a simple game like E. M. Forster's bumble puppy, which consists of "striking tennis balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce." Fun on Earth maybe; fantastic on the moon, especially for kids. Now open the whole big box of sports. Place them on the moon one by one. What we immediately see is that minor ones on Earth become the top attractions. Look what happens to:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Perhaps that's overstating the case—I would expect some raucous jitneys to be running by then—but the fact remains that the hot science in moon transit has coalesced around a vertical railroad made of "buckyballs" rising 62,000 miles into the sky. "Buckyballs," named for Buckminster Fuller, are carbon nanotubes of recent discovery; inside a dizzying shell of them passengers would ascend in a car along a thin diamond wire to a sort of platform... You know, I'll just pass this from my imagination to yours. The point is that in the very long run the elevator would be safer and cheaper than a bunch of launches.
  The usual corporate monoliths are behind this project, but it hardly signifies; the elevator is so much pixie dust to me. However, as the tour groups arrive—the moon at last!—I suddenly see it all perfectly. I can see myself, part of the herd reeling from the ride as we're funneled through passport control. I see the armed immigration officers stationed in booths or lurking in offices, hosing up baksheesh, beating undesirables down with paperwork, letting the toothsome through in exchange for sexual favors—just another day on the distant edge of civilization—till at last, clutching what's left of our belongings, we reach the parking lot and the shuttles that will take us to our hotels.
  As big as he dreamed, one thing Mr. Hilton got very wrong was the probable quality of the food. He had no idea I'd be peeling back that snowy napkin to reveal items as succulent as they are strange. He thought, quite naturally, in the antique future of his time: "Today a four-ounce hamburger can be reduced to 1/5 ounce; a steak to the size of a silver dollar. When reconstituted, these foods will be as tasty and nourishing as any served on Earth." Drinks at the bar, he believed, would be on the Tang model: push a button and "out will come a pre-measured, pre-cooled mixture of pure ethyl alcohol and distilled water.... Into the mixture the bartender drops a tablet—martini, Manhattan, scotch, gin—you name it. Instant drink!"
  At any rate, that's the Hilton, our case study. When we iris out to take in the full range of lunar hospitality we find—Las Vegas! No, really, that's the goal. "It'll be like Las Vegas," Bernard Foing told me, "each hotel a fabulous, self-contained world completely disconnected from the environment." I sat with architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut in a Dutch café as he spread out plans for what he called a "sensation engine," a lunar resort where guests would stay in teardrop-shaped "habitation capsules" in constant vertical motion, set in two glittering slanted towers offering views of other guests indoor-mountaineering or coasting about like bats. It's much the same at Escargot City, the Nishimatsu Corp. complex of three ten-story units shaped like snail shells—inside, a perpetual brain-pummeling present and outside, yes, "Las Vegas–style flashing neon signs..."
  Here on Earth, if you were to jump straight up with your legs together, you'd spend about 0.7 seconds in the air. Do the same thing on the moon and you'd stay up 3.5 seconds. Now let's extrapolate from that. Let's take for example a simple game like E. M. Forster's bumble puppy, which consists of "striking tennis balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce." Fun on Earth maybe; fantastic on the moon, especially for kids. Now open the whole big box of sports. Place them on the moon one by one. What we immediately see is that minor ones on Earth become the top attractions.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Around the blast zones some survivors are trying to escape: dragging out the tether launchers, grabbing plants from nurseries to throw aboard, the stronger helping the weaker onto the ships...
  Reaching Mars will demand a lot: a 140-million-mile trip lasting several months at least, "even with the help of advanced—and as yet nonexistent—propulsion systems." But 3-2-1 and off they go, trusting in cold sleep, nutrient drips and muscle toning by robot slaves to get them through. Hoping as well not to run into any of the thousands if not millions of bullets with which the universe is now laced.
  Perhaps they take a last look back at the moon's acres of carnage that could lie uneroded for thousands of years. Not necessarily the last word: other beings could try again.
  In the early twenty-first century scientists found microbial life in South Africa's gold mines, the deepest pits in the world. Ferocious bacteria eating sulfur and excreting hydrogen sulfide have survived scalding heat and pitch darkness for some 40 million years. So the tenacity of living organisms is really amazing.