Fame is Beckoning!
Yours truly pontificates in the latest issue of Crossed Genres. And I don’t have even a Master’s in Futurism!
Many thanks to Peggy Kolm, whose post about The Biology of Star Trek drew the editors’ attention, and to Kay Holt for the penetrating queries.
Excerpt:
Crossed Genres: We send astronauts up; we try to keep everything very clean and very sterile. Am I right in guessing that it just doesn’t seem viable if the population is going to stay there for very long?
Athena Andreadis: Well, these are not self-sustained, long- term missions. The real reason for the sterility is not to contaminate exoplanetary samples. Also, if you read the fine print, you find out that one of the major and most time consuming tasks in places like the space station is scrubbing the fungus off of surfaces because there are no countervailing entities to take care of it. Not very heroic. All these macho alpha-type people up there going ‘scrubba-scrubba’.
Image: Blue Moo, by Sandra Boynton (detail)