Key West The Newspaper

by Kim Pederson…….

Gizmodo recently posted an article by Annalee Newitz titled “NASA: We Are Going to Europa.” The piece features a short video from the agency called “Alien Ocean: NASA’s Mission to Europa.” Ostensibly, the goal is to gather information on the liquid ocean beneath the moon’s frozen exterior and determine, if possible, if it supports life. (If you have seen Europa Report, you already know the answer to this and it is not pretty. Maybe we should let sleeping…whatevers lie.)

I suspect there might another reason for spending billions or trillions on this venture, however. (Remember, or maybe you don’t, how some people once thought the first landing on the moon was faked for political and foreign policy reasons? Actually, as of 2012, 20% of Americans still believe the Apollo program was a hoax created by film director Stanley Kubrick. The picture of the moon lander and rock shadows going in different directions might even start you wondering, given there should have been only one light source there.)But wait, I’m getting carried away from the conspiracy theory at hand. We all know that we all do not know everything our federal government is up to at any given moment. Indeed, the announced trip to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, could well not be to look for life there but to find “clear gold” (water) instead. After all, it was NASA that just published the report on how Earth’s main H20 sources are being depleted. It would make sense for the space agency to be looking to solve the problem somehow and what better place than Europa? The moon has oceans more than two times as large in volume as those here. Why not stick a straw in it and bring it home?

There is just one, well, two problems here. One, given past experience, it’s hard to believe the current government could or would do something this useful, so maybe they really are looking for E.T. on Europa. Two, the moon is 390 million miles away. That’s a heck of a long distance to siphon once we get the rubber hose in place. We don’t have anything that can suck hard or long enough to get the flow of precious soon-to-be bodily fluids going and keep it going.

Wait. What am I thinking? We have Donald Trump. He could do it without ruffling one…”hair?”… on his head. What’s more, with his $8,737,540,000, he could even pay for it and build it and it would be a great interplanetary rubber hose because nobody can build an interplanetary rubber hose like he can.

Whoa. I think I have just found a reason to make Donald Trump president of the United States. This creates a quandary of Trumpian proportions. Do we ignore him and risk a good portion of the world drying up and blowing away or suffer the risk instead of having the US, no the entire globe under the thumb of New York City’s version of Ming the Merciless? (You know that’s where things would end up.)

Hmmm. I don’t know about you but I’m going to start assembling my stillsuit immediately.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span  Musings