Carry that Weight

 

Ever since space travel returned to the news, people have once again begun asking me what I think about it. For starters, they know how many times I’ve seen Apollo 13. But they miss an important part of that journey. The astronauts on board understood they were more useful at home, so they turned back for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with now. 

Others engage with me not on the specifics regarding interstellar voyages, but how I feel about the bigger issues at play. My tune has changed all these years. I no longer support galactic joy riding. Think about it. One of the reasons I enjoy driving is because of my ability to roll down the windows and cruise along an open road. Space travel affords one an open road of sorts, but that’s it. Without fresh air, what’s the point? It can’t be the scenery either. Not that black void again. Until they make a spacecraft you want comfortably and safely crack a window, I will stand athwart each launch yelling stop. 

But that’s not all. We have plenty going on earthside that it makes leaving right now a bad idea. Besides the podcasts, TV shows, and happy hour deals, we’re not supposed to be anywhere but here. 

This is why, in large part, I’ve never troubled myself with statistics like BMI (body mass index). Mass is something that scientists deal with in labs, wearing lab coats, surrounded by bubbling beakers and boiling bunsen burners. What I care about is weight and the gravitational pull here on my home planet. 

Despite this clear fact, you still get people who swoon over the idea of what they’d weigh on the moon, Mars, or places far beyond the Milky Way. I don’t get it. Folks take me aside during pilates and whisper things like, “you’d be shocked to know what I weigh on Mercury.” Would I? That’s where they're wrong. I simply don’t care.

Weight is a beautiful thing because it takes into consideration its surroundings. I don’t care what you weigh in a vacuum; Dyson, Oreck, whatever. Now if only there was a way for really tall people to feel the same way about their height when entering different orbits.