Pigs In Spaaaaaace!

Today's comic is, of course, having sport with the new movie Interstellar in which a handful of daring humans zip through the fabric of space on the hunt for a new planet to replace the dried husk of the Earth, which humanity had beaten like a rented mule for the past 10,000 years.

It makes you wonder how long a planet is really good for? Maybe I need to pose that question to Randall Munroe since he seems to be making a career out of answering such peculiar queries on his website at xkcd.com. He might guide us toward a useful timetable for building a space-bending fleet of space arks and/or ice cream trucks.

XKCD aside, all the while I'm drawing this comic and pondering the fantastic premise of the movie I realize that almost every physical object in my life was at one point someone's science fiction. Phones, electric lights, super-highways, life-size latex cheerleader dolls, everything. We of the 21st century get so excited about the possibility of the Next New Big Gewgaw that we tend to forget that a person from the 18th century reading about our boring, humdrum existence would find it every bit as dazzling as we currently find the worlds of Hiro Protagonist or Arthur Dent.

That's why movies like Interstellar bother me. They inject the idea into the collective noggin that Earth is expendable as last year's iPhone, that magical new world's are humanity's eventual hope for expediting our cosmic manifest destiny. But what should we expect from a civilization that largely clings to the idea of Supreme Beings who happily allow us to poison the Earth as long as we slay the unbeliever?

Real fiction would be a peaceful civilization that lives in harmony with itself and the universe. But that's boring. Bring on the nukes and Martian sex-slaves.

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Note: Sorry, no wacky extra comic today.

=Lefty=