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This Friday marks the 49th anniversary of when humans first landed on the moon.  As someone who supports lunar exploration (last year I announced my Stephen L. Thompson Lunar Exploration Prize) I wanted to do something to mark the occasion.  Therefore, from now through Saturday, you will be able to grab my two books dealing with the moon for free.

Hopefully, in the not too distant future humans will return to the moon. We will build bases and colonies, make farms and factories, and live, love and learn. “A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories” contains five of my short stories that are all set upon the moon. They give the tiniest glimpse of the possibilities awaiting us there.

 

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars” allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

Would you eat human meat?

Now when I say eat human meat, I’m not talking like Jeffrey Dahmer, or you’re crashed in the Andes, or even a story I read a few years ago of an “artist” who had their leg amputated for some reason and cooked it up for their friends.  Instead, I’m talking about synthetic human meat.

Synthetic meat is where you take some cells from an animal and grow them into meat in a lab.  It’s beef that was never part of a cow.  A lot of work has been done with this in the last few years, and a couple months ago I saw an article saying synthetic meat would show up in grocery stores by the end of 2018.  This wouldn’t be synthetic steaks, but more the crumbly bits of meat on frozen pizzas.  Synthetic steaks are still a few years away.

But if you can make synthetic beef, you can make synthetic human.  Would you try it though?  I think if someone took some of my cells and made synthetic Steve meat, I probably wouldn’t take a Steveburger, but I would try a piece large enough to get a taste. 

Of course, I do have to wonder if synthetic meat made from cells taken from a Japanese woman would differ in taste from synthetic meat made from cells taken from a Swazi man.  Could you find an exquisite flavor in synthetic meat made from cells taken from a member of one of those Stone Age tribes in the Amazon, resulting from them being more-or-less genetically separated from the rest of humanity for so long?  Sounds like the beginning of a horror story.