YOU AND ME ON A SPACESHIP

Imagine this.

We’re on a spaceship traveling between the stars, it’s bigger than the Millennium Falcon, The Enterprise or the Battlestar Galactica.  It’s a generation ship, a massive behemoth meant to sustain us for multiple human generations as we move at sub-light speed toward our final destination.

The ship’s systems are so complicated that none of us completely understand how it functions, which never seemed to be that big of a deal because we’ve each got our own little jobs to keep us busy during the journey.

The ship has been in space for so long the crew has different ideas about our destination – most people think we’re headed to Kepler442b while a minority believes we’re headed to Kepler452b.  I don’t think it matters much as we’re still probably a thousand years away.

People get crazy ideas in space and recently one of those ideas is that our ship’s purpose is to provide fun for the officers, most of whom inherited their positions instead of earning them like the rest of us. It’s practically a non-stop party for them down on deck 47 – life support.

The party has been going on for quite some time. Lately our senior leadership has joined the festivities, spending less time on the bridge and more time on Deck 47, passing out extra rations to their favorites.  Many of us are hopeful that we’ll get an invite to the decades-long celebration but I’ve been there and seen it first hand when I was part of a conduit repair team.  I feel it’s my duty to tell people what’s really happening.

Deck 47 used to be automated. A few generations back, our ship’s officers unlocked it and discovered that the automated systems had produced a huge surplus since departing the Sol system six thousand years ago.  Our officers spend their time eating, drinking, and playing in what I can only describe as an orgiastic atmosphere. When I worked on Deck 47 as part of that repair team, I saw them, and I’m not kidding, wheeling in a rhino stolen from the zoo on Deck 23 for a bacchanalian feast. I’ve got a buddy who works on Deck 23 that confirmed dozens of our breeding pairs have simply “disappeared” in the last 20 years.

That’s not the worst of it. Lately, the officers have been restricting access to Deck 47. It’s like they don’t want us to know what’s going on even though it’s been clear to some of us for a while.

I’ll just come out and say it: the Deck 47 surplus is gone and they’ve dipped into the life support system feed stock.

What that means for us is less food in the short term and less air in the long term.  There is a very high likelihood that the entire system will break down, killing all of us and turning our vessel into a ghost ship.

Now I’ve told you the truth and with that information we’re all going to have to make what should be a simple decision.  Are we going to let our drunken, over-sexed leaders kill us all or are we going to end the party and repair the life support system?

The imaginary choice we have is obvious.

Now turn your imagination off.

The planet you are standing on is a generation ship that circles the galaxy every 250 million years with no final destination or even a port of call.  The life support alarms are blaring.  Our leadership in America denies there is a problem.

We need new leaders.