Fish Plus
Will we become the real Guardians of the Galaxy?
Short answer: No.
NO COPE means no hope. It means the total extinction of the disgusting human race before it contaminates space where it doesn’t belong. Man belongs nowhere but here where his corpse might be useful as fertilizer or food for superior bugs.
My view is at odds not only with the ‘normie’ view but also the common ‘dissident’ view that Eeeelon will take man to Mars.
Mars, where the atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide (compared to 0.0427% on Earth) and where the surface temperature can be as low as −110 °C (−166 °F).
I think so many space enthusiasts have nanoamnesia - they may know lots of space facts (or at least what Science! claims to be true about space) but then conveniently forget them because they want to beLIEve in the multiplanetary dream.
Because for all their talk of Space!, they’re stuck in a Terran mindset - they liken space exploration to Columbus and his ilk. As if crossing the Atlantic were comparable to flying millions of miles in space - 57 million as of right now according to Brave AI. Landing in North America is nothing like landing on Mars. No spacesuit needed. And not only could Columbus breathe the air in the New World - he could eat the food and drink the water there too. Even mate with the natives.
The New World wasn’t very new by astronomical standards. Most humans cannot get how alien even a planet in our own solar system is. And Mars is relatively Earthlike!
But yesterday I was happy to see one of the few humans who get it:
And tonight I’m happy to see that Note has 435 likes, including one from me. The comments are worth reading too: e.g.,
I can’t get over how the Eeeelonites I know would scream TAX PARASITE at any regular person who gets a cent from the government but ignore their idol’s govdependence because he pumps them with copium. False hope (redundant) that man will survive, even thrive outside the one and only environment suitable for him.
So many beLIEve that. But would they also believe that fish could thrive solely in aquariums? In glass tanks in a hostile surface environment? Whose hostility is downright friendly compared to the conditions on other planets or in space?
B-but man is SPECIAL! We ain’t no fish!
Really?
One of my favorite EC Comics stories is Al Feldstein and Al Williamson’s “Fish Story” from Weird Science-Fantasy #23. It’s about alien fish who think they can colonize Earth’s oceans:
They fly to Earth in a water-filled ship, emerge in our seas, and … die.
Because they breathe fresh water. So close, but not close enough.
At least they might have survived in our ponds, lakes, and rivers.
No such safe havens for us off our planet.
Can’t we turn Mars into a safe haven? Terraform it?
I might believe that when we can xenoform even a little bit of Earth. Not holding my breath for a feat unncessary for Columbus and other explorer/invaders.
Instead of changing a whole planet, we could in theory change ourselves. Become like two of the original Guardians of the Galaxy from 1968 (cover date 1969) - Martinex (right), engineered to live on Pluto, and Charlie-27 (center), engineered to live on Jupiter. Later, Nikki, engineered to live to Mercury, joins the team. (The ‘real’ one to me - I never warmed up to the modern movie version.)
That’s regular human Vance Astro on the left. Out of time to edit this photo. As a twentieth-century man awakening in the thirtieth century (cf. Buck Rogers) setting of the original Guardians of the Galaxy, Astro is a fish out of water, so I guess he does fit the theme of this post after all.
Eight years later, Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus had a protagonist engineered to live on Mars.
Can we make a ‘Fish Plus’, a fish engineered to live on the surface of Earth?
Show me one, and then I might believe in the remote possibility of a Man Plus. And remember, a Fish Plus would be altered to live on the same planet, unlike a Man Plus who would be altered to live on a different planet.
Earth minus man is much more likely.