Minor space adventure

You know how pretty much any scifi adventure - a game, a movie or a book - ever made has a couple of basic assumptions and a couple of basic stereotypes. One of the basic assumptions is that we've mastered some sort of not economically disasterous form of space travel, to the point where you don't actually need to be an olympic athlete with 2 or more doctorates to be allowed anywhere near a space shuttle. So there's that. And every science fiction item that operates from this basic assumption (that our society is built on the concept of relatively easy space travel) has some stereotypical characters that can be found out there in space: you have the space ship captains and the red shirts, you have the scientists and the adventurers - cuz stuff just ain't cool until you endanger a bunch of people needlessly just to prove a point about how damn cool you are cuz wishfulfilment and powerfantasies and PIIIIINK!- and you have your space miners. Yeah. Even when they're not mentioned or even shown, there's always this underlying assumption that they're there. I mean, they have to be. Even a fictional world has to have a structure that supports buying rugs, exotic fruit, guns and opening bars. They're doing their heavy duty work, in the most extreme conditions, these big scarred men with their cigars in their space suits and their laser tattoos and their space brothels with squid-ladies. You have space travel, so the first thing we're going to do is go look for natural resources, right? We're running pretty darn low over here, so it just makes sense (and it's not like running low on natural resources has been a big secret ever since it was discovered that the Earth is not, in fact, a limitless universe all unto itself).

And guess what? It turns out that I might actually live to see space miners. Or what our equalent of them will be. I can't lie that it didn't make my geeky heart go all squiggly. <3




Supposedly I'm reading for my exam right now. In reality, I'm watching Scishow and Crash Course! on Youtube and learning about something completely different.