Week #1: Spaceship safety and fear.

Abraham Woodliff
2 min readMay 25, 2018

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How would you react if I told you that the world was getting better? No, seriously. Because it is. Also, you’re alive, which is good and bad at the same time. It’s good because you don’t have to live through any of the fucked up times in the past, but it’s bad because you’re not going to see any of the cool shit in the future.

But I promise, things are better now than they ever were before. We just feel bad. Why do we just feel bad? Well, because we see all the bad, all the time.

Imagine you’re on a spaceship. Are you imagining that? Cool, right? That’s why it sucks that you’re alive now instead of in the future, because you’re probably not going to be around when spaceships become normal, but I digress. Okay, say you’re on a spaceship, and there’s 999,999 other spaceships exactly like the spaceship you’re on. Are you imagining that? Okay, good.

Now say 100 of those spaceships crashed, or get hit by meteors, or attacked by hostile aliens. In other words, some bad shit went down and those spaceships, and all the people that were on them are dead. Now, on the other 999,899 spaceships, everything is fine, including the spaceship you’re on. Things are okay, your spaceship didn’t crash. Feels good, right?

Well, probably not, since we have bad ass spaceship technology, we probably have even better and more immediate forms of mass communication. Even more than now? Probably. We have spaceships. So naturally, yeah.

So you know those spaceships that crashed? That’s all the space media is interested in covering. All day. Everyday. All you hear are the details of these terrible crashes, never in the coverage do they tell you the overall small number of these crashes in relation to the number of ships. They’re numerically minute. Not minute as in time, but minute, as in MY NEWT, as in minuscule. As in not very likely to happen to you. It could happen, but it probably won’t. Ya know?

So instead of enjoying the life you have on your spaceship, which, once again is pretty fucking cool that you’re on. You instead are paralyzed with fear over your spaceship crashing, but this constant fear makes space exploration not worth doing in the first place. In other words, you’re dying before you’re dead because you don’t want to die. You could be exploring the infinite universe. You could be looking to the stars. But instead you’re trapped on a spaceship instead of free in the galaxy.

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Abraham Woodliff

Bay Area native, Hip Hop nerd, literature and poetry enthusiast, freelance writer, gamer, caffeine addict. Follow me on Twitter.