Technically Incorrect

Perhaps space travel has become old. Perhaps people have come to take it for granted. It's been seen in so many movies. So many space shuttles have taken off and returned to Earth that we think little more of them than we do of jumbo jets.

NASA therefore has to use its imagination to persuade tomorrow's generations that space travel continues to be a large step for man.

One small step in this process is a new public service annoucnement featuring that fearsome space creature, "The Rock." Dwayne Johnson himself, a man who has appeared in so many scientifically concocted movies such as WWF SmackDown, WWE Backlash, and WWE Crush Hour, is now telling kids that NASA is cool.

Why Johnson? Well, he plays Captain Chuck Baker in the new movie "Planet 51." The voice of Chuck Baker, to be precise. And that seems to be a sufficient connection for him to tell us that all of the clever things NASA discovers in the dark and beyond are also put to use here on the mundane round lump called Earth.

I know Johnson is trying to inspire, but when he tells us that NASA technologies allow us to enjoy the freeze-dried fruit in our cereal, I wonder how many viewers will look at their Raisin Bran with a jaundiced eye and quivering lips.

The Rock is a professional. He convinced when he played Agent 23 in "Get Smart," just as he did when he when he played Rick Smith in "Reno 911."

But even he struggles with the last line of this PSA. For reasons best known to someone, somewhere, perhaps even out there, Johnson is required to end this PSA with the words" There's no space like home."

Oh, goodness. He's Dwayne Johnson. He's the Rock. Couldn't they have got him to deliver an NASA smackdown? Or are we all just trying to nice-ify our images to the point of blandness?

Just because there's a recession, it doesn't mean you can't find your dream job. So allow me to direct your boundless ambition toward an ad on Craigslist's Calgary site.

While many people scour Craigslist to see if Starbucks or Bed, Bath and Beyond might be seeking additions to their cheery teams, the poster of this ad is searching for an altogether more adventurous type, proudly announcing "Astronaut Needed (Northern Alberta)." Is that the cough of a million scoffs I hear? Perhaps. But this is truly an interesting opportunity, to say the least. Just look at the first, enticing sentence of the ad: "Astronaut needed for experimental flight to Titan."

Perhaps you might be concerned that this ad was not, in fact, placed by NASA. Please, let me put your mind into horizontal mode. The advertiser assures all applicants that he has been "working on this project for near 40 years." Indeed, the only reason he is seeking an Armstrong for his flight is that he himself seems to have weaker limbs now that the years have passed.

You might also be wondering what kind of craft will shuttle you into orbit. Well, again, I can be your Xanax. The advertiser declares that his secret craft is "the result of my professional experience and imagination while serving the U.S. military in advanced aeronautics as a scientist." You see, this man is a veritable expert in his field. This spaceship enjoys "a revolutionary propulsion system and its fuselage is fabricated with the most advanced material."

Looks like a fun place to me.

(Credit: CC Flying Singer/Flickr)

Surely, you can have no more concerns. Surely, you are ready to reply to this advertisement, beaming at the idea that you will soon be beamed into the great beyond. Well, in the interests of full disclosure, let me draw your attention to some of the finer details. In the advertiser's own persuasive and humane words: "I am certain you will make it safely to Titan but there will not be enough fuel to get home. This is for someone unique that has always wanted to see the universe first-hand and has perhaps a terminal view on life here at home. Here's your shot at romantic history."

Yes, that's right. You won't be coming back. At all. Ever. So perhaps you might want to check what the nightlife is like on Titan. Because that might be the only way you could really create romantic history.

Should I have failed to deter you from applying for your life's (and death's) dream, do note that the job specs declare that you should be no taller than 5 feet 10 inches and "relatively slim." One imagines that any appearances in a Ralph Lauren advertisement might enhance your chances of being chosen.

Oh, and the advertiser also requires that you should be "mentally sound."

I know science thinks it can do everything.

I know robots will soon be ordering us around like wait staff at the Ritz.

But I am gravely concerned about an experiment that has been going on up there in space.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who returned to earth Friday, had been on the International Space Station since March. And, well, I don't know quite how I am to put this, but he didn't change his underwear for a month.

I know what you're thinking. We're both thinking the same thing.

Not even in the the darkest, most slovenly days of our student youth did we wear the same pair of knickers for 30 days. Around seven days was our limit. Then we'd at least manage a hand wash in a sink.

But here was the intrepid Wakata, prepared for the sake of all our futures to don anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent underpants. Yes, water-absorbent.

Will we only have two pairs in the drawer one day? Or even one?

(Credit: CC Mike52ad/Flickr)

I know that there was a lady astronaut a little while ago who wore diapers on a long car journey, but this is surely couture from another realm.

The London Times quoted Wakata as saying, pre-landing: "I haven't talked about this underwear to my crew members."

This is quite understandable. I rarely talk about my underwear to my clients. Not even my underwear clients. However, wasn't just the occasional merest stink caused by this novel eco-friendly fashion show?

"I wore it for about a month and my station crew members never complained, so I think the experiment went fine," he said.

Well, now, in polite society one doesn't normally comment when a fellow worker suffers something of a digestional malfunction, so how can Wakata be sure that his fellow astronauts weren't furtively making sniffy remarks about certain odors emanating from his person?

I know you'll be wondering what astronauts normally do with their soiled undies. Firstly, they take them off. Then they pack them up with the trash, which they shoot into outer space on human-less Russian cargo ships. On the way, the dirty undies are cremated.

But here's the thing with Wakata's undergarments: the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, which designed them, has no firm idea just how well they performed their task.

Which makes two pulsating thoughts thud around my cranium.

One: what if the anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent qualities didn't work so well? Especially the last two. What effects might imperfect performance have on poor Mr. Wakata's inner well-being?

And two, I must do the washing.

Technological progress always comes with a hefty price. (Unless it's a PC, I suppose)

So I must admit to feeling a little heartskip at hearing that the search to commune with aliens in the outer beyond will leave humans looking like, well, porky aliens.

According to a report in the Telegraph, scientists believe that long flights into space will not have beautifying effects on the star-crossed trekkers of the future.

In fact, they will make them short, fat, and bald.

I wish I could find more comforting words to describe their fate. Just as I wish that more people would realize that "bald" does not equate to "ugly."

A long time spent up in near zero gravity will mean that humans will not have to make an effort to get off the couch. They won't have to do anything to stay warm either. And no exercise means, well, blubber.

Will these be trekking humans waiting for plastic surgery?

(Credit: CC Jurvetson/Flickr)

The otherworldly atmosphere will also mean that humans won't exactly grow, as muscles and bones will not develop in the way they do here in the gyms of the earth.

Astrobiologist Dr. Lewis Dartnell from University College, London, also said that fluid will pool in humans' skulls and there will be no need for protecting yourself from the cold. Which means your face will bloat and your hair will fall out. Oh, and don't forget that you'll be fat, too.

"With little effort required to move around in microgravity and an environment that is never too hot or cold, future spacemen and women are likely to become pretty chubby," he said.

But here is what Dr. Dartnell did not conceive.

On every future long-haul space flight there will be plastic surgeons ready to nip, tuck, and weave you back to beauty in a perfectly painless, weightless environment. Jowls too puffy? Let's pop that air out. Hair dropping out? Let's graft a little from your other regions.

Yes, it will be not unlike the masseuses on the original Virgin Atlantic Airways.

We must never think negatively about technological progress. Science will always find a way to keep us just as beautiful as we are today. I mean, what else do we need science for?

Is being an astronaut really all that much fun?

You get otherworldly for a while, but, as some children on vacation will tell you, floating can get old very quickly.

While a few astronauts become heroes, some seem to come back to earth and never come back to earth. Their behavior becomes eccentric. Their utterances become bizarre. Some even claim they have seen aliens.

A question worth asking is whether many of these astronauts were already a bit weird before they floated off into space. And I'm not even including the ones who wear diapers whenever they slip into a jealous rage.

Now NASA has had a brainwave that it hopes will send soothing waves through astronauts' brains.

The idea, sponsored by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, is to have a therapist on video inside the spaceship. No, not a live therapist available 24 hours a day for a cut-price fee. Instead, this is recorded video with voice, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the one at your local energy provider that tells you "por Espanol oprima ocho".

The presumably soothing recorded voice will be clever enough to help astronauts work out what is making them miserable, employing a technique called problem-solving treatment.

Dear Computer, I only became an astronaut because I thought it would please my Mommy.

(Credit: CC Dullhunk)

As I understand it, the astronaut types into his computer: "I just don't know what the meaning of it all is" and the computer will ask useful questions such as "Meaning? What do you mean?"

This will help the astronaut, in absolute privacy, come to terms with him (or her) self and his (or her) negative state of mind.

I am all for helping astronauts. Given that space missions will increase in length as we explore our galaxy of water-bearing planets, it will take a peculiarly robust mind and body to tolerate the sheer inhuman stress of the task.

Which is why a digitally shrunk shrink is an extremely worrisome idea. I know there are advertisers who claim that the computer is personal again. But no computer can be quite personal enough.

No, it seems quite clear that NASA should provide a personal shrink (and perhaps masseur, too) in the spacecraft for every long-haul astronaut. Yes, it would increase the numbers on the trip. But it would also increase the possibility of positive human interaction leading to a life-affirming atmosphere beyond the atmosphere.

America has long been able to prove that constant and open-hearted conversation with a stranger is the way to truly lasting and holistic mental health.

And there surely must be a plethora of psychologists, especially given these recessionary times, who would be prepared, in the interests of scientific progress and a fabulously healthy fee, to be an astronaut's little mental helper in his (or her) and our quest for the ultimate discovery.

Machines can't do everything. Really they can't.

How can anyone, let alone an astronaut, possibly reveal the dream about the goat, the golf club, Copacabana Beach, Anne Hathaway, Alan Greenspan, Hillary Clinton, Ari from Entourage, several of the cast from 300 and an open-top Chrysler Sebring to a mere computer?

In any case, there is one other little problem. Because of privacy issues, no one will know which astronauts used the computer shrink and which didn't.

Please forgive me, this is making me miserable. I need to lie down now.

These days it's hard for a porn producer to find new ways to go where no man (or woman or beast) has gone before.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that Virgin Galactic, the company that plans to fly passengers into orbit from late 2009, announced that it has received a $1 million offer to allow a porn movie to be shot on one of its spacecraft, an offer the company has declined.

As I understand it, the producers thought they would be able to find a completely different kind of action if the participants were under the influence of zero gravity.

It is, however, difficult to understand how they thought they might be able to shoot such a movie.

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson acknowledges the pleasures of the service.

(Credit: CC Tanya Ryno)

Virgin Galactic's proposed flights offer, for a return ticket of $200,000, only a five-minute period of weightlessness.

However, those who involve themselves in the pleasures of pornography explain to me that the copulatory scenes tend to last a little longer than your average real-life five minutes. And sometimes they involve multiple physically demanding entanglements.

I am, therefore, unclear as to whether the producers (who remain strangely unnamed) wanted to rent the spacecraft solely for their own purposes or whether they were merely looking to book seats for the performers and a single member camera crew.

If it were the former, then surely the $1million offer has something of a derisory nature.

If it were the latter, might Virgin Galactic have charged the other passengers a little extra, given that they would be in the presence of an entirely otherworldly transport that would truly make the trip a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

One's mind is also somewhat disturbed by whether sex in space really is such an easy pleasure. Would there not be a problem with synchronization?

Still, Virgin's extraordinary and surprising intransigence on this alluring space sexperiment means that those who have had to tolerate suboptimal sex for so many years will also have to do without suborbital sex for a while longer.

We really are living in very difficult times.

I don't know if you've ever flown Aeroflot, but I am told that on some of the flights you get benches rather than seats--which is why I am rather admiring of Richard Garriott's courage.

Garriott, a video game developer from Austin, Texas, is spending a reported $35 million to get shot up in a Soyuz, according to Reuters.

He says he isn't scared. That's despite the fact that a South Korean lady, who became a Soyuznik in April, complained that she thought she was going to die upon re-entry. Her no-doubt highly sober captain apparently re-entered the capsule into the Earth's atmosphere at a rather unfortunate angle.

Parts of the module became smithereens, and the crew seems to have experienced the space equivalent of the bends.

Garriott is the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott. And the younger Garriott is about to enjoy 10 days in space before, hopefully, returning to Earth in a three-man re-entry vehicle.

The thing is, this vehicle might not get a wonderful Carfax rating.

It's a long time since we saw CCCP, isn't it?

(Credit: CC DeusXFlorida)

Its last two landings have been less than optimal. Both times, explosive bolts, which are supposed to detonate before re-entry, failed to do so. Insain, rather than Usain Bolts, clearly.

Nonexploding bolts cause what are known as ballistic landings (the name does not appear to refer to the passengers' mood during one of these returns to Earth).

"I am convinced the probability of a ballistic landing in my case is significantly reduced," Garriott told Reuters. "But if it were to occur, I am physically and mentally well-prepared for it."

You might be wondering why Garriott is not using some family influence to take a ride on a NASA vehicle. Apparently, his poor eyesight prevents him from participating in the U.S. program.

Whereas the Russians, having sent a dog up in space, seem perfectly happy to send those with merely diminished vision and surplus cash.

Garriott will need all his visual powers on his trip. His job will be to photograph environmental movements. Let us hope that he doesn't suffer from any other untoward movements while he is floating in the firmament.

Perhaps, too, he will have time to photograph what is going on at the Russian/Georgian border.

Star Trek fans, you'd better sit down.

Because there are scientists out there, out there in Texas, to be precise, who believe that you will soon be able to propel yourselves at warp speed.

Alright, I'm not going to put a time frame on the 'soon'. Because, well, what is time anyway? Merely one dimension of our truly warped lives.

But here's the idea that Dr. Gerald Cleaver, Associate Professor of Physics at Baylor and his Associate Associate, Richard Obousy (I have not located a picture of this man, but he is reputed to have elongated ears) have proposed.

They reckon that you or Richard Branson could zip up to the vast Up There in your spaceship and, well, shrink the space that is in front of you and expand the space behind you.

To me this sounds a little like plastic surgery.

However, there is apparently a force out there (no, not from that other sci-fi movie) which essentially works against gravity. Scientists refer to this force as dark energy.

There is hope, people. There is hope.

(Credit: CC Scragz)

And they believe (if that is not too emotional a concept for a scientist) that dark energy has, over the history of everything that's out there, driven our universe to expand at speeds that are faster than the zippiness of light.

Apparently, space can move at limitless pace.

The theory is that you get your spaceship to hang in a bubble of space, a bubble that happens to be moving at faster than the speed of light. We need to get some of that dark energy in your hip flask to do it.

But, if we manage it, we make the dark energy in front of your spaceship negative, and therefore that space will simply contract. (I really wanted to use the word 'simply' in that sentence.)

These Baylor boffins are, apparently, rather fond of string theory. Which I have heard of. However, I wasn't aware that the Stringies believe there are rather more than the four dimensions in which I suffer- time, width, height and length.

And the whole warp drive effort would require the altering of the 10th spatial dimension ahead of your spaceship.

By now, you might have guessed that I have already shoved my head in a bucket of cold water in order to prevent it from spatially overheating. Please therefore enjoy this link, one that will unquestionably enlighten you more than I can.

However, I have great faith in the work of these Baylor scientists.

I now firmly believe that anything can happen as I have just returned from witnessing Tom Cruise being seriously, brilliantly funny in Tropic Thunder.

If Tom Cruise can be funny, then warp drive is a very possible mission indeed.

In its quest to fight Facebook for every last social networking digit and dollar, Bebo is thinking big. Very big.

The social networking site has got together with the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Science to organize for 500 messages to be beamed to a planet orbiting the star Gliese 581c.

The project's title is A Message From Earth.

Apparently the planet in question is the nearest one to earth that might have water. Which means it might have life. And, well, Bebo would be a great name for a planet, wouldn't it?

Should this all sound just the slightest bit funny to you, please pinch your mirth.

For the third partner in this very valuable scientific project is RDF Digital, a company belonging to RDF Media, the producers of, amongst other scientific programming, Wife Swap, a show that highlighted the minutiae of distant, yet intimate, interaction in a very incisive way.

Bebo is asking its members and other assorted celebrities and politicians to create messages or images that somehow "consider the planet from a fresh perspective."

The best 500, as chosen by Bebots, will be beamed by a Ukrainian radio telescope. Beaming time is estimated at four and a half hours and will occur on October 9.

Look, this could be one of the most important human events of the last five thousand years. And I am really concerned that the organizers might not have thought this through.

(Credit: CC Ryan Inc)

If I was the resident of a land 20 light years from our own little Haedes, why would I want to read messages from some far-off orb, messages that appear to be entirely self-centered?

There are millions and millions of people trying to secure personal favors of one kind or another on Bebo. Have these Bebots learned nothing about human interaction? Can't the producers of Wife Swap give them a little knowing nudge?

If you are trying to attract someone else's attention, especially if they are 20 light years away, you do not talk about yourself.

You might explain something about yourself in passing, but you focus on the other person, the other being, the alien object of your interest.

So wouldn't it be a little wiser for the 500 messages to say something along these lines?:

1. We know you're probably smarter than us, so please could you give us a few hints? We're so amazingly dumb down here. We're incredibly self-centered too, by the way.

5. Do you guys take most of your clothes off before you jump into your water, just like we do? Do your nipples get hard when you get out?

Surely if we beam up questions such as these we might actually get some answers. And that's what social networking is all about- people communicating across space, time and purposes, exchanging information for the development of the common intelligence and communal happiness.

It's true that we might not get our answers for another 42 years (The messages are due to arrive some time in 2029.)

On the other hand, it might be less as the Planet To Be Named Bebo will surely have more sophisticated messaging equipment than an all too human lump of metal in the Ukraine.