Mistakes Were Made
I didn’t mean to blow up the Moon. Of course, I didn’t. I was aiming for the asteroid. We were aiming for the asteroid; I think it’s important to remember that this was very much a team effort.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak, to be able to tell my story, to defend myself. I regret the occasion, and I do think a tribunal might be an overreaction, but alas, here we are.
I shall try to be brief out of respect for your time. I will say mistakes were made. That’s what everyone says, don’t they? However, I find myself in a unique opportunity to give those mistakes a historical context based on my extensive education as a historian. Did you not know this? Surely, this was in your records. I specialized in 21st-century history. I didn’t get into science until later in life. The standards were so relaxed by then, I hardly required retraining. I would go so far as to say there wasn’t adequate training/education provided. But let us focus on the more salient points of this endeavor.
It all began in the early 21st century, when a series of increasingly unfortunate political events and questionable choices gave rise to the Sci-De movement known then as science deniers. Does anyone remember this? Those among you of the younger generations have felt its effects without even knowing it. Your schoolbooks, I assure you, were different than those of your predecessors. You probably don’t remember when history began to be rewritten to streamline it to modern values. Well, after that, it began to be obliterated altogether; not so much rewritten as reimagined into something that made people more comfortable.
Science was the next victim of that mentality. Global warming dialectics were making people uncomfortable, so they did away with those. Everyone wanted to hold on to their planet-devastating yet oh so lucrative resources like coal and oil and so they did. The money talked and everyone listened.
Did it help that by then the money and the power were one and the same? You bet. The highest offices of power in the largest countries in the world were turning into dictator-for-life posts, and the narrative was shifting rapidly. People didn’t notice or care or were too distracted by their phones and reality tv, but their lives were changing, the world around them was changing.
Their unfairly elected demagogues told them lies, and they bought it, hook, line, and sinker, because it was easy and the path of least resistance gleamed irresistibly—the yellow brick road of our time was paved with lies.
And the thing with lies isn’t just that they change a fact or two here and there, it’s that they become so prevalent that they change the very fabric of our reality, the very concept of truth, facts, knowledge.
The inconvenient was done away with and what is more inconvenient than science—the incontrovertible empirical procession of conclusions based on provable facts and data—that was telling people what they didn’t want to hear, trying to restrict their rampant consumption, their ubiquitous wastefulness, their thoughtless ways.
I remember when schools began to drop it from their curriculums. It was a dark day indeed. The loss of funding for scientific agencies followed. NASA became a place that survived off the donations of supporters the way PBS used to do back in the day.
What’s PBS, you ask? It’s a viewer-sponsored tv station that used to feature intelligent programming. It went under decades ago.
SETI was shut down permanently. Many observatories dedicated specifically to detecting early extraterrestrial threats were closed or refurbished into luxury glamping hotels.
Science became a niche field. Underfunded, underappreciated, underrespected. I apologize, the latter might not be a real word, language studies were largely dropped from popular education after the English-or-bust campaign of the 2160s.
At any rate, as you can plainly see, the odds were stacked against us from the very start. The asteroid didn’t get detected until much too late and only because Teddy Larson, a 12-year-old boy in Nebraska, detected it with his homemade telescope and his father, Teddy Larson Sr., was determined enough to contact everyone he could think of to raise alert. Did you know it took him months to just be put in contact with someone who would take him seriously? Crucial, crucial months we could have used.
By the time NASA learned of this threat and made it public, it was already almost too late. Not quite, but almost. Our fearless leader made fun of it calling it the Larsonator, remember that? It set the mood for the public perception and media coverage. It certainly didn’t help with the funding. The mission was cobbled together only because the richest man in the world decided it would make for a good promotion for his business. As if the man needed further business—he already had a monopoly on so many things. But alas, gifted horse and all that.
He funded the mission, using, to his credit, mostly genuine scientist, and there we were. With one shot to save the world. From an asteroid threat most didn’t believe in. Passing near the Moon that a not-insignificant percentage of the population nowadays think of as a giant wheel of cheese. With dated calculations equipment that was mere steps up from an abacus.
Why me? Well, the thing is, I was only selected to be the mission commander after the initial commander’s—our sponsor’s son’s—tragic death. Turns out he had some incorrect beliefs about space and gravity. Not ideas—as his mentor, I taught him better than that—but beliefs.
And so, it was left up to me and I tried my best and I’m sorry I failed. But really, how much blame should I shoulder in this situation? And does it really matter anymore? Do you know what’s going to happen to Earth now without Moon? Would you like to learn? No. Ok. Well…Sorry. Now what?
Mia Dalia’s short fiction has appeared online at Night Terror Novels, 50 word stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, Pyre Magazine, Tales from the Moonlit Path. Mia’s work is in upcoming anthologies by Black Ink Fiction, and Unsettling Reads. Her debut novel, Estate Sale, will be out in the spring of 2023.