Why the internet is weird… space, pizza, cats… and cave art

Weirdness

At ONESTAGETOSPACE we want to draw attention to our genuine space related project. And just brainstorming about how to do it without breaking the bank, I was surfing around for ideas. Unsurprisingly, I fell off the internet deep end. You know, that space you end up in when you find something so weird that you start to wonder what it was you were looking for. That twilight zone between our world and an alternate reality. A digital backwater filled with bad ideas you need to immediately reject to have any hope of looking somewhat professional…

Well. It is a cheap way to draw traffic, but I couldn’t resist to show some of the images I came across. This will be somewhat of an experiment and honestly, I will be disappointed if this article draws more views than the posts I deeply care about.

Apparently, there is this theme floating around on the internet of combining all the things people might ‘secretly desire’ into one image. There happens to be a large demographic that likes cats (yes, we know), pizza (yes, we know) and space (unapologetic and guilty). So….

Yes… We present you: Space, Pizza and cat.

And… Another Pizza, Space and Cat…

Somehow people like cats. Their gaze and attraction are inexplicable. Anyone who is or has been a cat owner knows that cats do not care about you. They want your food and sometimes require your hands to rid them from an itch. Scientists have investigated this and even hypothesize that most people carry a cat parasite, a virus that makes owners attracted to cats and has most humans obey their will. The Egyptians already mummified them and took their favorite pets into their personal graves. They had a thing with lions, small cats and big cats and some were part of the depiction of Gods (Sekhmet, Maahes, etc.). A big cat even made it into the bible. And with regards to that magnetism, it seems that the saying “can a leopard change it’s spots”, in Jeremiah 13:23, is a mistranslation of “can the Leopard change its attraction?”. No. It can not.

If making such images is ‘your thing’, why don’t you add your cat to the following ‘cat-ready-space-pizza’-image. May your cat boldly go where no cat-pizza has gone before.

and...

(Rest assured, I did not create the images, the first one has reference: cute-space-pizza-cats-wallpapers-Favim.com-4178685.jpeg and the second one has space cat.jpg as a reference. To the owner of the image, great work! I guess ?)

Need some distraction before you start your working day? Why don’t you try to google… space, pizza and cat…

To soothe our conscience, I will add a small bit about progress in food science:

And in that case, pizza’s are an interesting case study to make the astronomical life of astronauts a little bit more gastronomical. 3D printing food in space is being explored at all major space agencies world-wide to add some variety to the menu, by recombining ingredients that have a longer shelf life when stored separately. It works with mono-ingredient food products like chocolate, but products that combine ingredients with different tubes and nozzles are…not yet yummy.

Furthermore, some scientists explore the idea of brewing meat in plastic vats instead of cultivating cattle. Sort of like a vintage ‘meat wine’? Might oak vats improve the taste? Gross? Well. Think protein-slime floating in a liquid nutrient container and you get a scientifically correct image. Get over it. It gets leached, dried, processed and densified and as such is not very different from things like bread yeast, which also starts life as… a culture of living yeast cells in a vat. While the results so far are not appetizing, progress to create a product with better consistency and taste is being made.

The advantages for both deep space missions and use on Earth are obvious. Today, in most industrial countries, 70% of the agricultural areas are used to either grow food for cattle or grow cattle. The environmental impact this has is not always benign and killing live animals is an ethical problem even subsistence hunters wrestle with. Any reduction in the amount of animals that need to be killed and reducing the cultivation footprint would be a huge benefit for land use. Vats can be stacked vertically. Cows would protest. The end result of this process might be somewhat unexpected though… Because their usefulness to humanity might evaporate, many cattle species could someday go extinct. Some would call this progress.

Luckily we have a Belgian-Spanish painter, Carlos de Haes (1829-1898), a famous landscape artist, who fits in a European tradition tens of thousands of years old, known for painting cows.

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Carlos de Haes
The Altamira Cave paintings in Spain

Altamira, European Bison

Chauvet cave, France: 35.000 years ago
Remember the European Rhinoceros and Lion? Someone did.

Time capsules. Maybe it is time to create some of them on other solar system bodies, and that is where ONESTAGETOSPACE can help.

(Ok, here is the experiment: having been posted on Sept 30, 2017 this post has gotten…. How many views?)

ONESTAGETOSPACE is a genuine space effort seeking funds to further develop and build its MARVELOUS reusable vehicle. An innovative design allows us to decimate the operational cost of both orbital and interplanetary crewed missions, from surface to surface, over even the best industry competitors. This maturing site allows us to talk about our vehicle and to share stories about projects and people that inspire us on our long journey. If there is a story you feel we should cover, or a person that would like to be interviewed, let us know. Subscribe, like, share or support us with time, money or advice to help bring this project to fruition. It is ONESTAGETOSPACE, and you can become part of the adventure.