Should I find myself aboard an interstellar HMS Endurance of the future, irrevocably swallowed into the gravitational pull of the blackest of black holes, I'd think I'd prefer to be vaporized in the void rather than shoehorn myself into one of those claustrophobic escape pods I've seen in science-fiction films.
Although never actually professionally diagnosed with a fear of confined spaces, I doubt I'd last more than twenty anxious minutes in a little capsule without pounding on the aluminum alloy walls, demanding to be let out. This is also true of ocean-going mini-submersibles or just any conveyance smaller than the buffet car of the Orient Express when traveling through a tunnel. As such, until some boffin develops an aircraft carrier-sized research vehicle, I will not be setting foot in any final frontiers anytime soon, which is unfortunate as I've always wanted to spearhead a voyage of discovery.
And this psychosomatic disorder is obviously scientific exploration's loss. I'd refuse to "boldly go where no man has gone before" unless my starship had sufficient room for at least sixty other men and featured an observation deck as big as a football field. Captain Nemo must forever remain a stranger to me. "It's not that I don't want to fight the giant squid. It's just that I don't want to do it while squashed into that itty-bitty bathysphere."
Ah, what an adventurous spirit the world has lost with me. Imagine if Lewis and Clark suffered from raging cabin fever so never even made it halfway up the Missouri river; or if Marco Polo, in his cramped caravan, complained it was "getting too hot in here to go any further," so never met Kublai Khan, having returned post-haste to Venice with a cold sweat upon his formerly noble brow. Such is the disastrous consequence of my debilitating mental Achilles heel.
And I really think I would have been superb at cataloguing unknown deep sea worms in the Mariana Trench or, better yet, rescuing Dale Arden from the Emperor Ming. I can see myself as a sort of Flash and Dr Zarkov combination character. Brains and brawn in one irresistible but potentially very anxious package. Those firework powered rockets from the fifties television show did not look comfortably capacious to me.
Perhaps I should limit my ambitions to shouting "that planet over there looks nice!," while staring out the window of a Space Ark's reconnaissance probe when the human race is finally forced to find another galaxy to colonize. I'd just need a good nose for life-supporting atmosphere and a large packet of terraforming seeds. I could do that easily. Provided I wouldn't be required to spend the rest of the trip in an alarmingly narrow suspended animation tube.
It's awful to think the future of mankind might be jeopardized by my petty nervous disorder. But along such trivial fault lines does the fate of worlds depend. For instance, the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae were all afraid of spiders. Had the Persians unleashed a single tarantula onto the battlefield then Western civilization would look very different today. That's not true, of course, but I always find consolation allowing irreverent thoughts to wander freely through my mind until they come to rest in the safe space between my ears.
Comments