Quote of the day--shit-eating grin edition

Present-day space agencies already have considered the idea that astronauts on long-haul voyages could line the walls of their spaceships with their food on the way to wherever they're going, and line the walls with their poop (properly packaged, of course) on the way back. Such agencies also mention that it could, with enough work, be possible to process that poop until it become edible again. It's then possible to feed those processed patties to the astronauts, who will then poop them out, and then it's back to the wall. I think at this point it's easy to see why we would rather have the aliens take our hair.

- Esther Inglis-Arkell, "10 Things Aliens Will
Harvest From Humans", io9, June 15^th, 2012.

So I think the question becomes, "Just how badly do you want to go into space?" Though maybe that's not the question at all. Maybe the question is, "Just how badly do you want to come back from going into space?" Because, you know, I think the part that maybe you don't want to think about isn't so much the part where you're pulling food from the walls of your vessel and replacing them with carefully-wrapped shitpackages, but moreso the part where you later pull the shitpackages out and reprocess them into shitburgers or Shit à la King. Maybe, you know, you'll just want to stay out wherever you happened to be going, even if it's uninhabited or desolate or downright inimical to life. It obviously offers an incentive to spend the entire journey in suspended animation, if possible.

Should you end up encountering an extraterrestrial species of face-rapists like the ones in the Alien franchise, you might at least take this consolation: they have no idea what you've been eating, or re-eating as the case may be. Ah. There's another joke: "Would you like to re-eat something from the ship's stores?" "You mean warm something up?" "Not exactly."

Well, it definitely tasted better going down. The first time, I mean.