What Does Teotwawki Mean For the Ethics of Colonizing Space?

So TEOTWAWKI Means “The End of the World as We Know It”

“And I feel fiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeee…” you just hear it in your head after saying that phrase which is probably why TEOTWAWKI needeed to be an acronym. It’s also EOTWAWKI some people skipping the more formal singular honorific. I heard someone say it the other day and I’ve been watching Walking Dead and this morning I was like, “Wait is that really a thing?” Turns out TEOTWAWKI is a thing for people. It looks like a vaguely Hawaiian/Japanese word. Here’s how to pronounce teotwawki because how would you figure out the pronunciation of teotwawki:

Obviously We Would Colonize Space During the End of the World

All this TEOWAWKI and my natural inclination to think about space travel got me thinking harder about space travel. Ethically speaking right now we’re decently responsible with our colonizing of space: we laser the shit out of anything we send to Mars so there aren’t microbes and whatnot. Space ethics gets weird with TEOTWAWKI though. Imagine a situation where the sun is ending 100-1000 years from now. That doesn’t just kill Earth it also pretty much shuts out the lights on the entire solar system and if the power goes out we’re moving out of the neighborhood. In that situation would we slow down and worry about the ethics of space colonization? Or would we to shotgun blast humans at anything remotely habitable and crash land and cough our survivalist microbes on everything?

We Leave Space Garbage Everywhere Already

J/k got you we’re not responsible at all and we’re a mess. We’re pretty much giant space litterbugs. We’ve left an insane amount of trash orbiting the planet, we leave tons of garbage on the moon, and our #1 way to explore a new planet it to basically crash a computer with probes on to it. Imagine if we had to bug out for TEOWAWKI and colonize anything, even intrasolar planets (Mars I’m looking at you.) We’d pile up space junk so fast it would be crazy avis sur le viagra. Its estimated we have colonized like 400,000 pounds of trash to the moon. It would be like when you see a McDonalds wrapper floating by in the wind 10mi from the nearest McDonalds only its 33.9 million miles from the nearest McDonalds. Speaking of which we’d probably take our animals with us and you know how they poop everywhere. Speaking of poop: we already jettison astronaut poop in to the atmosphere so it burns up. That should give you an idea of how cleanly we handle space exploration, we rain shit on our own heads.

Some People Call it SHTF not TEOTWAWKI

If you’re wondering what SHTF means you’re not alone. In my vision question for the pronunciation of teotwawki I found out SHTF means “shit hits the fan”. Less exotic and not nearly as fun IMO but if it starts raining corn kernels we’re gonna officially change the name.

Hmmmm…

Humans are gross even in space. I’ll probably tweet @NASA about it just for fun.

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