Badass ninja science fiction writer Charlie Stross has just posted a killer essay on the futility of space explorationcolonization. Nutshell: it's far and hostile, and we can't even figure out how to live in the Gobi desert or the ocean's floor, infinitely closer and more hospitable.

Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take five and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there quite a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

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Patrick "Bad News" Hughes has a book out now which amounts to a more portable version of his blog that you can leave unlimited comments on with a ballpoint pen. In other words, I love it.

Hughes is best known for humorous, sometimes vulgar first-person essays on everyday indignities suffered in life, and that's what you find here. "Whimsical stories of soul-melting shame."

The "key phrases" Amazon associates with this book should give you a better idea of the flavor: "poo water, ass blood, saltwater catfish, florida, skinhead katrina, Burger King, Four Horsemen, Downs Syndrome, Bob Seger." There's also a passage in here about a guy who set his dick on fire at Sean Bonner's wedding, many years before Jackass.

Link. The book cover is so awesome. Let's hope he doesn't get in Jill Greenbergian hot water over the baby torture photo at the top of this post. (thx Sean!)

Previous posts about Patrick Hughes on BB:

Great food-review prose from folks who aren't food critics

Reader comment: dr.hypercube says,

I've been a Bad News fan for a while - a few days ago I was looking at some bad album covers (Link, via), saw an awful mustache and was inspired to set up a Chile D. mustache Flickr group.

From Uncle Patrick's advice to Children: "Burt Reynolds? Nope. Tom Selleck? Uh uh. Try Chile D. Molester. Shave that fucking mustache." Just a few participants so far, but i know there are some great molestaches out there.

Video Link. This horrible, blurry mashup of Spock lipsynching to the Bad Brains is hilarious if you grew up on DC hardcore, otherwise just skip this post.

Here's the Bad Brains performing the song live in 1982. They were one of the first bands I ever saw live, and they changed my life and defined punk rock for me. These equally-shitty quality YouTube uploads might give you an idea why: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Just pure, crazy speed. (thanks, Sean Bonner)

Update: To all the humorless pedants in the hizzouse who like to use email: yes, this is an unauthorized adaptation of "Bilbo Baggins."

Richard Berry says:

The Tweety popsicle entry was hilarious and alarming at the same time. Here in Australia I've highlighted a similar serious problem we have encountered on my blog: Sticks & Stones.

The Bubble 'O Bill ice cream bears absolutely no resemblance to what's promised on the packet. But that's the least of our worries. The main problem is, the popsicle is the spitting image of Australia's most nortorious murderer, Ivan Milat.

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Previously on Boing Boing:
• Ice cream patent wars in the 1930s
• Expertly produced Korean red bean ice cream fish
• Tweety Bird popsicle doesn't look like Tweety Bird
• Bugs Bunny popsicle
• Turtle popsicle reflects pride in workmanship
• Popsicle parody ad

Amy Crehore says: "There is the most amazing collection of fantastic images in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library."

Illustration shown here is from J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863 Link