• LibsEatPoop [any]
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    97 months ago

    This is freaking hilarious. I might buy this book just to read more of this:

    “Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers,” Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote. “You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?.. One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.”

    … the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they “both consume and provide the most food.” He went on to provide a “weirdly detailed look” at how to cut up one’s fellow humans if necessary.

    “We don’t know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn’t find his height and weight online,” the authors wrote, “and honestly we’re scared to ask.”

    In “Survival and Sacrifice”… readers will also find… a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: “In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?”

    Great marketing.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    77 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    A husband-and-wife duo have published a book about life on Mars that includes a section about — drumroll, please — the ethics of astronaut cannibalism in space.

    Perhaps best known for husband Zach Weinersmith’s “Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal” webcomic — though Kelly is a behavioral ecologist at Rice University — the duo pointed out that beyond the United Nations’ international space law stipulating that technically, a floating corpse in space would be considered a satellite (“thanks, Registration Convention!”)

    “Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers,” Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote.

    Per the author and triathelete’s estimation, the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they “both consume and provide the most food.”

    In “Survival and Sacrifice” — whose title, we must admit, makes a chilling sort of sense in this context — readers will also find, the Weinersmiths pointed out, a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: "In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation.

    Per the aeronautical professor’s estimation, it would indeed be wrong — but as the writers of “A City on Mars” so aptly declare, it’s probably best for Red Planet-bound astronauts to “leave Erik Seedhouse at home.”


    The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @Vqhm@lemmy.world
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    77 months ago

    Wouldn’t be the first time and prolly won’t be the last time.

    Jamestown.

    Jamestowne is home to the ruins of the first permanent English settlement in North America.

    104 settlers but only 38 survived

    Despite writing describing cannibalism:

    “Haveinge fedd upon our horses and other beastes as longe as they Lasted, we weare gladd to make shifte with vermin as doggs Catts, Ratts and myce…as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather,” he wrote. “And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.”

    Direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas was elusive until recently finding “bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to-cannibalism-46000815/