The ape bones haunt heaven now

The monkey bones flew into space next to a Las Vegas real estate mogul. Another millionaire passenger founded a race car company. i don't know what the third passenger, the one entrusted with the Australopithecus sediba or Homo naledi fossils, did to afford his $350,000 / one hour suborbital vacation, but the space tourism company calls him an "entrepreneur, adventurer, conservationist and member of the Hubbard Council of The National Geographic Society."

But anyway he's the one who carried the fossilized ape clavical and thumb bone.

The stunt was meant to represent "humankind’s appreciation of the contribution of all of humanity’s ancestors and our ancient relatives" i guess, but it just felt sort of macabre and fucked up. i'm pretty sure those monkey great-grandparents could barely stand upright, right?  Let me check

Okay so Australopithecus sediba walked on its hind limbs a lot but i don't think anyone knows how much Homo naledi did. But it's safe to say both of them probably were scared and confused a lot of the time. Right? Predators and hunger and sickness and cold and heat and all that. And their lives can be traced directly down all those genetic lines and branches and limbs towards those millionaires. Technically, i mean.

'Thank you for your suffering,' said the millionaires. 'We will take a part of you into suborbit. It's sort of space, but not quite. It's mostly a gesture of some kind. We mean well Don't take it personally.'

This morning i was talking about it again with my editor, and she joked about how the millionaires were going to get the entire planet haunted, bringing bones up into the sky like that. and i laughed at that, like it wasn't already true. An entire planet haunted by ape bones. We sent a lot of monkeys into space before the monkey bones, by the way. They started doing it in 1948 but it took 3 years before a primate actually survived a trip.

i wonder if we would have tested our rockets on sediba and naledi, if they were still alive at the time.

The millionaires said something in their press release about how sebida and naledi probably looked up at the  night sky with wonder, and hey maybe that's true. Maybe they did. That 's a nice thought. Isn't it? but now of course it's hard to see the night sky most everywhere. It's an easy criticism of modernity to bandy around like it's a poetic metaphor for everything. No stars. So sad.

Meanwhile it doesn't change the fact that lot of people are getting rich off blocking out the stars.  They're getting rich making satellites, their own stars. But now some of the bones of those satellites are haunting the skies, too. And the millionaires are paying money to go look out at the planet, because it takes them a fancy house's worth of money to help ponder existence for five minutes before falling back to the ground.

i don't think they ever wondered about going up there, though. sebida and naledi, i mean. Neither of them even knew there was an 'up there' in the first place. To them the stars were just occassional lights that made the nights a little less terrifying.