Lost in the Cosmos

Messiah, will be mediated by the Jews, who are a light unto the nations and with whom God entered into a unique covenant.
    (e) (Baptist speaking) C3. Man is saved. He suffered the Fall, was promised a savior from the Jews. A savior came, Jesus Christ, to save us from sin and misery and death. The Good News of his coming was broadcast to the ends of the earth for all men to hear and be baptized and saved. The Kingdom of God exists here and now and we are in it. We have freed ourselves from the Catholic Church and other idolatries. I have had a personal encounter with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and I am saved once and for all and live now and forever in a state of blessedness, now on this earth and forever in heaven.
    (f) Other (specify).
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Thought Experiment: Sexuality and space travel.
    As project designer at NASA, you must select a two-person crew to undertake a prolonged mission. Their objective: to act as emissaries to a civilization with whom communication is already established. It is a vital mission. They are more advanced than we. We, with an estimated 40 percent chance of survival, need their wisdom as well as their technology. Their goodwill is our objective. Your task, therefore, is to select the best, most admirable specimens of Homo sapiens sapiens.
    It is also your responsibility to provide for the human needs of the astronauts. In the objective scientific stance so characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sexual needs are viewed as but one of the many human needs which must be provided for within the cramped confines of the spaceship, e.g., need for food, water, oxygen, exercise, simulated gravity, and so on. Previous missions have shown that pornography, Penthouse magazine, tapes of Nancy Friday, inflatable female dolls, and masturbation have been unsatisfactory sexual outlets. Nor have inhibitory hormones, saltpeter, cold baths worked.
    You conclude that human sexual needs require humans to satisfy them.
    It was decided against sending a husband and wife, not merely for the reason that a husband-and-wife team was not available, but because of evidence adduced by staff social scientists that the institution of marriage had fallen on such evil days that four out of five married couples studied—as well as unmarried live-in couples—were already so sick of each other that no one would take responsibility for what they might do to each other after years in space.
    Accordingly, you have five crews available from whom you must choose one.
    (1) A pair of good-humored and well-qualified astronauts, a man and a woman, who have no religious scruples and no marital or emotional attachments, a Burt Reynolds and a Shirley MacLaine type, each highly skilled technically, each sexually experienced and happily and actively and somewhat casually heterosexual, and who, though not well known to each other, find each other attractive—but who, let us admit it, are a little dumb and know next to nothing of Western civilization, literature, or history, beyond last year’s winner of the Super Bowl and the comparative ratings of Snyder, Carson, and Letterman during the last ratings sweeps.
    (2) A pair of lesbians, an inseparable couple, pleasant, fastidious, housekeeping, “married” middle-aged homebodies with a low sex drive and a high toleration for closeness and intimacy. Besides being excellent astronauts, both are highly cultivated. One is by avocation a historian, the other a poet.
    (3) A pair of male homosexuals from San Francisco. Strangers to each other before training, promiscuous as chimpanzees, they find each other attractive. Outside their technical proficiency, they have a range of interests; one was active in San Francisco politics, the other a Rhodes Scholar in medieval studies.
    (4) A lapsed Catholic, Irish, Midwestern male chauvinist, and a militantly feminist woman. Despite, or perhaps because of, their differences, they get along famously. The male is perhaps the best qualified technically of the lot, his marriage is on the rocks, and he is highly sexed, humorous, and salacious as only a Christian or ex-Christian can be (as horny as a preacher, as the saying goes). The female is a handsome Gloria Steinem-Radcliffe type who subscribes to the NASA view that sexual drives and needs are normal biological properties of the human organism, and is willing to satisfy hers and his on the basis of an equality between the sexes—i.e., it must be understood that she is as