Lost In Space, Apathy on Earth.

Boeing Starliner & our extinct water cooler moment.

Sep 03, 2024

American astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams left planet Earth on June 5thfor the International Space Station for what was supposed to only be an eight –

- hold on. There has to be a better way to introduce their story.

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic cape,
Aboard a Boeing ship.

The Butch was a mighty pilot man,
And Suni brave and sure.
Two astronauts launched that day,
For an eight…day tour.
An eight…day tour.

Nearly three months later, Captain Wilmore and Captain Williams are still stranded at the ISS after issues with the Boeing Starliner. The plan now is for SpaceX to rescue them in February of 2025, which means the best case scenario still has them stranded for at least 8 months.

More remarkable than their situation is how generally unimpressed Americans are. There have been no candlelight vigils. The evening news doesn’t start each night by updating how many days since the astronauts were stranded. Gal Gadot hasn’t rounded up her actor friends to sing a Beatles song.

Events don’t capture the public consciousness in the way they once did. “Viral” moments don’t achieve universal awareness and can’t sustain attention over a long period of time. Coworkers used to run into each other at the water cooler and connect while discussing current events. That almost symbiotic phenomena, a water cooler moment, experienced its extinction event long ago.

Communal experiences have given way to highly individualized lives that exist in compartmentalized or segmented social ecosystems. In February of 1983, Americans gathered around television sets for the series finale of the CBS sitcom, M*A*S*H*. An audience of 105.7 million watched Hawkeye board a helicopter to leave South Korea. The most popular comedy in 2023-2024 was also a CBS show. The series finale of Sheldon, a 7-season spinoff following 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory, aired on May 16th of 2024. That finale was experienced by 9.32 million viewers.

Sheldon only attracted about 8.8% of the total viewers that M*A*S*H*. received despite 2024 America having at least 100 million more people than 1983 America. In fairness, Sheldon was limited by only being a family sitcom with a precocious kid who everyone knew would grow up to be the lead character from a popular 12-season television show, while M*A*S*H* benefited from the vast abundance of comedic material associated with…working at an Army surgical hospital in Korea during the Korean War.

Knowing how splintered popular culture has become, perhaps it’s not surprising that the Suni and Barry show isn’t commanding more attention. After all, we’re less than 2 months removed from a former President/current candidate almost assassinated on live television and it is already old news. One could argue that political interests may have memory holed that event; if not by tangible efforts, then at least through a subconscious desire from many who wanted to move on. Still, there are any number of apolitical flashpoints that are set aside just as quickly as they appear. In contemporary society, the road goes on forever, and the scrolling never ends.

Boeing Starliner is no Apollo 13, the infamous 1970 space flight that also didn’t go as planned. 1

Two days into the journey, after completing a live broadcast from space that was ignored by every major television network, mission control asked Swigert to flip a switch to perform a routine stir of the spacecraft's oxygen tanks. Minutes later, the spacecraft was rocked by an explosion causing first Swigert and then Lovell to report back to Earth, "Houston, we've had a problem."

The drama of the mission temporarily re-engaged public interest in Apollo. Though NASA was initially unable to secure airtime on major television networks for the mission's first broadcast prior to the explosion, upwards of 40 million people watched the splashdown live, with many tens of millions more following the news around the world.

The Apollo 13 incident was so impactful it would eventually become a blockbuster film starring Tom Hanks. The only way Boeing Starliner could get a movie offer right now would be to provide what Apollo 13 never could; sexual tension. Would it kill Suni and Butch to work in the occasional leer or suggestive touch?

A romantic comedy is their only chance for pop culture relevance. “Starring Kevin Costner as ‘Butch’ Barry Wilmore and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as ‘Suni’ Sunita Williams.”

(Hey, it’s Hollywood. Of course they will cast an actress 16 years younger than Sunita.)

There would be so many RomCom appropriate titles to choose from:

Pride and Negligence
Sleepless in Space Station
Moonstuck
~~500~~ 243 Days of Sunita
The Fault In Our Starliners

Or Speak Truth To Flour’s preferred selection -

When Barry Met Suni

The perfect song for the soundtrack already exists with “Arthur’s Theme”.

When you get caught between the moon and New York City
I know it's crazy, but it's true
If you get caught between the moon and New York City
The best that you can do
The best that you can do
Is fall in love

To their credit, our star-crossed astronauts attempted to go viral by adding a sci-fi twist.

Even aliens won’t move the dial in a post water cooler world. Lou Elizondo’s book Imminent was released on August 20 and is quickly becoming a bestseller. Elizondo is a former United States Army Counterintelligence agent who previously worked for the Department of Defense in a variety of positions, including a role as the Director of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program). The book discussed his work in the program and Elizondo alleges in his writing that UFOs are real, the United States has a crash retrieval program which has existed for decades, and that we are in possession of “non-human biologics.”

None of this is new information. He’s made similar claims previously in public interviews and these allegations have been echoed by credible government witnesses like David Grusch, among others. A 2017 New York Times piece confirmed the existence of AATIP and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vouched for Elizondo and his position in the program prior to passing away. There are multiple famous (and Pentagon confirmed) videos, along with radar/sensor data documenting the presence of otherworldly or non-human technology in the air and under water.

Hollywood movies about alien arrivals typically assume a dramatic reaction to their appearance, most notably the media circus-like atmosphere in Contact or the equally frantic but more somber, anxious response in Arrival. Despite all the real-life data, testimony and video footage that’s come forward in recent years, not much has changed. There’s no panic and, outside of an occasional Congressional hearing, no formalized public outcry.

For years, the UFO community has referenced a report released in 1960 by The Brookings Institute. It considers the potentially destabilizing impact of citizens finding out that aliens exist. The assumption was such a revelation would come into direct conflict with conventional wisdom and established culture. Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel wrote about the report in their 2012 book, A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact. 2

The implications were taken seriously by the authors who feared social disintegration if humanity came into contact with an extraterrestrial lifeform.

It’s a theory that assumes there is a tightly wound culture to disrupt, a reasonable belief in 1960 when America was only taking its first steps into a decade that would engage in self-induced social upheaval. Today, there’s a legitimate question about how much custom and social structure is left to unwind. The number of people in America who identify as Christian has fallen from 90% in the 90’s, down to 63% as of 2020. 3

This isn’t presented to argue Americans need to favor Christianity over other religions. In fact, an analysis of statistical trends by Gallup in March of 2024 revealed that “much of the change in the U.S. has been a shift away from Christian religions to no religion at all.” 4

That same piece from Gallup notes an overall decline on how Americans view the importance of religion in their lives.

Forty-five percent of Americans say religion is "very important" in their life, with another 26% saying it is "fairly important" and 28% saying it's "not very important."

When Gallup first asked this question in 1965, 70% said religion was very important.

The question isn’t whether America needs a foundational religion to thrive, or alternately the presence of multiple religions to be the foundation for social life. If Americans abandon religion, what replaces the communal influence it had in society?

So far, nothing. The decline in religious participation, a dumbing down of holidays and customs quietly fading away are all contributing to the erosion of community. Advances in technology have created substantially more choices in entertainment and information than prior generations had, resulting in niche-driven content that values engagement with smaller groups of people over appealing to all of society.

The disclosure of aliens (or non-human intelligence in our modern vernacular) can’t destabilize an already unstable culture. That’s the reality facing any moment now, whether it be our stranded astronauts or something else. How do you compel the gravity of an event when your audience is desensitized? Corral the focus of a perpetually distracted populous?

If we stop reacting to events as a collective entity, is there any hope we can still act in unison to respond to the biggest of moments? Americans rallied together after September 11th. We splintered into factions during COVID-19.

What divides us, including both adversarial and benign differences, is becoming greater than what unites us.

Debating that is a discussion for another day. For now, one thing is certain. That strange noise coming from the Boeing Starliner could have been a non-human intelligence knocking because they brought a casserole or wanted to offer Butch and Suni a ride home to Earth, and we’d still probably shrug our shoulders and move on to whatever’s next.

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