5

Material Possessions

Pixabay Public Domain

Are you reading this at home? Look around you. What do you see? Chairs, tables, and home entertainment technology, probably. Little, meaningless trinkets that you've acquired over time and grown attached to. The reanimated mummy of Rameses XIV silently glowering at you in the corner of the room, forever trapped in the ring of salt and eldritch spices you lured him into at the last minute. You know, usual everyday stuff. Do you need all that stuff? Of course not. Do you want it? Shit yes. Rameses gets you so laid.

Can you have any of it in space? Ha, no. This is what your new space living quarters will look like:

Pics About Space
The dude comes with the room, and will stare at you like that 24/7.

That's as attractive as a giant clump of taint hair pulled from the shower drain. There are freaking prisons that give you better premises. In some countries, you can even bring your Final Fantasy figurines with you, provided you leave out the ones you can use to shank a dude.

Play-Asia
So, basically, everything but this plush Vivi.

4

Sex

Pixabay Public Domain

One of the first things humanity will try to get rolling once we start mass traveling in space will almost certainly be artificial gravity. That would enable us to sit, stand and, yes, screw just like we did on earth. However, it's a pants-shittingly difficult concept to pull off, so don't expect it anytime soon. Besides, once you leave the confines of Earth, why would you want to embark on your regular, awkward gravity-based missionary, where the only sci-fi element in your sex life is that roleplay you do on your birthday where you're Jabba the Hutt and she's the trash compactor. You're in space, people. Get space fuckin'.

Sex in zero gravity is the name of the game here, and therein lies the problem. You're not going to want to fly completely nude, because even the best of zero-G boning sessions is not going to be worth the glare of the space station commander when you bumblingly try to explain to him how that gallon of your dong sweat ended up in the machinery. You're going to want some protective gear between your equipment and the spaceship's, preferably something that also keeps you strapped to your partner so you won't embarrassingly float away from each other mid-thrust. If only someone would come up with an invention that meets all these needs ...

... wait, they already have? How about that. Meet the 2suit:

They're still working on the lace and frills.

3

Sports

Pixabay Public Domain

2

Babies

Pixabay Public Domain

Regardless of your opinion about kids, I think you'll agree that we need them to survive as a species. This means that when we bring our circus to space, we'll need to bring them as well, which is a completely different set of problems. Errant babies flying about, slobbering everywhere and pulling every cord and lever they can see is just part of the issue. There are also problems that you'll never see coming until it's far too late. Every parent has experienced the "between diapers" scenario, where, one minute, they're just mindlessly changing the baby, and the next, they're trying to hold back a wave of poop that is absolutely biblical. Now, imagine if said poop didn't have to obey the laws of gravity, so it just kept going. Your parental instincts are enough to dodge it, but the precious piece of unprotected equipment it inevitably hits is less lucky. Now, multiply this by 10,000 babies firing streams of feces like drunken Stormtroopers fire their weapons, and your space colony is suddenly an unlivable hellhole the color and general odor of a 19th century asylum.

Pixabay Public Domain
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

1

The Internet

Pixabay Public Domain

Thanks to sites like the ones that I'm involved with, it's hard to go without the internet for any length of time. The average Western person is so used to having all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips that the very thought of getting that power stripped away is like losing a limb. No one wants to go in space -- or, for that matter, anywhere -- without that shit these days. With that in mind, I come to potential space-dwellers bearing good and bad news. The good news: There is internet in space, brought to you with the complex science-magic of satellite configurations and lasers. The bad news: It's at least as slow as dial-up.

Wikipedia
"Thought you were rid of me, huh?"

Further strengthening its claim as the herpes of online connections, dial-up's back -- in speed and spirit, if not in actual technology -- as Space's official internet connection for the last five years or so. What's more, the internet capacity the International Space Station enjoys is fairly rudimentary: Emails, news, Twitter and the occasional video call. Can't read Cracked in space (though if I'm wrong and an astronaut aboard the ISS happens to read this, holy shit, please let me know. Also, hi!).

The main issue here is distance. While the ISS itself is only an average of 254 miles away, there's a whole lot of signal traveling. So, if an astronaut clicks this link in space, the request will travel 22,000 miles to a network of geosynchronous satellites, which send it down to an earth-based receiver, which processes it and returns the response. That's a whole lot of waiting time to realize you've just been Rickrolled.

YouTube
In related news, if I don't have a column out next week, that means the ISS have a secret death ray.

Luckily, science fully recognizes the situation and is working its ass off to rectify it for aspiring space travelers. There's talk of a functional interplanetary internet, spearheaded by internet luminary Vint Cerf. They're developing completely new series of protocols and storing methods that will one day hopefully be able to bring Mars colonists a comparatively speedy internet access from Earth. Whether this is for their comfort and convenience or whether this is for the constant stream of cat videos that will pacify any chance of a Mars colony secession and uprising is up for speculation.

Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked weekly columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.

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