Who will be the last to stay alive - a Beatle or one of the gents who walked on the moon? Choose your most likely survivor!

paul mccartney isn't going anywhere

rooting for Ringo or Gene Cernan

Pete Best looks like he's in decent shape, and he's had a lot of hallmarks of a long-life - a marriage that's lasted more than half a century, heavy civic involvement, steady career helping people.

I think it would be a lot weirder to live in a world where no one is alive who has ever walked on the moon than to live in a world where the Beatles are all dead and not within the living memory (as a functional band) of all but senior citizens (by AARP standards . . . that's in less than a decade!)

wait, does that list include every dude who EVER walked on the moon, or just the dudes from the first moon landing? when was the last time people walked on the moon?

useful poll

neil armstrong landed on the moon with eight other guys.

That list includes everyone who ever walked on the moon and is still alive. Four have died: Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad, Alan Shepard and James Irwin. The last time people walked on the moon was in December, 1972 (more than FORTY years ago!) when Cernan and Schmitt walked on the moon. Schmitt was the last "new" person to set foot on the moon, but Cernan - who touched foot-to-moon before him - also left last. So either one was the last man to walk on the moon, depending on how you calculate it.

Three Beatles have died - Stuart Sutcliffe, John Lennon and George Harrison.

It is a useful poll. I get asked the poll's question nearly every day.

well this is depressing

i was surprised no one asked me this on my ask page tbh. glad the question has been opened to a general audience.

It seems like each of the lunar missions had three guys on it, but only two walked each time. (A few guys had more than a single mission.) Only one guy, James Lovell, made it there and back without ever walking on the moon.

I think decades from now, it will become sort of apparent that it was the time of the Apollo missions that really represented the peak of humanity's achievements. Yeah, we've got smart phones and the internet and Dorito taco shells and all, but most of this is really an incredible refinement of progress from back then The Beatles are hugely overrated, but symbolic of the times, and the most popular cultural artifact of the era. It'll all be dust soon enough.

maybe. but won't it be cool when geo-engineering projects designed to forestall the effects of global warming succeed in blotting out the sun?

would kill all the remaining beatles + probably annihilate all beatles recordings to preserve at least one human who had walked on the moon

boo

http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/30206152130/well-right-naturally-you-should-hate

Everybody thought Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon were spending four-and-a-half percent of the federal budget each year to prove that America owned Science. This was all a fiction. The Apollo Program was an elaborate demonstration of how even the blandest among us are under the heel of the spirit.

NASA needed astronauts to go plant a flag on the moon. For obvious reasons, the astronauts ended up being the most reliable type of man America makes: white, straight, full-starch protestant, center-right, and spawned by the union of science and the military. Every last one of them was the heart of the heart of the tv dinner demographic. But then they get shot into space, tossed from the gravity of this planet, across a quartermillion miles of nothing, to be snagged by the moon after three days. Eighteen guys did this and twelve descended further to find out that moon dust smells like gunsmoke. Every single one of them came back irrevocably changed. America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans.

dlh, wouldn't it be easier to, like, just send some more ppl to the moon?

definitely hold the moon guys in more awe than the beatles (maybe not lennon but mainly because he's been dead so long), tho. i actually met buzz aldrin at a book signing and shook his hand, that's still kind of eerie for me to think about.

that happy eventuality is covered by my ultimatum xp

but if it's just robots, better kindle the bonfires just to be safe

dlh, wouldn't it be easier to, like, just send some more ppl to the moon?

yeah, theoretically one of us could even end up on the moon. but very few ilxors are former beatles.

there's probably some dumb 20 year old posting on ilx right now who is going to invent a web startup, become a billionaire, and be the first space tourist to land on the moon.

probably

space tourism will probably be a thing before the 21st century is out, no? i guess it depends on whether or not there is some kind of global economic catastrophe that stalls technological progress.

well at the very least paul's probably going up

that i haven't prepared for

as a little kid i used to cry over michael collins (who stayed in the ship and whose orbit periodically removed him from earth radio contact). i couldn't imagine what that must have been like. i mean i'm sure he didn't really give a shit he was too busy. but thinking of him alone in the ship in the dark when i was six, yknow.

but most of all not getting to walk on the moon.

esquire asked nabokov (i think while a11 was en route?) what he wanted the first man on the moon to say upon landing and vn telegrammed I WANT A LUMP IN HIS THROAT TO OBSTRUCT THE WISECRACK. all things considered tho i think neil did ok.

random moonfax

Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs. And also managed to crystallize the experience of seeing your entire planet at once:

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"

Wonder if anything would change, if space tourism became a thing.

lol no-one has ever walked on the moon, and Paul McCartney has been dead for 46 years.

This really needs to be a live game show on the moon with laser guns and stuff, suggest the title Beatle Royale.

I WANT A LUMP IN HIS THROAT TO OBSTRUCT THE WISECRACK

Seeing as how the quote was supposed to be "one small step for a man", but ended up being "one small step for man" instead, seems Vlad got his wish, along with Mr Gorski.

Only one guy, James Lovell, made it there and back without ever walking on the moon.

What about Michael Collins on the Apollo 11 mission?

...versus people born in the 19th century (think there's about 10 left)

I mean, if I put Jiroemon Kimura on my Death Pool, I'd LOSE 16 points if he kicked it, right? Not that I'd ever actually enter Death Pool you misanthropic jerks :D

xposts
Lovell went to the moon twice without walking on it. Every other astronaut who went to the moon twice got to walk on the surface on one of their journeys.

It's kind of a shame that this isn't the Police instead of the Beatles.

xposts that's one heck of a naughty step.

for a man

plus tick.

one month's grounding for mankind

Chuck Yeager is 90 and I hope he outlives everyone.

He will. Relative supersonic travel creates an auditory projection of oneself - a sound-double, if you will - that is precisely mirrored in time by a cataclysmic event, such as a terminal world war or a comet strike. Thus, paradoxically, the earlier the transcending of the Wave, the later one's manifestation will echo, still retaining its own life, awareness, desires...

Tom Hanks, I mean Lovell, didn't walk on the moon cuz his ship kinda exploded.

xposts

ahh, I misinterpreted 'made it there and back' as 'went to the moon and came back safely' rather than 'went to the moon more than once'.

I think I unconsciously picked Cernan cuz he's the Last Man on the Moon.

does he know he left the light on?

Required reading before voting:
http://www.sfsite.com/gra/0507/mdlg.jpg

I'd like to think in the future technology will have advanced enough that we can all be Beatles

not while we still have ppl to kill on earth

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

wld you rather b a Beatle or Osama?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Oh dear, nobody dug the inch-perfect Pynchon pastiche. Don't worry, there are 35,000 more words where that came from!

docfilm on Gene Cernan opens this Friday

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-121415a-last-man-moon-documentary.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uykSsOR6mU

the 7 surviving moonwalkers are all in their 80s

This is made slightly less fair by the populations involved. Beatles grew up in austere postwar Britain (rationing, privation, miserable weather) and then became globally famous rock stars (drugs, groupies, hedonism).

American astronauts grew up in relative plenty, were expected to be in peak physical condition, got excellent health care, and as long as they didn't get blown up or drown, probably lived pretty healthful lifestyles in a sunny and dry climate.

Ergo Beatles should get some kind of bonus years relative to the spacemen.

Beatles bonus years = actual years of age.