Yamazaki
There is a general consensus among our smartest minds that humanity’s time on this Earth is nearing its end. Stephen Hawking himself said if we don’t leave this planet within 1,000 years, we will be extinct.
Damn. Dark. Haunting.
Luckily, people are already working on our departure. Space agencies are developing rockets that can take us to other planets. Kepler is scouring the stars for spots to land. Most interesting of all is the work NASA is doing on how isolation affects people.
That link up there is a remarkable long-read about NASA’s attempt to simulate a years long journey to another planet. Six aspiring astronauts are living in essentially a sealed dome, carrying with them the only supplies, power and tools they’d have if they were aboard a spacecraft.
While this will go wonders toward establishing parameters and plans for a trip, there is an important, important, important, important question that is being ignored by it.
Will there be booze, and if we bring it up to space, will it still be okay to drink?
What else matters? You can barely go on a three hour road trip without a sixer. Imagine a decades long jaunt to the far end of the Milky Way.
Last year, some Ardbeg scotch came back from the heavens, having spent three years aboard the International Space Station.
But much like we sent dogs to space before people, we are now testing the best whiskey in the world. That’s right, we are gonna find out if space will fuck up (or make better!) our most primo booze.
Japanese distillery Suntory is set to blast some of its world-renowned beverages into space to create ‘space-aged’ whiskey.
The company will be sending samples of whiskey to the International Space Station (ISS) in order to study the ‘development of mellowness in alcoholic beverage through the use of a microgravity environment’.
Samples will be sent to the Japanese ‘Kibo’ module of the space station and will be studied in two batches. The first batch will be aged for one year, while the second batch will be aged for two or more years, with the exact duration yet to be decided.
Then, only then, will we be able to create whiskey that can handle the rigors of interstellar travel. That we can sip as we cruise through the Oort Cloud, looking longingly at Earth before turning our eyes to Rigel 7.
Which really is the only hurdle that we are facing. The rest is pretty much cake. Because I can do anything for any amount of time as long as there’s booze.