Column: Bang, zoom – to the moon!

Have you ever had a really great idea you just can’t stop thinking about? Well, I sure do. Here it is: terraforming the moon.

Every time I read about some foolhardy, quasi-scientific endeavor, I bang my spoon on the table in unparalleled fury. Don’t these people know they could be engineering a renewable atmosphere on the moon right now? The earth isn’t going to last forever!

Seriously, you’d be surprised at the baloney scientists are wasting their time with these days. At this very moment, beverage company execs are concocting a plan to liberate a few bottles of 100-year-old whiskey from deep Antarctic ice. Located under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds (I’m not making this up), the crate of whiskey can only be retrieved using special drills and an expedition of people with nothing better to do.

But that’s not all. Other scientists are hard at work determining – wait for it – how feasible the existence of vampires is. Apparently, an enzyme called telomerase could imbue vampires (or anyone!) with immortality. However, a pair of physicists from Florida calculated that a 17th-century outbreak of vampirism would have annihilated the human race within two-and-a-half years, thus conclusively disproving the existence of vampires. I can finally sleep at night again.

Now that we know Edward Cullen is fictional and Antarctica is home to some old booze, I really think it’s time to start making the moon fit for inhabitation. On the practical side, humanity would have a place to go once our poor, abused Planet Earth gives out. On the romantic side – it’s the freakin’ moon! Imagine the alabaster moonlight, previously available only on certain nights, infusing your every waking moment, radiating from the very ground you tread upon. Picture bounding gracefully across the Sea of Tranquility, the Milky Way spanning the horizon. People, the time to colonize the moon is NOW!

I express this to my roommate Megan and her boyfriend, Mike, expecting hearty agreement. I was in for a shock.

“But … it will be built on the backs of those who are already hungry!” exclaims Megan, her eyes shining with earnestness.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to settle in Antarctica?” says Mike, the engineer. (Answer: Only if you bring your own liquor.)

The smile melts from my face, utterly deflated. My rebuttals, mostly in the form of “But … it’s the moon!” wilt under the superior logic of my friends. The dream is over.

I have a lot of ideas that get shot down as soon as I unveil them. One time, I tried to circumvent my total inability to hold onto my house keys by trying to teach my dog to unlatch the door. My whole family scoffed, bringing up the point that it might just be easier to keep up with my keys. Well, I sure taught them something when, weeks later, the dog hadn’t learned a thing and I was still climbing through the window. When my mom brought the incident up just this week, a big part of me still thought it was a great idea.

Another time, I was doing a team building exercise with four others. The goal was to create the tallest tower out of a limited amount of supplies (plastic cups, duct tape, live animals, etc.). I had some harebrained idea to use our wire – about as sturdy as yarn – to support the paper tubes. Time was running out. Against my team’s recommendation, I pushed my agenda and implemented it such that, just as time ran out, half the edifice flopped over.

The teammate that had opposed my ill-fated wire tactic let us all know how she felt.

“If we hadn’t done that, we would have been fine,” she said a little brusquely.

The thing about hearing your ideas are dumb is … it hurts. You invest time and brain cells into developing these schemes. Somewhere along the line, you invest a lot of your ego into them, too.

Sometimes, it makes sense to fight for a certain proposal. Most of the time, however, the world won’t stop turning if your idea gets rejected. It doesn’t mean people hate you. It doesn’t mean people think you’re dumb. (Usually. I guess it depends on the percentage of bad ideas you have and how extravagantly stupid they are.)

The best thing to do when your greatest idea ever of the week gets shut down cold is to take a step back and reevaluate. Your critics could have a point. Maybe the idea should be ditched, modified or executed full-steam ahead. Taking it personally will just distract you from solving the problem you were working on in the first place.

And if the criticism gets to be too much, you can always come live with me on the moon.

BETH SEKISHIRO has some exciting plans for the canned frijoles, Bagel Bites and spinach in her fridge. It may or may not involve the blender. To explain why this is a terrible idea, e-mail her at blseki@ucdavis.edu.