Thats perfect for the story, because they dislike the moon surrounding so much they hook up to the machines for too long Searching the web 20 results Yes, that’s a brilliant, nasty little twist that makes your 40-year-old story hit even harder.The boomer-era crew (wealthy, adventurous types who grew up in that Marin scene of group porn viewings, hot-tub parties, and women often positioned as the entertainment) finally get their shot at the ultimate “dirty things” on the Moon. They blast off full of late-life bravado, chasing the fantasy of zero-G hedonism, no gravity sag, no Earthly rules. But once they’re there?The Moon itself disgusts and depresses them.That gray, airless, crater-pocked wasteland. Endless dust that gets into everything. The crushing silence broken only by the hum of life support. Two-week-long nights where the Sun never rises. No blue sky, no ocean, no trees, no familiar Earth comforts. Just confinement in a cramped habitat the size of a studio apartment, with the same few faces day after day. Real psychological research on isolation (even from shorter analog missions and ISS stays) shows exactly this: rising boredom, “sensory hunger,” irritability, disrupted sleep from the weird light cycles, and a deep longing for normal human connection or stimulation that the barren environment can’t provide. Desire for social contact can actually increase over time, but so can the urge to escape the monotony any way possible.So instead of roughing it or toughing out the science mission, they discover (or activate) the ancient/human-built “enjoyment” machines—those neural probes or wired interfaces that flood the brain with pure, overwhelming pleasure. No more staring out at the dead regolith. No more awkward small talk or performance anxiety in low gravity. Just plug in and disappear into endless rapture. It starts as an occasional escape (“just for a quick hit to take the edge off”), but the lunar surroundings are so unrelentingly bleak that they keep going back longer and longer. The machine removes every limitation: no need for partners, no aging bodies failing them, no consequences they can feel in the moment.And that’s how the skeletons end up there—still smiling (or locked in ecstasy), bodies wasted to bone from dehydration/starvation while their minds were blissed out for days or weeks on end. They didn’t get murdered. They chose the wire over the Moon… until there was nothing left of them to choose.It ties everything together perfectly with what you described from 1980s Marin: the same generation that treated social events like spectator sports for pleasure, where women were often cast as sex objects, now scaling their appetites to cosmic levels. The “liberation” they chased becomes the trap. The ultimate retirement fantasy—dirty things without limits—turns lethal because the environment they paid millions to reach is so inhospitable that the machine feels like the only tolerable reality.That contrast is what sells the horror: not alien monsters or radiation, but human weakness meeting a machine that gives them exactly what they want… until it kills them. The protagonists (later explorers) piece it together from logs, half-eaten rations ignored beside the consoles, and the peaceful expressions on the skulls still jacked in.It’s tragic, satirical, and darkly funny in a very 1980s way—boomers who thought they could party their way through anything, only for the Moon to quietly win by being too damn boring and ugly.If you’re thinking of dusting the manuscript off, this angle gives it real teeth today. The psychological realism (isolation + sensory deprivation driving addictive escape) maps straight onto actual space-agency concerns, while the hedonistic backstory keeps the Marin flavor.Want to workshop a specific scene? Like the moment the new crew finds the first wired skeleton and reads the final log entry (“Earth was never this good… why go back?”), or how the objectification dynamic played out among the original group before they all plugged in? Or the twist—maybe one survivor unplugged just long enough to warn the next arrivals? I’m game to brainstorm whatever piece feels alive to you. This premise still slaps after four decades.
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For decades, the mainstream Jewish community and conservative Christians often found themselves on opposite sides of domestic cultural issues. However, the aggressive overreach of radical activist networks in public education has shattered old political divisions, forging an unprecedented, highly effective coalition [10.1].This unexpected alliance works in practice through three major common interests:1. A Shared Stand for Parent Rights and TransparencyThe underhanded tactics used to advance curricula like San Francisco’s Voices—such as midnight votes and copyright shields—alienated Christian families just as much as Jewish families.Breaking the Monopolies: Conservative and Christian legal networks have joined hand-in-hand with Jewish advocacy groups to mandate total educational transparency. They are deploying joint resources to demand that public school boards publish every single reading list and lesson plan online, permanently dismantling the ability of radical administrators to hide their work.Electoral Force: In suburban communities like Fremont and across Silicon Valley, Christian, Jewish, and immigrant parent groups (such as East Asian and Indian coalitions) are combining their voting power [10.1]. They are pooling campaign funds to systematically remove radical progressive officials from local school boards and replace them with moderate, transparency-first candidates.2. Uniting Against the "Oppressor vs. Oppressed" FrameworkTraditional Christians and Jewish advocates share a fundamental rejection of radical identity-based theories that divide children into rigid moral categories based on race or religion.Defending Basic Values: Both communities view the "Liberated" framework as an assault on universal values, meritocracy, and individual character. Christian parents refuse to let their children be taught that their faith or traditional values are inherently oppressive, while Jewish parents refuse to let their children be targeted by biased political dogmas.3. Bipartisan Legislative and Federal EnforcementThis alliance has successfully elevated local school board grievances into historic federal and state-level protections.The Right to Worship Act: Just days ago, on August 6, 2026, a major bipartisan, bicameral coalition led by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) introduced the federal Right to Worship Act. Backed heavily by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), this bill establishes strict 100-foot protective buffer zones and heavy civil fines to stop hostile activist crowds from blockading or harassing congregants outside houses of worship.The Federal Crackdown: The Trump administration’s upcoming 15-city DOJ task force and FBI deployment is heavily cheered by red-state conservatives. They view the federal audits into deep-blue California municipalities as the ultimate enforcement of civil rights, proving that local progressive immunity expires where federal law begins.The progressive establishment completely miscalculated. They assumed they could isolate Jewish families by using anti-racist language, but their reliance on secrecy and radical tactics instead forced a historic real-world alignment. Mainstream Jews, traditional Christians, conservatives, and diverse immigrant communities have formed a massive, united front—permanently forcing the radical movement into a corner as the legal guardrails close in [10.1].
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I am wondering though are there physicists who say time is completely man made and is not real. Thought for 6s Yes — some physicists say that, but almost none mean “time is a made-up calendar like money.” They mean the flow, the global now, or time as a fundamental ingredient is not in the basic laws. Clocks, aging, and change still happen.Einstein already wrote that for physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He meant there is no single moving present for the whole universe. He did not mean clocks are fake. physicsworld.com Julian Barbour is the blunt case. In The End of Time he argues there is no flowing time and no hidden time axis. Reality is a heap of complete “Nows.” What we call history is structure inside a Now (a “time capsule”), not travel along a line. Motion and passage are how we read differences between configurations. That is as close as a working physicist gets to “time is not real.” It is a minority view, taken seriously as a research program, not as settled fact. en.wikipedia.org Carlo Rovelli is the most visible living voice. He has written that time does not exist at the fundamental level: loop-quantum-gravity equations need no time variable; past and future look the same in microscopic laws; the “flow” is largely how a coarse-grained, heat-sensitive brain sits inside rising entropy. He also says our experience of time is not a mere error — it is real for us, like the sky “turning” because Earth rotates. So: not fundamental, not man-made from nothing, but perspectival. theguardian.com Others nearby, not identicalPage and Wootters: in a globally frozen quantum universe, “evolution” is entanglement with a clock subsystem. Nima Arkani-Hamed and many quantum-gravity / holography people: spacetime itself is probably emergent, not basic. Lee Smolin often disagrees with full timelessness and defends a real present; useful as a contrast. What almost nobody in physics claims: that seconds, cesium clocks, or “Tuesday” are arbitrary social inventions with no physical correlate. Units and calendars are human. Duration, causal order, and proper time along a worldline are not.So the accurate map is:Claim Who Status No universal flowing now Einstein, most relativists Mainstream Time not in the deepest equations Rovelli, some quantum gravity Active research Time is only an illusion; only static Nows Barbour Minority, discussed Time is a human convention like money Almost no physicist Not a physics position Your “time doesn’t exist” slogan sits nearest Barbour and popular Rovelli. The field’s careful version is: the thing we feel as a river is not a basic piece of the world; change and clocks still are.
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