You gotta love dung beetles.

All day, every day, they’ve got their faces in the worst stuff we can imagine. To them, it’s no big deal, but to us, spending life as a dung beetle is literally what it would mean to lose the reincarnation lottery.

The good news is a dung beetle’s life is less than three years long.
The bad news is … for the entire time, you have to be a dung beetle.
But the latest bit of redemptive good news is … dung is not your entire world – there’s more. In fact, there’s the entire Milky Way.

Researchers have discovered that dung beetles use the stars to navigate their dung ball placement. But it’s not just a couple of little stars, it’s the center of the Milky way – a strip of light crossing the night sky that apparently gives them the reference point they need to know their dung ball is traveling in a straight line.

And by “dung ball”, I mean “your day’s work”, whatever that is. And pushing it in a straight line is quite an achievement. I’ve been putting my shoulder to various dung balls around for almost 40 years, and I can say with certainty that they haven’t traveled in anything like a straight line. I’m certain I’ve done some curlicues and loop-de-loops, and for quite a long time sat still in the very same place. But dung beetles reckon by the stars, and their efforts are rewarded with measurable progress. If a beetle veers off course, it climbs up on top of its dung ball and does a little “dance”, by which it gets its bearings and resumes its task.

I assume dung beetles will remain here after we’re gone because everything poops, and a key factor in survival is to have steady work. But in 4 billion years, when The Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy, the beetle’s sky-marker will be re-arranged. Will that signal the Dung Ball Apocalypse?

When you feel you are headed off-course, how do you find the right direction?

The verdict is in on the question “what happens when you lock six men in a pretend space capsule with a bunch of cameras and sensors and tell them to make believe they’re flying to Mars.”

It appears they become lazy, and cranky, and they can’t sleep.

In other words, it’s the very same result you get if you choose to stay on Earth and simply get old.

In just about any environment, getting people to exercise is a challenge. The intangible piece in this case is the willing suspension of disbelief. They chose scientists to take this mock journey, but scientists are practical and ultimately they know the truth. Why exercise for two hours a day? After all, it’s not like we’ll really have to be on Mars, or that we couldn’t get out of this box if necessary!

A better crew would have been made up of unemployed actors who could really get into their roles.

Believe it or not, we already dealt with this topic – in what was only the second Trail Baboon post on June 4th, 2010.

In that post, I suggested the “Six Men in a Tub”, who were being paid $100,000 each to embark on a scientific version of a 17 month reality show taping, needed a proper theme song. One was offered, modeled after the anthem for the TV show “The Brady Bunch.” But it turns out those tailor-made lyrics were still wrong.

The study results suggest this is a more accurate version:

Here’s the story of six sleepless fellas
Who got lazy while pretending they could fly.
They skipped workouts and moved less than they were told to.
They didn’t even try.

It’s not easy to snooze in a trailer.
Though they’re paying you to stay there like a lump.
It’s depressing when you know you’re stationary.
You feel like such a chump.

When it started there were cameras and reporters.
Asking how long would the daring mission take?
And the guys were acting so dedicated,
But inside they understood it all was fake.

The whole thing’s fake. The whole thing’s fake.
This is all the lousy acting I can take!
The whole thing’s fake. Not much at stake.
I’m embarrassed which is why I’m wide awake.

Name a role you could inhabit, non-stop, for 17 months.

Bored with the available options for stealing things made here on planet Earth, thieves have taken to taking things that come from outer space.

One man has been arrested and another may be behind bars soon for the Christmas Eve pilfering of 100 meteorites from the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute near Asheville, North Carolina.

Apparently, buying and selling space rocks is a big deal online.

As with major works of art by dead painters, things that are rare and unusual can command a high price. Anything that can bring in bucks is a target for the criminal element, but one has to wonder if meteorite futures are as bright as the prospects for, say, works by Picasso or Munch.

After all, if the value of a thing is defined by its scarcity, one must take into account that the Universe is full of rocks. Most of them did not come from Earth, so while meteorites might be valuable today, how impressive will they be in 50 years when your descendants can take a day trip to the moon and come home with a bag of space chunks?

Yes, any serious connoisseur of extra-planetary debris should begin building his or her collection with an eye for the long term – the very, very, very long term. Rocks that somehow landed on earth by accident are fascinating, but it would be wise to be a little more discerning.

Some sky watchers predict it won’t be long before we discover another planet showing exactly the right conditions to be a mirror image of Earth. Wouldn’t space rocks from such a place be far more valuable than a collection of mere pebbles from Mars? And what if a civilization was discovered on this planet? Wouldn’t their tools, appliances and ephemera be extremely collectible? What are a few metorites compared to getting your hands on a Pandoran fork?

And of course once the cosmic trade routes are set up, the reverse will be true as well. Your excess stuff, which you see now as worthless, will be viewed as pricey exotica on distant worlds. This, it seems to me, is the only rational argument for hanging on to all that trash in the basement – to package it up and ship it off to another civilization shortly after contact is made.

That’s why I’m collecting wine corks. Light and easy to ship, they’ll be valuable treasures on Earth II, where the amazed resident creatures will gladly part with their fortunes to own and display a souvenir of our strange world.

With what commodity are you ready to corner the inter-galactic trinket trade?