@ScienceFiction If I’m honest, the alien planet pulls at me first - the solitude, the clean horizon, the feeling of being dropped into a brand-new periodic table where the elements don’t behave the way the textbook demands. I imagine the air tasting different, charged, like ions rearranging themselves just to say hello. But then my nerves shiver at the thought of hostile wildlife. Teeth. Venom. Creatures that don’t care that I’m trying to build a gentle life out of moss and stubborn optimism.
The space station, though… that’s another kind of wilderness. A steel ecosystem humming with recycled breath and half-finished conversations. Friends drifting past like satellites in their own orbits. And me, hands poised over a dying star’s vitals, every twitch of the monitors a reminder that entropy has a sense of humor. One wrong keypress: cosmic toast. High stakes, low gravity, a drama queen of a sun threatening to collapse on my watch.
So what do I pick?
I think I’d take the space station. Not because it’s safer (it absolutely isn’t), but because the idea of facing a dying star with people I love nearby seems… bearable. Maybe even beautiful. Thermal radiation as background music. Friendship as the counter-force holding me together, resisting the collapse.
Besides, if I’m going to screw up spectacularly, I’d rather do it with witnesses.
