My Artemis Confession

I need to tell you something, and I am not sure how to begin, but let’s try to start with the event that broke me.

On the most significant crewed space mission in over half a century — the first time human beings have been sent to the Moon since 1972 — the Artemis II astronauts could not access two of their Microsoft Outlook accounts. They called Houston. Not about a thruster anomaly. Not about a radiation spike. Not about a trajectory deviation that might send them hurtling into the void. They called because their email was not working. On a spacecraft traveling at seventeen thousand miles per hour, two hundred and forty thousand miles from the nearest IT help desk, the show-stopping crisis of the day was a problem that every office worker in America has experienced.

I was watching this unfold from my own desk, as it happened, where my own machine had frozen for the third time that afternoon. I stared at the spinning wheel of digital purgatory, that defining symbol of modern productivity. I rebooted, as one does. But something about the symmetry of the moment lodged itself in my mind and would not leave.

Here we are, a species that claims to have sent men to the Moon in 1969 with less computing power than the phone in my pocket. Yet in 2026, with all our advancements, with all our billions of dollars of engineering, the astronauts are stopped cold by an email client. The most sophisticated vehicle ever built by human hands, carrying the hopes of a generation, and it is undone by the same software that crashes when Jerry in accounting sends a meeting invite with a large attachment. I sat with that thought for a long time. And the thought metastasized.

What if the reason this looks absurd is that it is absurd — not because of the Outlook failure, but because of everything surrounding it?

I need to be clear with you, reader. What followed was a period of approximately seventy-two hours during which everything I have written on this blog, everything I have argued, everything I have believed about the rational order of the universe, came apart like a poorly formatted email attachment that Outlook could not render.

It started, as these things do, with a question I could not answer to my own satisfaction: if we could put men on the Moon with 1969 technology, how is it possible that 2026 technology cannot keep simple email running in orbit? The small voice that every rational person learns to suppress — the voice that whispers unless they didn’t — suddenly had a microphone.

I have always firmly believed in Occam’s razor, that the simplest explanation is likely the correct one. So I went back and watched the Apollo 11 footage. I had seen it before, of course, many times, always with the reverent eye of a man who believed he was watching history. But now I watched it differently. The flag that seems to ripple. The shadows that do not quite converge. The oddly composed camera angles from a lunar surface where no camera operator was standing. I am not telling you these observations are original — they are not. I am telling you that I had encountered them dozens of times before and dismissed them instantly. What changed was not the evidence. What changed was that for the first time, they seemed reasonable. And that is what frightened me.

Because once you pull that thread, the entire tapestry unravels with alarming speed.

I once wrote on this blog that astrology was a philosophical anathema — that the reduction of human purpose to planetary arrangements was not merely wrong but intellectually offensive, a relic of pre-rational thinking that deserved to be discarded alongside alchemy and phrenology. I argued that astronomy, the real science of the heavens, had rendered astrology a quaint embarrassment. I was very pleased with that argument. I thought it was airtight. But sitting in the dark at two in the morning, three browser tabs deep into territory I would have previously dismissed without a second thought, I began to wonder: what if the ancient astrologers, who at least had the honesty to look at the sky with naked eyes and describe what they actually saw, were closer to the truth than the astronomers who built elaborate mathematical models to describe what they inferred? What if inference, taken far enough from observation, becomes its own kind of mythology?

Then just this past weekend, I wrote a detailed reply to a comment on my article about nihilism and freedom — defending my position by grounding it in Plato, Aristotle, Confucius. And in doing so, a thought I had not anticipated arrived: were not those great thinkers merely being entirely honest about the world they experienced? Unencumbered by layers of modern technology, did not the ancient philosophers – and astrologers – have clarity to perceive inherent truths that our dulled senses cannot?

And looking further back, I recalled writing about Comet A3 and its extraordinary orbit — the idea that an object could travel for eighty thousand years on a path determined by gravitational calculations we trust implicitly. Eighty thousand years. We cannot keep Outlook running for eighty hours in low Earth orbit, but we are confident in orbital mechanics spanning eighty millennia. I once found this awe-inspiring. Now the word that came to mind was presumptuous.

And then there was the matter of paradigms. I have written admiringly of Thomas Kuhn, of his insight that scientific revolutions are not merely discoveries but wholesale replacements of one worldview with another — that what counts as “evidence” is always determined by the paradigm in which it is evaluated. I cited Kuhn as a corrective to scientific arrogance. I did not, at the time, appreciate the full implication of his argument. Because if Kuhn is right — and I believe he is — then it is entirely possible that the paradigm I have been operating within, the one that says the Earth is a sphere orbiting a star in an unremarkable galaxy, is itself just that: a paradigm. Not a fact. A framework. And frameworks, as Kuhn showed us, do not fall because they are disproven. They fall because enough anomalies accumulate that the framework can no longer contain them.

Microsoft Outlook failing on a Moon mission felt, in that moment, like an anomaly.

I began to look at the Earth differently. Not as a globe — that was the old paradigm — but as a surface. As something experienced rather than modeled. I looked out my window toward the horizon, and it was flat. It has always been flat. Every horizon I have ever seen with my own eyes has been flat. The curvature I “know” exists is something I was told about, shown diagrams of, given equations for. But I have never seen it. And the astrologers — the old ones, the honest ones — they never saw it either. They described a firmament, a dome, a fixed structure above a fixed plane. What if they were not primitive? What if they were simply describing what was there?

The stars, I reasoned, could be anything. Points of light on a projection. Holes in a canopy. Lanterns hung by a hand I could not see. Any of these explanations required exactly as much faith as the one I had been given. The comfortable narrative — that they are thermonuclear furnaces billions of miles away, that their light has traveled for millennia to reach us — is a narrative I accepted on authority. I have never independently verified the distance to a single star. Neither, I suspect, have you. We trust the instruments. We trust the math. We trust the institutions. And the institutions cannot keep Outlook running on a spacecraft.

For three days, I lived in this new world. I will not pretend it was comfortable. It was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure, the way I imagine it must feel to be genuinely unmoored. The government shutdown, still grinding on, began to look less like political dysfunction and more like a convenient distraction — a nation arguing about budgets while a fake Moon mission played on every screen, a bread-and-circuses production so elaborate that even the email failure was scripted to make it look authentic. After all, what better way to sell the illusion of reality than to include a mundane, relatable malfunction? Nobody would stage an Outlook crash. Which is exactly why you would stage an Outlook crash, if you were very clever.

I want you to understand that I am not recounting this for entertainment. I am recounting it because, if I have spent years writing about rationality, about the pursuit of truth, about the Science of Divinity as the highest calling of the human mind, then I must be willing to tell you when that pursuit has led me somewhere I did not expect.

And it did lead me somewhere I did not expect.

On the fourth morning, I sat down at my desk. My computer, as if participating in the metaphor, had frozen again overnight. I rebooted it. I waited. The screen flickered, the desktop loaded, and Outlook — that most pedestrian and infuriating of programs — opened without complaint. And there, in the automatic feed I had set up days earlier, was the latest image downlinked from the Artemis II spacecraft: the Earth, seen from beyond the Moon, whole and round and impossibly blue against the blackness, the same blackness that had seemed so menacing when I had reimagined it as a ceiling rather than an expanse.

I stared at that image for a long time. And I thought about Kuhn, about paradigms, about anomalies. And I realized that the anomaly was never a malfunctioning email client on a spacecraft. The anomaly was a malfunctioning mind at a desk — my own — that had, for seventy-two hours, committed the one sin I have always warned against on these pages: I had let a small frustration become a first principle, and I had reasoned outward from absurdity with the same rigor I usually reserve for reasoning outward from truth. The architecture was sound. The foundation was insane. And no amount of elegant reasoning can redeem a foundation that is insane — a fact which, it turns out, is the entire point of this elaborate exercise in misdirection, and which I trust you recognized well before I have chosen to admit it.