"Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day"

Bill Vaughan skewers a familiar paradox: our appetite for cosmic triumphs sits alongside a stubborn inability to solve the ordinary. We marshal ingenuity to leap planetary distances, yet the five-mile commute remains a daily slog. The joke lands because it reveals a mismatch of incentives and a misunderstanding of difficulty. Getting to Mars is a technical problem, daunting but bounded, while getting people to work efficiently mixes politics, land use, economics, culture, and habit. Rockets obey physics; cities obey people.

The line also critiques what we choose to glorify. Spaceflight promises spectacle, national prestige, and a narrative of heroism. Commute reform demands the unglamorous work of zoning changes, bus lanes, bike networks, and maintenance. Funding follows story, not necessarily impact. We invest in moonshots because they feel like progress, while the slow, local fixes that would save hours and lives appear dull and contentious.

There’s a deeper psychological lure. Distant goals free us from messy trade-offs; they let us imagine purity, vacuum, stars, a frontier. The sidewalk, by contrast, confronts us with neighbors, costs, and compromises. That allure can mask the fact that everyday efficiency would yield vast social dividends: less time wasted, lower emissions, healthier bodies, stronger communities.

Vaughan isn’t dismissing exploration; he’s asking why we neglect the near while chasing the far. The irony is that the know-how required for better commutes is already at hand, frequent transit, walkable design, congestion pricing, safer streets, yet it demands coordination and sustained political courage. We’re excellent at engineering for controlled environments and worse at governing the shared ones we inhabit.

Perhaps the lesson is to broaden our definition of ambition. Landing a spacecraft is grand; so is making it effortless to travel five miles with dignity and speed. A civilization worthy of interplanetary dreams should prove it by mastering the everyday.