The Delirious Saga of Our Flapping Escape from Gravity's Shackles

Listen up, you moist little earth limpets – I'm about to regale you with the utterly preposterous tale of how our species managed to sprout wings and take to the skies like a bunch of feathered lunatics.

It all started, because of course it did, with a pair of eccentric bicycle peddlers from Ohio who couldn't seem to take "You're daft, you'll break your necks" for an answer. I'm talking about those two famous flap-jockeys, the infamous Wright brothers.

Now, our stubborn fascination with playing Greek mythological figures had been going on for ages already. Since the dawn of time, really. We'd been leaping off cliffs and tree branches with homemade wings and praying to whatever trickster gods would listen, only to come crashing back down like sacks of sad potatoes. Broken bones, hilarious wipeouts – the whole undignified shebang.

But Wilbur and Orville were a tenacious pair of plonkers. They simply refused to take "It'll never work, you daft pillock!" for an answer. Through years of tinkering, crashing, and brushing the sand out of their underbritches, they finally managed to coax their rickety little wood-and-muslin contraption called the Wright Flyer into the air for a whopping 12 seconds of sputtering, undignified semi-flight.

To the untrained eye, it seemed like a spectacular dud. Just a couple of dingbats flapping around like a newborn bird having a spasm. But that modest putter across the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk marked the first time we moist little earth turds managed to achieve powered, controlled flight. We were off and running...well, flapping, really.

From those humble origins, our quest to escape gravity's shackles swiftly became a species-wide mania. Within decades, these new "aero-planes" went from being a sideshow curiosity to slingshotting people across oceans in a matter of hours. Suddenly, that vast, lonesome world seemed to shrink as air travel brought every corner of the globe within reach of our grubby little flap-fingers.

Of course, every new technology also seems to find its way into the calloused mitts of the military-industrial war machine. Those once-peaceful passenger planes were promptly outfitted with bombs and bullets, turning the skies into a terrifying new theater of combat. The sheer nihilistic audacity of it all – thousands of young men duking it out in rickety flying death-traps miles above the earth!

But did that stop our relentless pursuit of loftier heights? Of course not. The march of progress, as it's wont to do, continued undaunted. We didn't stop at simply mastering flight – that wouldn't satisfy our insatiable egos. Pretty soon we were shattering the sound barrier, flying higher and faster than any sane creature has a right to. And then, in one of the most absurdly hubristic undertakings in the whole sordid history of human ambition, we looked up at the heavens and declared, "You know what? That's not high enough for us."

Next thing you know, we're strapping fleshy hairless apes to massive phallic rockets and shooting them into the cold, uncaring void of space itself. All in pursuit of...what, exactly? Slaking our demented curiosity? Sticking a sweaty finger in the cosmos's wrinkled eye? Shaking our puny fists at the heavens and shouting "We are but tiny, insignificant specks...but what specks we are!"

So that's the story, more or less, of our species's relentless flapping escape from gravity's shackles. From Kitty Hawk to the moon and beyond, it's been one delirious, undignified leap after another into the unknown. Daft as a stoat in a birdhouse, yet our refusal to be earthbound has produced some of our greatest achievements.

Although I can't help but wonder, as I wedge my doughy self into yet another tiny sardine-tin airplane seat beside a colicky infant and a consumptive lout, if the Wright brothers didn't open a veritable Pandora's carry-on bag of woes by getting that first wobbly flight off the ground. But I suppose it's too late to be second-guessing that now – we're all airmiles-chasers at this point. We might as well lean back, avoid eye contact with our neighbors, and try to appreciate the miracle of flight...or at least the tiny bottles of nose-melting whiskey they pass out.