As I began my walk this morning, just after six a.m., I
looked up and saw a beautiful full moon hanging low in the early morning sky. A great sadness swept over me as I reflected
that it was now forty-five years, half a lifetime and more, since the last
human had walked on the surface of the moon.
Those below middle age have never known the thrill of following reports
that one of our species was walking on the moon.
Since then, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in fruitless,
destructive wars, the inequality of our society has grown ever more grotesque,
and yet it has not proved possible to mount one more manned space flight to our
nearest solar system neighbors. Had we
devoted a tenth of the resources we have wasted killing, we could by now have
sent men and women to Mars, and brought them back.
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5 comments:
I was born in 1972. I had a hand-me-down Apollo 11 lunchbox. I remember being really excited about Skylab and learning all about it, only to find out it had been brought down two years before. Then a couple of years later there was the Challenger disaster, which included the teacher in space. So I've never seen what the big deal is with people in space. You can't live there, it's insanely expensive, and so much effort goes into just keeping the astronauts alive. It's just a big stunt, like holding your breath underwater or tight-rope walking. I'm much happier sending robots into space. The pictures are just as good and nobody gets hurt.
Let's reallocate our entire military budget toward an effort to ship the T***p White House to Mars. That'll solve two problems.
But his descendants will return to conquer the whole planet. And Mars is the God of war.
With no wealth to inherit and no Martians to con, I doubt they'd get much traction building anything approaching a working society. With any luck, they might be able to harvest shit potatoes a la that Matt Damon movie. Hmm... shit potatoes. Not a bad nickname for the T***p bunch.
Yes, he'd better serve humanity as a pioneer in space and wouldn't last long. I think of him as a traitorous demagogue let in the walls of a besieged city, like Thebes
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