the launch
I went from disappointment to excitement back to disappointment this morning when I found out first that we would be spending some of the day at the new Des Moines Science Center and thus would miss the launch, then that they would be showing the launch there, then finding out, of course, that it was cancelled. I think I'm working Saturday, can't remember...
After the Columbia asploded, there were lots of people who said that spaceflight was too dangerous, that 7 lives was far too much to risk on exploration and science. Of course, the thousands of lives we destroyed in Iraq wasn't too much to risk on very little evidence of...anything. But I won't get into that now. They say that exploration is part of the human spirit. That's true, of course, if it wasn't, we'd still be in mud shacks in Africa. Maybe slightly nicer mud huts, but if we lived our lives in fear of the strange animals that had been said to take peoples' lives, if we sat and stared in fear at the impassable ocean and spent our money on other things, where would we be? Science Fiction has caused people to take for granted the idea that 40, 50 years from now, we will be vacationing on Mars and teleporting to work regardless of what we do with funding now. YES, vacationing on Mars could someday be a reality, I'm not so sure about teleportation, but maybe I'll be eating my words in a thousand years or so, but the point is that we have to start somewhere, we have to make mistakes and learn from them, and we have to accept the inherent risks of exploration. Did every explorer make it back alive? How many ships have been lost searching for new land, new people, new trade routes and been forgotten by history? Or even remembered, I just don't feel like looking for examples. These explorers, astronauts, knew the risks and accepted them. They weren't just clueless civilians, bystanders, like the kids that have been killed in Iraq...ok, sorry.
I'm not saying we should only be doing this to vacation on Mars. Let's look at population. Look at the chart. Now think about how crowded we are. Not just in Africa and third-world countries. If you live in a big city, you know how crowded we are. People are stuffed into crappy apartments, homeless people live on the streets, and we are not prepared to support a significantly larger population. You might look at the chart and say "But Rob, that's only 2.5 billion people more at the bottom of the chart, hardly a 'significant' number". That, however, is only 45 years in the future. What about 100 years? At this rate, can you imagine life continuing as we know it? What about with 4, 5, 6 billion more people? We need to start thinking long-term, and when you get down to it, mass anything-cide or colonization of the moon or Mars is our only option, and all of that starts with the space program. Private or public, some kind of group that will get the job done. The SpaceShipOne demonstrated the feasibility of private groups. I suggest tax hikes for the wealthy and some kind of tax break for private companies trying to go into space.
What do you think?
Recent Comments