The Search Continues…

for the best waste of money. Now the French National Center of Space Studies is sending up a sattelite that will be able to find Earth sized planets. Having grown up on ’60s sci-fi, I’m extremely disappointed that we’re just now getting to this point. I should be able to drive my floating car to the moon already.

Water on Mars!!!

Some think it might be dust or sand or even strange gullies, but we all know the truth. hmph!

The Best Waste of Money

I’ve always been a space junky, so I almost pooped my pantalonies when I saw that NASA was planning on building a permanant base camp on the moon. The sci-fi kid in me is thrilled. This seems to be the start of a permenant colony on another terra. If a self sustaining community can be established, it will increase the chances of mankinds survival in the case of some calamity devestating the Earth.

However, the emerging adult in me wonders why we should burn more money in a space program that does little to improve the quality of life on Earth. In fact, by contributing fuel and pollution it seems to diminish the quality of life. We could be using that federal money on better things: health care, redistribution of wealth, buying better armor for our troops, and hell, maybe even reducing the tax burden.

Besides what good does it do to start a mini-Earth when we can’t solve big Earth’s problems? The new community better be self sustaining and non-polluting. I don’t want to look through my telescope at a planetary garbage dump (though that’s an interesting function for the moon). Granted, any kind of developement, especially terra-forming will change the make up of the moon. Imagine seeing a moon with blue skies and oceans. Our stories will change. Our mythologies will evolve. We’ll tell our grandkids, “I remember when the moon was just a chunck of white rock.” They’ll say, “how boring.” We’ll say, “No. How beautiful.”