It pains me to say this, but I’m pleased with George Bush. Shoot me. Now.
No, I’m not talking about his asinine political decisions, or whatever the hell is going on with him and Condoleezza Rice. Bush has taken one of the few governmental aspects I’ve railed about in the last three years, and in a freakish parallel to 1969, we’re seriously looking at going to the moon. Again. Last time we did this, Vietnam was going on. Hmm. I’ll avoid that parallel for another day.
February first will mark the second anniversary of the Columbia disaster, and I think it would be a perfect time to announce yet again that we choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.
Well, I’m not really pleased with him. I hate the ass, I hate that he was re-elected, and I hate that the majority of my stupid, stupid, stupid nation voted for him. Even my Republican mother. Hate her just a bit because of him. Not a lot. I love you, Mom! The point though is that no matter how much I hate Bush, I’m pleased he’s gotten the funding to get NASA starting back to the moon.
Why is the moon such a big deal? If we can establish a base on the moon, we can consider sending people to Mars. A computer can only pick up what we tell it to pick up, and even if we remote control a probe, there’s a lot of lag between talking to a computer on Mars and the one here on Earth. Oh, by the way, that Snickers commercial with the Mars Rover cracks my shit up.
Moon! Moon! Moon!
Had to get myself back on topic, sorry about that.
I’m a reformed Star Trek geek. But the concept of traveling through space, seeing what else is out there, and exploring, is at the very foundation of humanity’s core. We make wrong turns, but so did Columbus. We should celebrate Explorer’s Day instead of Columbus Day, and salute Magellan, Francis Drake, and all the other heroes who traveled the world to see what else was there.
Man can not survive in a vacuum, and we need to explore. We need to explore the seas, see what lives in the deep below. We need to explore the earth, understand why some places are more tectonic than others. We need to explore space, to see what cause us to exist.
That’s the fundamental point of space exploration to me.
Where did we come from? I believe in G-d, and I believe that G-d began life, the universe and everything. I also firmly believe that G-d created the moons, the stars, the great planets that make up the heavens. I refuse to believe that G-d only created on planet with life. Even if you’re a true scientist and believe the creation of life was little more than an evolutionary accident begun with a bang, then you have to look at the laws of probabilities. We can not be the only sentient creatures in the universe. It’s too big. It’s too wide.
We owe it, not to ourselves, but to the truth which humans have sought for with bone and blood for centuries. We owe it to the future to determine what made our past. Science has no conscience and therefore we must act using only our own. Pursue knowledge and understanding, and take it to make the world better.
We chose to go to the moon. We should return. We should continue. Not as Americans, but as a world.
I leave you with this – John F. Kennedy “We choose to go to the Moon” 1962:
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.