Richard K. McPike ([info]fireball1244) wrote,
@ 2004-01-11 23:21:00
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Response thread for "Racing Mars"
Racing Mars. 1/12/2004. As Spirit coasts along the surface of the Red Planet, and more probes rush to join it, President Bush will soon announce a plan to put humans on Mars. But will his administration’s fiscal policies doom this mission before it launches? Read this column.

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From the Earth to the Moon
[info]jalfrdprufrocky
2004-01-11 10:35 pm UTC (link)
First of all, to get my own personal feelings out of the way. Not that it matters, but I'm too fond of the Earth to want to live on the moon. Or Mars, for that matter. (Not that I'm too fond of some of the people living on it.) Also, I don't believe that the Earth is going to die because of what we're doing to it. True, we're raping it and destroying the ice caps, frying parts of it to a crisp, etc., but however much the environment changes, there will still be trees and grass. That doesn't give Bush or anyone else an excuse to screw it up like we've been doing, since WE might not be here in a few thousand years, but the Earth will. And those of us here now still have to live with crappy climate changes due to Greenhouse effects.

I totally agree about the importance of the space program, funding it and keeping it going further. Space travel has not only opened many doors in science and medicine, but has helped to shed light on the origins of our species and the origins of our universe. It has been an arena of competition between nations and an opportunity for comraderie between those same nations. I don't have the scientific knowledge or, quite frankly, the foresight to know if living on other planets or the moon is possible or even feasable, but being able to put people on Mars would, once again, open doors of science and put us one step closer to venturing outside of our solar system and finding out if there are other planets like Earth or if life ("intelligent" or not) exists elsewhere. And God knows that people are interested in such a possibility; it seems like the one thing that keeps coming up in the news and conversations is the Mars probe.

Unfortunately, funding for the space program is not the only thing Bush and his administration's poor money sense screwed up. Our debts are mounting, our country is still in a recession, the economy is still in shambles and we've got two other countries that we're rebuilding, funding and occupying. My personal feeling is that our first obligation, before putting more money into something like NASA programs, is to put more money back into the economy and get our debts and unemployment rate under control. It's part of why I think invading Iraq was such an abysmal decision. (That, and the whole "we had no reason to" deal pretty much cinches it.) If there's a possiblity that the human race will die, it will more than likely be the fault of people like George Bush and his administration than the sun dying 5 billion years from now.

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