2002-05-16 - 10:03 a.m.
Bah, now I've got a song by U2 stuck in my head ...

Ugh. UGH! I just read an article in the newspaper that horrified me. It was entitled "Lawmakers want outpost on Mars," and was credited to Larry Wheeler of the Gannett News Service.

I was enjoying the idea until I got to one of the negative paragraphs near the end: "NASA's new administrator, Sean O'Keefe, has declined to embrace objectives such as a human mission to Mars, indicating that the technical unknowns are too great."

OMG. My jaw dropped when I read that. If NASA had been governed by someone with that attitude back in the early days, I doubt we'd have ever reached the Moon! Remember manifest destiny? A crappy idea when applied to conquering someone else's territory, but entirely appropriate in outer space. If you have technical problems, then scare up some funding and solve them! The unknown is something to be conquered, not feared!

Where the hell else are we going to go, if not to Mars? The human race will need someplace to go if things continue as they are. Too many countries have a birthrate of more than 2 children to a couple, and as long as that keeps happening, the population will continue to grow. We can't chain ourselves to this planet and expect peace and prosperity. Something, eventually, will give in a catastrophic way.

*shaking self* Enough doom and gloom already. It's beautiful outside! A little hazy, but the sky is mostly blue, and the sun is shining down. Plus, I finished my third interlude last night, meaning that I've written 5,500 words of stories in the last week. That felt good. This is going to be a wonderful day.

7♠