Brings new meaning to "Let's Roll!"
Posted on 01/19/2004 5:02:25 PM PST by blam
There's a lot of Oxygen on Mars...just mostly bonded to iron or carbon.
In that belief system we can tell the season, but not the exact time. In that belief system we are taught that a day is as a thousand years to the Lord. So...there is not definitive telling exactly when the time is and therefore a continued effort that will benefit mankind is fine, at least with me.
Anyhow...my name's not Joe, hehehe.
Count me in. That pissant planet has nothing for us. All this nonsense about "Did it ever have water?" only adds up to the fact that barren red road stop lost any water it had billions of years ago.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent lift here and we can't even find primordial algae!" Trying to live on Mars would be worse than a weekend in Buffalo. Almost as bad as two weekends in Buffalo.:)
Space, the final frontier which even illegal Mexicans haven't managed to cross, although that probably won't be far behind with American tax payers dinero. Bush was really desperate to do the Mars thing as a distraction over his illegal Mexican faux pas (Fox paws).
The best use of ill-gotten tax dollars next to the USMC we have ever gotten is out of the space program. This leaves a little something for the future, instead a month's worth of fast food, 40 oz. malt liquor and crack for millions of lazy slobs.
Thank God for engineers!
Here's an engineer joke that I liked:
One senior engineering student says to another, "I really like your new bike! Where did you get it?"
"It's kind of a weird story," replied the other, "I was walking past the quad, minding my own business, and this blond girl rode up on the bike, stripped off her clothes, and told me to take whatever I wanted."
"Good choice, the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."
8*)
When?!
Brings new meaning to "Let's Roll!"
After watching mankind's first step on the moon I, ten years old then, shuffled off to bed bursting with enthusiasm for my country - and with an equal helping of enthusiasm for my own future.
I woke up particularly early later that morning - I was so excited to read the newspaper accounts and watch the ongoing story on television. Only, to my dismay, the reporter on the first channel I tuned in could focus only on asking the question "Why go to the moon when there are starving people in our own country who should be taken care of?" (lost to me was the irony that at the time I was the son of a poor sharecropper living in an ancient home whose floor was supported by a car jack.)
And I as tuned from one channel to the next - or even as I read the newspaper - I saw that one question repeated over and over. The focus was NOT on our great achievement, but on "social equity".
From that instant I could see that our society had reached a zenith - not unlike a satellite that, after having failed to reach escape velocity - begins a slow, inevitable descent to a fiery death in the atmosphere below. I saw a future in which my nation was not going to "Boldy go where no man has gone before", but rather was going to slowly and agonizingly devolve into the squalid hellhole that we see emerging today.
Today, thirty-some-odd years later, I find myself a bit pleased to see the surface of a planet - AN ALIEN PLANET - which nature and pragmatism would deny us. Additionally, I no longer find myself so concerned that the USA (which has proven not to measure up so well to the idealism of a 10-year-old boy) will not plumb the depths of space, because I realize now that even as our star is fading another is rising in the East - rising over another nation full of young boys and girls with dreams that may not be so easily extinguished.
Yes, by all means, let's save our money!
No you're not. You I've been steadily chopped at on another thread for uttering the blasphemy (at least blasphemy according to the science fiction fans) that there isn't anything there that is worth the cost of getting there.
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