[Mr. K]

I hope President Palin says “Before my 8 years are up, we will send a team to mars to establish a colony”

[ssaftler]

“Before my 8 years are up, we will send a team to mars to establish a colony”

I'd suggest O-Blamer, Bite-Me, Undertaker Reid and Nancy Pug-ugly as the first Astro-nuts to do the colonization!

[cableguymn]

I hope President Palin says “Before my 8 years are up, we will send a team to mars to establish a colony”

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how many libs can we send at a time???

[OneWingedShark]

I hope President Palin says “Before my 8 years are up, we will send a team to mars to establish a colony”

While there are a lot of un/underemployed STEM-majors in the US, I'm not sure we have the technical expertise/competence in our ranks that we had during the moon-race.

Let me give an example:
Today, in my field, there are people graduating with CS degrees that simply do not instantly grasp the utility of restricting valid values from a type (i.e. subtyping*). This is used so often in mathematics that I cannot understand how someone could even lightly dismiss it. (Math ex: For all X, where X is a positive integer… is the restriction of Integer to the positive values.) This facility is rather uncommon in the type-systems of many programming languages.

Moreover, there are industry pressures for the "cookie cutter candidate" for employment, as most employment postings now have a requirement of X years of experience on their systems/environments for entry level employment… which pressures the management to implement in "lowest common denominator"-languages (which are usually fairly unwieldy for solving the problems of their project); which, in turn, pressures academia to churn out graduates trained in the lowest common denominator... to the detriment of needed skills.

And this is a technical industry we're talking about —Yes, there are exceptions— but the question is whether we are still capable of the expertise/competence that would be needed for a Mars-mission, which must be more complex/difficult than a mere moon-mission. (Logistics, different entry/landing-variables [Mars /= Earth], psychological/physiological health of the crew, etc.)

* Subtyping (and a strong type-system) can be used to greatly reduce complexity, thereby allowing easier proving/validation of programs.

[SVTCobra03]

I hope President Palin says “Before my 8 years are up, we will send a team to mars to establish a colony”

Then send all the liberals there.

[Windflier]

President Palin

I still like the sound of that, and would do most anything to help it come true.