I hate to rain on your parade, but the 'we', if it is a collective one, makes me pale. Just think of the tremendous system and lifecycle costs to our precious, limited Earth to ship people to another one. We are already doing an excellent job of impoverishing 95% of the world so that the 5% can have unlimited access to entertainment, creature comforts, and resource-sucking transporation. Even putting 1% of the people on this world into space, 6 million people, would bankrupt us. As much as space and people in it are cool, it is something we must practice in moderation. Until we find that magic bullet of antigravity, limitless nonpolluting energy sources, inexpensive matter transmission, or the like. Manned space flight to other planets at this point is a visionary political move designed to aggrandize those who do so. The Kyoto protocol, public transportation, access to basic health care, and hiking corporate average fuel economy are for sharing this world responsibly with all those souls who feel pain and suffering, on average, so much more than you and I do.
Space tourism, immigration, is fine when we have enough, and some to share. And I don't just mean our nation, I mean the world. In the mean time it makes swell science fiction -- the best of which (IMO) being social lessons that make us think about what we are doing to ourselves, today (like so much light pollution that most kids never see a starry night)
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Date: 2004-08-05 05:45 pm (UTC)Space tourism, immigration, is fine when we have enough, and some to share. And I don't just mean our nation, I mean the world. In the mean time it makes swell science fiction -- the best of which (IMO) being social lessons that make us think about what we are doing to ourselves, today (like so much light pollution that most kids never see a starry night)