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Space, the final frontier. And bloody freaking no one cares. The only reason people cared about going to the moon was that 'We have to beat the stupid Russians'. Then when we did beat them 'Hey, there is no little green men or moon cheese up here. Let's never come back.' So we have piddled around in the very fringe of our atmosphere for the last 35 years. 35 years and we have done nothing other than sit on our hands. If you asked someone in July of 1969 where would the human race be in terms of space in 35 years, they would have probably said we be out to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn by now. But no, public interest was lost after the first couple moon landings and it is the public who pay taxes and it is taxes that fund the space programs. And so, in a fit of selfishness, the American people killed the space program. I say this because NASA is more of a show now than anything that will propel the human race into space. People just don't care enough. Even with conservitive estimates, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in 1985. And here in 2003, we have yet to even consider that possibility. The ISS is a good idea, but in my opinion its too little too late. ISS stands for International Space Station if you didn't know. I am all for setting up colonies off planet. And I think the moon should be the first step. The moon doesn't have many volatiles but you can bake oxygen out of the rock. Volatiles, if you didn't know, are the lightest elements, hydrogen, helium, all the way down to flourine. Stuff that can be used for simple rocket fuel and life support. Consumables, in other words. But the moon does have a ample supply of rocket fuel. Aluminum and oxygen is rocket fuel. Both are in large supply on the moon. From there we can take Mars. But once we start going interplanetary we get into long term voyages. With chemical rockets, it will take 6 months to get to Mars. 6 months in my opinion isn't bad, but others think differently. 'Muscle deterioration and bone loss is too much after 6 months.' That is assuming they are coming back. What if they were to stay there and set up a self sufficient colony. They could even start terra forming Mars. But after we finish colonizing the solar system...then what? Our nearest neighbor is 4.1 lightyears away. Proxima Centari, a binary pair of stars. To expand beyond our solar system, we need one of two things. The morals that let us send arks out with artificial womb technology and genetic material, or faster than light travel. There are only two 'legal' ways to do this. That is to say that there are only two ways that don't break rules of physics. The first way is wormholes. Wormholes do exist, we can prove that. But almost all of them are the size of a quark. The trick would be either finding a way to enlarge these to permit a ship to pass through, or to create artificial ones. The thing about wormholes is that if you find one, thats all you need because they connect to every other one at some point in their length. They other way to have faster than light travel is based on a theory that sayd that the universe has more that the 4 dimensions that we see. Those 4 being length, width, height, and time. The theory states that there are up to 11 dimensions, but the remaining 7 were compressed in the Big Bang into the 3 that contain space. If this were true, then we could somehow tap into those and travel great distances through them instead of through normal space. I compare this to the Hyperspace of Star Wars. But all this can only be done if the people care, and that is where I think this rant will fall short because I have no faith in homo sapiens. |
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