Okay, so my buddy and I are sitting around getting drunk and watching For All Mankind which is about the goddamn Apollo program and Man’s first steps (and so far only) on the Moon. I’m sitting here watching this fucking thing thinking to myself that I want to go to the fucking Moon and that the odds of that being possible in my lifetime are so near as nothing to make no odds.
Fuck me, goddamn it! My earliest memories are of the Apollo 17 crew bouncing around on the Moon and the commentator and my brother both saying that this was the last time in the 20th Century that humans would walk on the Moon. Why the hell are we so fucking stupid to think that humanity doesn’t have a place in the stars?
I mean, I thought that I’d be able to buy a ticket to a Lunar colony by now! (Can you believe it? At the age of three I was thinking that the dumbest thing a human being could say was that we’d not have colonies on the moon before the end of the 20th Century!)
Instead, all we’ve got is the ISS, which the mainstream media isn’t bothering to cover in great detail. I believe that our destiny lies in the stars, but I’ll never even be able to reach the fucking Moon!
Why? Because people are so short sighted as to think that space travel is unimportant! Fuckin’ A, if it weren’t for the space program I wouldn’t have a job! But people think that we should strip the money from NASA and use it for helping the goddamn less fortunate, which we don’t really do anyways!
Christ! I work for a satellite phone company and a lot of the people who buy our phones work for charitable organizations. Sat phones enable them to call for help in the middle of the jungle. Sat phones enable them to order more vaccine for the people who would otherwise die from a horrific disease! Sat phones are possible because of the space program, but to too many people its not important!
Fuck me! If you were born after 1950 many of the things you take for granted (plastics, fiber optics, and more shit than I care to think about) were all made possible thanks to the space program! But people think that its unimportant! For Christ’s sake! If it weren’t for NASA we wouldn’t have the goddamn PC or the fucking internet.
Shit, NASA put men on the Moon using computers less powerful than those disposable pocket calculators you can buy at Wal-Mart for next to nothing! And yet, we still can’t think of a way to build a cheap spacecraft which can get the masses into orbit, muchless into a Lunar colony!
I want to know what happens when you have sex in zero G! I want to know what it’s like to have sex in 1/6th gravity! I want to know if I’ll live longer by moving to the Moon! And the way things are going, I’ll never find out, because people are more interested in if Brad Pitt’s screwing his dog than what we can do to get ourselves as a species off-planet!
Yeah, I know that there’s the X-Prize and others trying to get us off-planet, but none of them have the inspirational power which is needed to bitch slap the masses into realizing that we need to do this!
I know that there’s people who say we should get our own house in order before we start trying to move outwards, but let’s face it, we’ve had the potential to get our house in order ever since the beginning of time and we haven’t done it, what makes you think that we’ll ever be able to do it? Yeah, I know, we’re not the savages which first began to walk upright, but even after some of the darkest examples of evil have presented themselves (i.e. Hitler, Stalin, and others of their ilk), we’re still committing mass-murders (Yugoslavia, and lots of other places that probably aren’t being covered in media). Humans are always going to butcher humans. Why should we let that stop us from moving onward and outward? If we don’t expand out into space we will die as a species, I don’t want that to happen.
