If Frank, Sam Stone, and RickJay all think going to the moon is such a great idea, why don’t y’all lobby to send the Canadians to the moon, hm?
I’m a great fan of science and space exploration, but IMHO, there are better uses for our tax dollars than manned space missions and permanent stations on the moon.
We’ll still have achieved more with that than what we are achieving in Iraq, and it will be at a fraction of the price. Compared with other government money sinks, at least this has the coolness factor going for it.
I lobby the Canadian government to spend as much on our own space program as possible. Canada doesn’t remotely have the ability to send a man to the moon, so I’m not sure why you’d expect me to lobby for it. But I’m sure that there will be a role for Canada in a new American space program. I’d advocate for as big a role as possible.
Sam, dear God. I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you. The question is, what good is being wealthy if other people can determine for you how you should spend it? What is a “great thing” to you might not be a “great thing” to me. You say that Apollo will stand as some shining example for mankind in the distant future, and I disagree. It will stand as a colossal waste, and that isn’t even granting the obvious — that future man will look back on our conscription of one another for the “common good” as ethically and politically barbaric. Bill Gates is undertaking great things, in my opinion. So is Warren Buffet. So is Oprah Winfrey. So are all the world’s philanthropists. If these people were spending their money building rockets for a fruitless quest already proved to be impossible by simple mathematical logic, lots of the world’s poor would suffer for it. I only wish I had the courage and the means to resist people like you who believe their goals are somehow greater than my own and are willing to fleece me for the sake of their own myopic vision. And to anyone who doesn’t like the fact that my view doesn’t fall lockstep with either the left or the right, fuck you.
I think we need somebody new, rather than the usual suspects. Let the Italians do it. I reckon they could make the moon pretty cool with little bars and stuff. OR maybe the Philippinos or the Thais - that’d be pretty laid back.
What do you think would happen if a foreign country turned the USA flag upside down on the moon? We would have to go there and turn it right side up and flip their flag upside down. We get a snowball effect and before you know it we have a moon war.
Yes, but so have leaders who “conscripted” people/resources for the “common good”. FDR undertook great things. So did JFK and LBJ. Some great things can only be done by governments or by organizations/enterprises on a governmental scale. The exploration/exploitation/colonization of outer space falls under that heading.
And let us never forget that colonization must be the ultimate goal. Space travel means racial survival. There is no physical reason the human race cannot survive another ten billion years – provided we do not keep all our eggs in one fragile basket, i.e., one planet’s biosphere.
Ad Astra!
Gratuitous assertions gratuitously denied. 
You won’t go anywhere in space, except (maybe) one or two local planets or moons, where you will be irradiated, rained on by micrometeors, starved, suffocated, burned, and frozen. The way I see it, if a man won’t clean his own house, moving won’t solve his problems. He’ll just make a wreck of his new place the same way he did his old place. The problem with man isn’t where we’re located; it’s that we’re cold hearted and uncaring. We’ll be the same way anywhere we go.
But we’ll survive, without which nothing else matters.
BTW, I urge everyone interested in this thread to check out this series of short essays (all pdf files) written recently by SF author Spider Robinson as the first Writer-in-Residence of the MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C.
If you want to argue that healthy slaves should count their blessings, I suppose you have a point. But you won’t survive. Nature will destroy you with even greater efficiency than you’re destroying the earth. You haven’t evolved to survive gamma radiation, hypersonic bullets, methane atmospheres, or subfreezing and broiling temperatures. And if you ever do, you won’t be human anymore.
Humans living off Earth won’t be slaves, they will merely be as wicked as humans always have been – no more, no less.
We won’t have to change our gene-code to survive in space, we will merely build artificial environments – and, way, way, down the road, maybe terraform whole planets.
Yeah, right. If you terraform it the way you’ve terraformed this one, good luck. Personally, I think you’ll still be losing the War on Poverty.
Are you arguing that you haven’t benefited from the space program in any way?
No, I’m not. Are you arguing that slaves who got food and education should not have complained?
If you’re benefitting from the space program, why shouldn’t you help pay for it?
Yeah ,and we aren’t physically cut out to survive many of the environments on this planet yet we’ve managed to use our ingenuity to do so, and that is distinctly human.
There are a great many benifits to science and industry when hardcore exploration occurs. The Space program’s spin offs thus far shows this.
It’d be nice if you used some of that ingenuity to feed hungry people who live in perfectly livable areas but are starving. That aside, your moon colonies won’t be close by like your Antarctica colonies. One aw-shit will wipe out a thousand atta-boys.
There’ve been a great many benefits from Christianity too. Would you be interested in helping to finance it?
Are you seriously claiming that people should pay for something when it tangentially or incidentally benefits them? If so, lots of people, institutions, and causes could argue that they have benefited you in some way and send you a bill.
Oh, god, not another one of these threads. I’ll just cast my vote and move on. Pro. I can think of nothing cooler than to see humans back on the Moon, where we belong.
You whippersnappers can have Mars. I’m an old Loonie at heart.