Over the past several month, off and on, I've been reading with some amusement, and bemusement, the various Moon Hoax threads, and now the Mars Hoax
thread.
Amusement, because of the faulty, if not outright fallacious science being quoted as gospel, irregardless of numerous attempts to correct it.
Bemusement, because all too many seem willing to buy into the falsehood.
Anyway, that's not the real reason I started this thread...
A couple of nights ago, a question was asked on one of the Hoax threads about why do we need the Space Program, or words to that effect. They struck
a chord with me, and I decided to get philosophical...hey, it's what I do
. Plus I'm a points whore, and I"m hoping a thread of mine might
actually take off...lol.
Why the Space Program? Why do we spend our treasure and resources going to Mars or the Moon, why crash a probe into a comet or into the Jovian
atmosphere...why...why...why?
For many, many thousands of years, at least, maybe since our ancestors climbed down out of the trees in Africa, we've gazed in awestruck wonder at
the stars above us in the vault of the sky. For not quite that long, we've wondered what are they? Were they other suns, and if they are, are there
other worlds around them. Men died for expressing these thoughts, and asking those questions, yet despite it all...the question remained firmly
rooted in the imaginations of anyone bothering to look up at night...
For the longest time, the stars were our guideposts on our journeys across our world, if such and such a star is here, we're headed this way. As
such, they were and still are, our friends. On warm summer evening who hasn't gazed up at the stars twinkling down at us so cheerfully through the
hot muggy air?
As they've beckoned to us on our journey's here on Earth, how can we ignore the beckon that urges, even pleads with, us to leave this nest and join
them.
Our first tentative steps have begun that journey...I sat beside my mother and father that evening in 1969 when mankind took that first bold
step...We'd landed on another world! I saw, for the first time, my mother cry. I never knew why until I saw the shuttle lift off, and return safely
for the first time. I knew right then, and right there, that the Earth will not always be our home.
To this day Armstrong and Aldrin hold a special place in my heart...They were the messengers who told a world that more worlds await, and that it is
time to go!
Who doesn't remember those pictures from the Viking Landers of landscapes not so dissimilar to places here on Earth? Or the pictures of worlds so
wonderfully and delightfully weird as to beggar our imaginations, from the Voyager spacecraft as the blazed the first trail out of the Solar System on
their long plunge into the darkness beyond, heading for those freindly twinkling little stars...
Now more Martian probes have sent back information that may indicate that life might be present now, or in the past. Only water? But as a single
note from a trumpet may indicate the possibility of a symphony, so too does water indicate the possibility of life elsewhere in our Universe.
Oh, the possibilities!!
But why go?
Man is, at heart, a wanderer. An explorer. Yearning to see new vistas, experiance places we've never been. Man is never more wonderous then when
challenged. This is, I submit, our ultimate challenge. To join the heavens and tread among the stars. Our ultimate destiny, what ever that is, lies
not here, on this rather insignigicant little blue rock. But out there, yondering amongst the stars.
If we don't destroy ourselves by ignoring the angels of our better natures. Something awaits us our there...I'd hate for us to miss it due to our
prediliction for violence. I don't think we will, but the jpossibility is there...
