The late, great Peter Finch as Howard Beale in “Network.”
If you’re like me, you’re sick and tired of these !#$~! snakes on this !#$! air….
Oops. Wrong movie.
You are probably fed up with the high cost of space travel. I mean, it’s like two million dollars a day. Probably more now. Who can afford that? Other than billionaires. And they can afford anything.
Even if you could go, you’d end up get crammed elbow-to-elbow into a little seat in a tiny Soyuz capsule for two days, peeing into a tube, eating reconstituted food, and hoping the video of your bout with space sickness doesn’t end up as Number 1 on YouTube. It’s a lot of put up with for the vacation of a lifetime.
Well, if you’re mad as hell about not being able to afford these minor inconveniences, you don’t have to take it any more. Instead, you can sign the MarsDrive Petition for Inexpensive Space Access, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The group is hoping to get more than a million signatures and “submit it to government bodies like U.S Congress, the E.U and various other nations with space aspirations. We will also present it to large private sector companies and investment organizations at this point.”
Frankly, I’m not sure how useful petitions like these are, but it will probably do some good and doesn’t take much time to sign. And you can channel your inner Howard Beale. Or Samuel L. Jackson. Either way, it would probably be quite cathartic.
Thanks for linking to the petition. I’m guessing you
heard about it from the Space Cynics?
Anyhow, in answer to your semi-question about what good
it would do — not much, of course.
But if it makes one person stop and think, it will have
been worth it. It all starts with a handful of voices
speaking the truth clearly.
After all, it was only a few hours’ effort to put the
web site together, and each person spends only a minute
to read it (and sign it or not).
Think of it as digital graffiti if nothing else — just
one more attempt to get the word out.
And if nothing much comes out of it — well, nothing much
went into it. Nothing except dreams and conviction — but
that gets focused into many other channels as well.
Ad astra!
Hal Fulton
NP. I’m not sure where I saw it, might have been Space Cynics. I look at a lot of websites.
I hope I wasn’t too hard on you; the optimist in me does like the idea even if the realist knows a bit too much about how politicos think.