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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peregrinus: [QB] We have, unfortunately, grown up in a society based largely on immediate gratification, and when it became apparant that we weren't going to have orbiitng space stations, moon bases, and expeditions to Mars by the '80s, most people's attention drifted. When Shrub too office there was a budget surplus for the first time in decades, which he and his warmongering cronies all-too-quickly pissed away. We want it all, we want it now, and when we don't get it, we get bored and turn on the TV. I've known we weren't going to get to Mars for decades. I know it's probably going to be a millennium before we start to go to the stars, unless something utterly unexpected occurs. It was over a century between Columbus running into Haiti and the first serious European colony in North America. I'm just amazed the private sector has remained so ambivalent to space exploitation. Ideally, we would keep the Martian and Jovian expeditions as a background thread, while sending out probes to explore the far planets and the Oort cloud and establishing more of a nearspace presence. Multiple orbiting space habitats -- not a collection of modules like the ISS, but an actual STATION, a la 2001, constructed using materials mined from the moon and near-Earth asteroids. We've piddled around in the shallows long enough without leaving a permanent presence. Even the ISS isn't home for too many for too long. We need someplace people can live and work and call home for their entire lives without suffering deliterious effects. Whether this is through artificial gravity or through centrifugal force or whatever. There will still be accidents and deaths and the like. Such is the cost of living in this universe. Whether it is from being gored by a mastodon, having a building fall on you in an earthquake, or by having a bulkhead blow out and leave you sucking vacuum, you're just as dead. Trying to find a point to justifiably "hold back" from going too far is futile. You'll end up back at the primordial soup where going out on land was too dangerous because of the ultraviolet rays bombarding this planet... --Jonah [/QB][/QUOTE]
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