My son keeps asking me when we're going to have flying cars. "When will it be the future?" suddenly became a question, somewhere about halfway through first grade.
And I can't tell you how disappointed he is, when I tell him they've been promising me things like flying cars since I was his age and it hasn't happened yet. That being said, given the way I see other people act in parking lots and on clogged roads, I'm not particularly on the band-wagon for flying cars.
Any more than I'm on the band-wagon for those things down there.
And I can't tell you how disappointed he is, when I tell him they've been promising me things like flying cars since I was his age and it hasn't happened yet. That being said, given the way I see other people act in parking lots and on clogged roads, I'm not particularly on the band-wagon for flying cars.
Any more than I'm on the band-wagon for those things down there.
Those nifty, idyllic things are called an O'Neill Cylinder. Basically, back in the seventies a Princeton genius theorized these designs for space colonies built from materials on the moon and harvested from asteroids, rather than dealing with the exorbitant cost of firing things into space. Two cylinders connected by a manufacturing center would spin and cause their own artificial gravity. The massive windows into space would make it easier to always be pointed at the sun, and he was sure, in the seventies, it could be done with modern methods and materials.
The British Interplanetary Society has picked it back up, as of last year. They've named it Project SPACE (seriously, Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering) and they recon with the new lower cost shuttle replacements hopefully on the horizon it's only a matter of time.
And my response to this?
Not if you paid me.
I get that we need to get into space. Maybe not for all the reasons people usually espouse (I don't buy we're killing the planet, actually. I figure it'll kill us long before we get there. I don't believe we'll over-populate it either for a whole host of reasons), but I still think we need to go. We need to go because the worst things in our history have happened when we stopped wondering what was over that hill way over there. When we stop striving and looking and dreaming all we're left with is what we are. I think sometimes we don't like ourselves very much.
Which is sad, and symptomatic of a whole other list of problems that spring from this massive human tendency toward negativity we've never quite managed to shake.
So why don't I want to go into space? Let's just say the Fermi Paradox has been the boogeyman in my mental closet since long before I knew what it was. I more or less own the fact I'm afraid of the dark.
The British Interplanetary Society has picked it back up, as of last year. They've named it Project SPACE (seriously, Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering) and they recon with the new lower cost shuttle replacements hopefully on the horizon it's only a matter of time.
And my response to this?
Not if you paid me.
I get that we need to get into space. Maybe not for all the reasons people usually espouse (I don't buy we're killing the planet, actually. I figure it'll kill us long before we get there. I don't believe we'll over-populate it either for a whole host of reasons), but I still think we need to go. We need to go because the worst things in our history have happened when we stopped wondering what was over that hill way over there. When we stop striving and looking and dreaming all we're left with is what we are. I think sometimes we don't like ourselves very much.
Which is sad, and symptomatic of a whole other list of problems that spring from this massive human tendency toward negativity we've never quite managed to shake.
So why don't I want to go into space? Let's just say the Fermi Paradox has been the boogeyman in my mental closet since long before I knew what it was. I more or less own the fact I'm afraid of the dark.
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