Well, I’m travelling again this week on my day to post. I am using a loaner laptop and therefore, annoyingly, can’t find the links I had picked to write about.

I wanted to do a post on the mission to Mars.

I had a friend ask me one time, in a spirit of sheer cussedness, what the whole point would be of space travel. (Cussedness, because he is an avid SF fan and owns the entire Star Trek series on DVD…) Is the point simply to spread across the galaxy, like cockroaches? We have a perfectly good planet, right here. (At least, so far…)

Um, I guess. Seriously, though, there is a huge universe out there that is completely and thoroughly inimical to human existence. You could be suffocated, frozen, boiled, roasted, crushed, just by stepping off the nice cosy surface of the planet. Just as we underestimate the size of space (As Douglas Adams said, it’s really REALLY big. Unimaginably big. HUGE. Imagine the biggest thing you can think of. It’s bigger than that. Really.), we drastically underestimate how difficult it would be to survive out there.

As someone once put it, we can’t sustain a base in the Sahara; how are we supposed to sustain a base on the moon or Mars?

All these things are true. Still. I want to see it happen. I want us to go and find out.