Do you remember the Apollo 11 mission? Or any of the subsequent moon visits?
No. Is that the one where Tom Hanks saved Buzz? That was before my time.
Do you remember the first space shuttle launch?
No. BUT… I remember the big crash, the first one. I was home from school that day. Some interesting trivia about that event you didn’t know. That was the first space shuttle launch to not be carried live. They were just becoming routine at the time. Anyhow, I remember the news broke in and showed the footage. I remember the verbiage they used ‘there appears to be a malfunction’. Note, (and I am working from memory here), the space shuttle doesn’t appear to just explode at that point. It kinda breaks into two streams. That was also a big deal not just because it was the first real bad crash/explosion, but was the first shuttle with a civilian on it. Teacher Krista McAllife (again, just working from memory for integrity purposes, of course this can all be googled for veracity… had a an editor.
Remember Skylab?
Not sure. That was the pre-cursor to the ISS, right? Like, a neutral space station everyone could hook up to? Make a potty run right before the long drive home?
Should we try to get to Mars?
I am super conflicted on this. First question is… why are we going? Are we going for science? Ok, then I am in. Or… are we going because Earth is totally fucked and we need a back up? I guess I am in that way, as well. Just wish someone would say that out loud, though. At 47, I’ll be dead before any of this fully manifests (people living on Mars), so it isn’t for me to say. Being a liberal, I can’t help but think we could take that money and spend it on health care and education right here and right now. Maybe if we addressed climate change, we wouldn’t need to go to Mars.
Are there space aliens out there?
Isn’t ‘space aliens’ redundant? Let’s just call them aliens.
I feel the same away about this that I do about ghosts. I think probably yes, but I could be convinced otherwise. Were the existence of ghosts and/or aliens a totally binary question that I had to answer yes, or no… I vote yes to both. But, I have no experience with either. Well, maybe some harmless ghosts in our college apartment on Agassiz.
careful… it gets a bit ranty down there.
Since we are here, I might as well give this speech… and I likely have here many times before. Anytime someone says life couldn’t exist on other plants because of _____ or lack of ____, I want to dope slap them. Maybe our kind of life couldn’t exist, which has specifically evolved to work in our environment. If someone says “there couldn’t be life on Venus. The surface temperature is 8000 degrees. Life would boil alive!” I think ‘maybe OUR lives would’. Since we don’t even know how big space is, it is INSANE to think we are the only life. I would imagine life somewhere else is having a discussion like this. They are saying “we have looked, and there is NO way there could be life on Earth. With an average temp of 72 degrees, all life as we know it would spontaneously combust. Not to mention an atmosphere of nothing but oxygen and nitrogen. HAH. There is virtually zero percent breathable sulfur on Earth.
Ok, that was my stump speech on aliens and life on other planets. NEXT UP- ghosts.
Here is why I firmly believe ghosts are very possible. Our bodies are electrical. Everything happening in the brain is electrical. Remember the end of the Matrix? How it turned out our bodies were kept in stasis just to be used as batteries for the aliens? Ok, we have established that. Einstein said, and I just fucking love this quote and thought and theory “energy can be neither created nor destroyed”. Our bodies are energy. Not in a touchy feely new age way, in a science way. We take in calories, harvest what we can for energy, and shit the rest out. If you shoot a guy, and trust me I know… where does that energy go? I don’t have an answer, I admit. This is why I just say I am open to all of this.
Plus, it makes life way more fun to include these possibilities.
*** cool side note – I am right now finally reading ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. I know I am 30 years late to the party, but I have been avoiding fiction for the last decade or so until recently. What are the odds? Details here –
I am Correct 