Oh, There's Water on Mars

Martian water? Scientists are excited.
College students? Not so much!

And the Wacko's Are Unhappy About It!

Somewhere on the college campuses of America, College Students are learning a particularly insidious form of collective self-loathing.

Check these quotes:

• "200 years from now we are going to be messing up that planet just like we did this one...and looking back at us like we look a cave men."
•  "The mysteries of space should be left untouched. Mankind has already destroyed earth why should we destroy other planets? "
  
• "So we make a mess of this planet and look for another to mess up. I feel this money would be better spent on improving this planet."
• "The funding of expensive space missions will only result in the eventual destruction of the moon, mars etc for our own benefit, and conducted as usual, with little or no consideration for the associated environment."

I love the ones about how if we just spent the money from space exploration on building houses and giving lots of stuff to poor people, all the world's ills would be solved. The self-loathing is palpable in all their comments.

  NEWSFLASH: The world's problems wouldn't be solved by paying off the poor. And it certainly wouldn't protect elitist college students, who fully expect to be a part of the upper classes once they get out of university and start flashing around that degree in art history - not in the least from the wrath of the unwashed masses should they ever get tired of being poor and start taking stuff away from wealthy, entitled, elitist university graduates.

Jesus, Himself, the world's number one proponent of charity to the poor, the widows, the lame (1st century for "disabled") and the orphans, said "The poor you will have with you always." When are people going to figure out that you can't throw money at poverty and cure it? Poverty goes away when people work - everybody, not just a handful of rich people from whom you can extract money on behalf of those who don't work via extortion or taxation.

In the Garden of Eden, the first thing God did was give Adam and Eve some chores. - "Here ya' go guys. I need you to take care of the animals and the plants." So what's the first thing they did? Eve went off and sulked because one of her friends (a skinny fellow that hung out in trees) told her God had all the money and power and didn't want her to have any. So the first sin was originally inspired by class envy!!! How about that? Still using the same old argument. "You have it all and it's NOT FAIR!!"

Still the same old solution that Cain came up with too: Take it from someone who has it and knows how to use it and give it to those who don't want to be troubled with all that education and work and planning and experience. As a result of that "progressive" philosophy, the whole Earth is now a big screwed up mess with more inequity than is imaginable - people cheating to get ahead, powerful corrupt leaders laying waste to their people while they prop themselves up on silk pillows to watch the dancing girls, crooked corporate robber barons manipulating the system to make piles of money they don't need and can never spend in a lifetime.

And into this impossibly corrupt morass, these guys want to inject the comparatively trifling sums we spend on space research. How much do you actually think will get to "the poor" and how much will be siphoned off by the evil folks whose supervision has resulted in the whole mess in the first place?

Folks who write drivel about "ruining the other planets" don't care about that. Many of them are pretty well-to-do already. They come from good schools, make good money, pamper themselves a lot. They just don't want to feel guilty about it, so, I guess they figure that if they just make noises about how the government ought to take care of poverty by shuffling a little money around from things they don't care much about anyway it'll help them to feel better about being so well off themselves.

Voila! Guilt all gone. "Let's go clubbing tonight!"

Heaven forbid that one of these dim bulbs actually get out and do some actual work on helping the poor. Why should they quit their cushy job and go out and start a company that hires actual people to work for them and maybe forgo buying that Porsche and plow the money back into health insurance for their workers? Oh, and don't actually do anything like donate money to famine relief programs or sponsor a child through a nonprofit agency or pay some poor kid's way through college.

Nope, just loudly gripe about money being "wasted" exploring space and whine about how we (meaning somebody else, not the whiner) are going to just ruin Mars and your conscience is clear! How easy is that.

Here's the problem with that.

Here's a picture of Mars:





I don't think you've got too much there to mess up! It ain't a park. It ain't overrun with anything living. It's a big red rock. Maybe we can do something to fix the place up, but how do you ruin a frozen, empty waste. Don't give me a bunch of nonsense about how we need to avoid "polluting" Mars.

If you guys want to clean up the planet, start doing it! You might find a way to shred and reuse some of those Evian water bottles for something useful. Or how about a cheaper solar electricity panel?Oops! I'm sorry, we shouldn't be using any of that evil space research based technology, should we? Never mind.

How about let's all unplug and go off the grid. Get back to nature. Cook over an open fire (forget the carbon that releases - it's NATURAL CARBON). We could use horses for transportation (forget the exploitation of horses and the titanic job of scooping up their poop from the roads).We could all just go back to eating whatever we find growing raw out there and run around naked and be NATURAL. How about that!!!

Well, I got news for you, Bub! YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE ME NAKED!

I'm just sayin'

Tom