"Happiness consists of getting enough sleep."
Robert Heinlein said
that -- I think it's somewhere in Starship Troopers. my vehicles tend more to cars
and boats and tiny airplanes, sadly, but I agree with
him.
Incidentally, if there is one great disappointment in my life,
it would be exactly that -- not lack of sleep, but not getting to ride in a
spaceship. I could blame Congress for its lack of interest in the space program,
but I honestly think that the exploration of space will never go beyond short hops
in our own terrestrial neighborhood until private interests take up the
exploration of space in competition with government. Though then again, the
greatest explorations of the past -- Columbus, Magellan, and all the
conquistadores -- were done under the auspices of government. It was only after
that that private businesses and organizations settled in to colonize and profit
form the resources discovered.
As a child and teenager, hearing about
trips to the Moon and reading fantasy and science fiction, I thought that by the
time I was grown up I would be able to go, at least to the Moon, if not farther. I
would never have envisioned the stalling and timidity of our tentative probes into
space that leave us content with a sluggish move toward a tiny space station in
orbit about the Earth. In the entire history of humanity, exploration has
always paid for itself with glorious bounty, in knowledge as well as
concrete riches, though it hasn't always paid in exactly the ways expected. Even
NASA's tentative baby steps have brought enormous progress; the laptop computer
I'm typing on, all 7 pounds of it, would not have been possible without the space
program. Neither would many if not most of the medical advances of the last fifty
years; some of the people I use this computer to email to would be dead without
the space program's payoffs.
Also, I believe that most of the things
wrong with my country are because it grew around the concept of a frontier, and we
have none today. There are always people whose restless energy leaves them
unsuited to a rigorous civilization, and many of those have had brilliant careers
when they had somewhere else to go. The same sort of people do well in wars --
General Patton is an example -- but a frontier uses the same talents without the
hatred. The ones Robert Service called the
href="http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8336/robertservice/son.html">Young
er Sons need somewhere to go. The ones who need to seek glory -- they need
somewhere better than street gangs to find it. The ones who want to seek wealth
without spoiling the Earth -- there are asteroids out there with no endangered
species. The ones who just want to Do, and Go, and See are not being served by our
governments or our crowded streets or our cautious congresses and
businesses.
To be an astronaut, you must be a perfect physical
specimen with a Ph.D. or military rank, with few exceptions. When will the rest of
use get to see our planet dimming the stars with her reflected light, against the
blackest field of empty space?
And just to bring this full-circle,
back to bed, I should also mention zero-G sex, where you finally get to use
bothhands.