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One of my oldest memories is when I wasn’t even in school yet, just a skinny little kid with grasshopper arms whose family had obviously introduced his ears to good music at an early age.
One dark night, my mom and I were outside – staring up at the stars as we liked to do years ago, before manmade light got in the way – when a shadow among the heavens caught my eye.
“There’s Born to be Wild,” I told mom in my youthful naïveté, “riding on the moon.”
John Kay and Steppenwolf would have been proud.
Speaking of Magic Carpet Rides, when I was in first grade some time later, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Without hesitation, 5-year-old me wanted to be an astronaut. Since the U.S. of A. had just landed on the moon the year before – alas, Born to be Wild was not found there – it’s easy to see why a youngster like myself would have seen that as a pretty sweet line of work, as opposed to whatever my stepdad did that seemed to make him grouchy all of the time.
I say that to establish my bonafides as a fellow who likes to look through telescopes and visit the planetarium at Young Harris (Ga.) College. The universe is the most beautiful and fascinating of God’s creations, and the spectacular images NASA shares of our celestial bodies would soften even the most hardened science fiction cynic’s soul.
That leads me to this: Why are so many wealthy people building rockets to fly other wealthy people into outer space, if only for a minute or two? And why are so many people spending so much time – and money, of course – trying to figure out if humans could ever permanently live in a space station, on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system?
The only person I know who ever really wanted to live on Mars is a big ol’ boy who once worked with the Cherokee Scout and owns too many copies of the red planet-related hit movie Total Recall on VHS. (Note: It’s the original Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, of course, not the weak remake. And I am not making this up, as Mark Townsend can attest that he had a deep, boisterous laugh.)
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is planning a SpaceX launch by the end of the year. Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic claim they will win the space tourism race. Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame thinks there will be 1 trillion humans eventually living in the solar system and, naturally, his Blue Origin company will lead us there. Even China is planning commercial space flights by 2025, according to firstpost.com.
Yet, I’m not particularly interested in wondering whether we could build a dome for air and somehow create water on a distant world. I’m much more interested in figuring out how to make the world we already live on better.
SpaceNews.com reports that a ballpark cost of a manned mission to Mars would run around $1.5 trillion – and that was seven years ago. Plus, that estimate doesn’t include the costs of actually building a livable facility or importing what humans would need to co-exist there among the rocks.
What else could we spend that money on instead? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s start by making health care a right and creating a plan that gives coverage to all Americans, which thelancet.com says would cost about $3 trillion annually. Affordable housing is an issue that’s only going to get more critical in time, which means we need to take action today. And if we actually want to be proactive, NPR.org reports that inaction on climate change could end up costing the government $2 trillion or more annually.
The bottom line is whatever the project you prefer and costs involved, there are far better things than space travel that we can spend our dollars on right here at home – rather than trying to abandon this place before it gets uninhabitable.
If we all start working to improve the world we live in today, just imagine how nice it could be tomorrow.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on Twitter @daviddBstroh.