Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Where Have All The Headlines Gone?
Just one this time:
Seattle Times: Local News: Paul Allen sees space tourism in our future
Original Article
"This is your captain speaking, if you'll look out the right-hand window you'll see several billion miles of empty void sparsely punctuated by tiny points of light variously ranging from three to several million light years away. This view will be available for roughly the entire time we'll be spending outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Outside the left window you can see the continent of North America passing by, home to the Empire State Building, Disneyland, the Alamo, the Golden Gate Bridge, roughly ninety-three thousand McDonalds restaurants and many of the environmental problems plaguing our planet.
We'll be docking at Copernicus Station in approximately five minutes, please observe the No Smoking sign, and make sure that all liquids are in closed containers and not floating in random blobs around the room."
Space tourism is a lot of work to go through for little payoff. Earth tourism is interesting because we have weather that creates all these majestic natural wonders in a small number of specific places (like the Grand Canyon), but not over the vast majority of out planet's surface (like the great expanse of undifferentiated prairie in the American mid-West). The moon, relatively speaking, is miles and miles of more of the same. We also have all these sites that our culture has picked out as being significant, like worlds' fairgrounds, tallest buildings, architectural landmarks, ancient burial grounds, and presidential shooting sites. While Mother Nature has produced some outstanding work, when it comes down to sheer number of landmarks, human-kind beats her out handily with its endless sea of historical sites, novelty shops and giant, fiberglass cows.
Until we're able to shuttle people back and forth to, say, Mars quickly and efficiently (and good luck with that), the creation of space stations and moon bases will add the grand total of two locations to the brochure collection at the local Escape-U-Life travel agency. Cool for the short term, granted, and I'll admit that it'd be neat to cavort around in zero-G until bone decalcification makes it medically inadvisable, but until some version of extraterrestrial skiing gets invented to enable rich preppy kids to better waste away their weekends, the whole idea is ultimately faddish.
Visit The Moon: It's Like Aspen, But More Dangerous!
Just one this time:
Seattle Times: Local News: Paul Allen sees space tourism in our future
Original Article
"This is your captain speaking, if you'll look out the right-hand window you'll see several billion miles of empty void sparsely punctuated by tiny points of light variously ranging from three to several million light years away. This view will be available for roughly the entire time we'll be spending outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Outside the left window you can see the continent of North America passing by, home to the Empire State Building, Disneyland, the Alamo, the Golden Gate Bridge, roughly ninety-three thousand McDonalds restaurants and many of the environmental problems plaguing our planet.
We'll be docking at Copernicus Station in approximately five minutes, please observe the No Smoking sign, and make sure that all liquids are in closed containers and not floating in random blobs around the room."
Space tourism is a lot of work to go through for little payoff. Earth tourism is interesting because we have weather that creates all these majestic natural wonders in a small number of specific places (like the Grand Canyon), but not over the vast majority of out planet's surface (like the great expanse of undifferentiated prairie in the American mid-West). The moon, relatively speaking, is miles and miles of more of the same. We also have all these sites that our culture has picked out as being significant, like worlds' fairgrounds, tallest buildings, architectural landmarks, ancient burial grounds, and presidential shooting sites. While Mother Nature has produced some outstanding work, when it comes down to sheer number of landmarks, human-kind beats her out handily with its endless sea of historical sites, novelty shops and giant, fiberglass cows.
Until we're able to shuttle people back and forth to, say, Mars quickly and efficiently (and good luck with that), the creation of space stations and moon bases will add the grand total of two locations to the brochure collection at the local Escape-U-Life travel agency. Cool for the short term, granted, and I'll admit that it'd be neat to cavort around in zero-G until bone decalcification makes it medically inadvisable, but until some version of extraterrestrial skiing gets invented to enable rich preppy kids to better waste away their weekends, the whole idea is ultimately faddish.
Visit The Moon: It's Like Aspen, But More Dangerous!
