Posts Made By: Al Gennari

Many periodicals and papers predicted a close race and that Kerry had a good chance of winning - and it wasn't exactly a Bush landslide, was it? My point is that that the conservatives who now prevail see any deviation from their rhetoric as "liberal" (intended as a pejorative), "unpatriotic", "unamerican", or "left wing". Regardless of what epithet the right wants to attach to the mainstream media, the fact is that it's not the insidious threat they make it out to be. The day is coming when peaceful dissent in the U.S. will be a crime and the Republican Broadcasting Network will be the only legal source of information. It's happened before and it can certainly happen again. Anyone who thinks that we're immune from this senario because we're "America the Great" is deluding themselve's. When over half the electorate can forgo critical thinking and essentially re-elect a man based not on his record (dubious at best), but on blind idolatry and jingoism, it's time to worry and take a hard look at where we're heading. Perhaps you consider this over-reacting, but no doubt many Germans of the early 1930's dismissed Herr Hilter's ardent detractors as doomsayers and loonies, too. Thurgood Marshall once said that the night doesn't come all at once - There's a twilight during which at first you don't notice anything has changed - only to find yourself lost in the darkness. It think it's time to invest in some candles.

For a fraction of what's been spent on military budgets over just the last year, we could send people to Mars. IMHO many of the fundamental questions about ancient rivers, volcanism, possible microbial life, etc, can only be resolved by direct human interaction. No robot lander, no matter how sofisticated, has intuition and curiosity. Besides that, I think it's part of our nobler human nature to want to explore and discover first hand.

Good points, Eric. But, I feel their largely preprogrammed nature and the lead time for signal transmission to and from robot landers takes away a lot of the spontaneity that a manned mission would have. As to the radiation hazards, yes, the exposure to cosmic rays would be significant. Still, I'd be ready to go in a New York Second if I had at least a reasonable chance to come back alive to tell about it. We all gotta go sometime and dying on a Mars mission would be a hell of a lot cooler than getting run over by a bus or dying of cancer right here on earth.