[Mb-civic] Far Beyond The Wild Blue Yonder - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Far Beyond The Wild Blue Yonder

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, October 14, 2005; Page A19

Let's look away from earthly death and destruction for a moment and turn 
our gaze to the stars. When China sent two astronauts into orbit this 
week in a Chinese space capsule atop a Chinese rocket -- demonstrating 
once again that manned space flight is the defining status symbol 
elevating superpowers above wannabes -- I thought of Michael D. Griffin, 
NASA's eager administrator. And I thought of Buzz Lightyear.

Buzz was the spaceman character in the computer-animated movie "Toy 
Story," you'll recall, and he had a signature line: "To infinity -- and 
beyond!" That's pretty much where Griffin expects the U.S. space program 
to take the human race -- back to the moon, on to Mars, then perhaps to 
the moons of Jupiter and finally out into the limitless "beyond" of 
interstellar space, visiting faraway, undiscovered solar systems in our 
latter-day Santa Marias, Niñas and Pintas.

It sounds like the kind of vision that leads people to wriggle into 
velour jumpsuits, put on made-in-China pointy ears, gather in ballrooms 
at Holiday Inns and greet each other with "Live long and prosper." But 
Griffin's is no true "Star Trek" scenario, because he sees this as 
America's destiny, not humankind's, with Americans getting there first. 
Wherever "there" might be.

Griffin recently explained to reporters and editors of The Post that if 
the humans who inevitably "colonize the solar system and one day go 
beyond" do not carry "Western values," we could end up with "a gulag on 
Mars."

(I guess that means no seat on the bridge for Chekov, Sulu or Uhura. 
Scotty, all right, maybe. But the ultra-serious Spock, with his alien 
Vulcan values, is out of the question. He might even be a candidate for 
extraordinary rendition to the Klingons.) Griffin went on to say that 
"in the long run" -- the very long run, I hope -- the human species will 
face mass extinction. "If we humans want to survive for hundreds of 
thousands or millions of years," he said, "we must ultimately populate 
other planets. . . . [One] day, I don't know when that day is . . . 
there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it."

Some would say the hard-right leadership in Congress left our planet 
long ago, but I digress.

Griffin is not a nut. He's a smart, genial engineer who needs to 
enunciate a mission for his agency and justify its $16.2 billion budget. 
At a time when the government is hemorrhaging money on Iraq, Afghanistan 
and Gulf Coast reconstruction while also cutting taxes for the wealthy, 
manned space travel is a tough sell. Robotic probes are much cheaper and 
have proved spectacularly effective. But NASA wants to send astronauts.

If the goal is really to colonize other worlds, Griffin is right that 
only humans can do the job. There's a slight problem, though, one that 
Albert Einstein explained 100 years ago in the process of forever 
changing our understanding of time and space.

A century is long enough for the fact to sink in that nothing can be 
made to travel faster than the speed of light. You can't go zooming to 
and fro across the galaxy at "warp speed" as they did on the "Star Trek" 
series. All you can do, really, is poke around the neighborhood. It 
would take years to get to the nearest star, maybe decades to get to the 
nearest star with planets, maybe centuries to the nearest star with a 
planet that looked anything like Earth. So much for going "beyond."

In a sense, the probes that NASA, the Russians, the Europeans and the 
Japanese have sent to other planets and moons in the solar system have 
been too successful, in that they proved that we already live in the 
best house in the neighborhood -- indeed, the only house in the 
neighborhood. Griffin said, for example, that the absence of breathable 
oxygen in the thin Martian atmosphere would be one of the lesser 
obstacles to colonizing Mars. That gives you some idea of how difficult 
the greater obstacles might be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301789.html?nav=hcmodule
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