Space Travel

// $eeing $tar$

By Alex Aloise .
07.31.09 // Space Travel

On a recent episode of his show “Real Time,” Bill Maher delivered an excellent monologue questioning how and why the profit motive came to be so powerful in America. He argued that Medicine, War, and the News were all at one point not-for profit endeavors. They existed simply for the benefit (or in War’s case, detriment) of mankind. But somewhere along the way people decided that these things could all become money-makers, so they found a way to do it – all the while pining for the “good old days, when everything wasn’t about money.”

His case got me thinking. Is Space the next great money-maker of the human species? In 1969, when we landed on the moon, Neil Armstrong described it as “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” In recent years there has been talk of going back to the moon. I’m curious, who will the giant leap be for this time? Will the shuttle leave the moon’s surface with a flag for Microsoft waving in the distance? We’ve already got Virgin Galactic offering people the opportunity to spend a few hours in space for a mere $200,000. You can go to the mall and buy Moon boots, Milky Ways, Mars Bars, Space rocks and Astronaut Ice Cream. Hell, if I wanted to, I could go online and buy Jordan a star! (Don’t tell him yet but I already did. It’s a small, bright one. You can see it at night. It’s on the left).

We barely know more about what’s out there now than we did 400 years ago when Galileo was studying the stars. Space is a mystery to us. It’s intriguing, enigmatic, sexy, and thus, profitable. But who knows? For all we know, we could be way late to the dance. Who’s to say that dibs hasn’t already been called on most of that shit. We may call it Pluto (and then kick it out of our club, poor little guy), but what if someone else has already proclaimed it as Zardoz presents Yakfudz. As far as we know, we live in the Milky Way. But is it really out of the realm of possibility that we may be in fact living in the 63rd Targozal District, brought to you by Hooooooooksnf?

What I’m trying to say, Earth, is slow down. Let’s take some more time to really explore and discover all of the amazing things that are out there before we go thinking of ways to cash in on them. There are countless profitable roads to travel down right here on our little blue dot. Hell, I’m sure if we really put our minds to it we could come up with plenty more “inherently free entities” like health and information to charge for. This whole “air” thing seems to be catching on pretty well…

View Comments / Jul 31.09 / Space Travel / by Alex Aloise