A friend of mine recently posted about a manned mission to Mars with the purpose of starting a colony there. I’m sitting in the airport bored to tears for another hour and a half, so I decided to google it. And I literally started crying from extreme happiness. The vision of these people is overwhelming. I want to go. I want to boldly go where no man has gone before. :p This is the opportunity of our life time; who would sit back and let it pass them by? Yes, you’ll leave your family forever, but at the same time…as our technology develops, I bet we make it take less than seven or eight months to reach Mars. And even with that amount of time, I really don’t see people never coming back to Earth for “shore leave”. Even just for a year or so. I can see, in our future, splitting the travel time at least in half.
They talk about there being a seven minute lag time for video back to earth. That makes for a long call, but again…technology keeps on developing! We are not going to stop at it taking seven minutes…we’ll keep pushing the limits until the lag time is normal (which for something like Skype could mean anywhere from seconds to a minute).
Humanity is amazing. I love how we keep exploring because there is more to see than can ever be seen and more to do than can ever be done. We just KEEP GOING BECAUSE IT’S THERE. I want to be part of that. I need to be part of that.
I want to be on one of these four person teams. I’m good in enclosed spaces, I can tolerate annoying people for long periods of time, and I want to learn and grow and help humanity to do the same. Can you imagine living on another planet? Yes, it would be hard. A big challenge…but if you don’t take a risk, where will your life go? No where. And what’s the point of a stagnant life?
Good Lord I want to go.
Molly
