Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Back to the Moon!

I believe that the peak of human achievement as a species will be when we can figure out a way to batter and deep-fry the entire moon.

Think about how amazing it would be to do that! To be able to do it. The entire moon.

The prospect staggers the imagination, beggars the descriptive powers. Stabs the brain itself right in the center of the nerve centers responsible for utterances such as "No waaay!" Simply put: no greater level of human achievement is even conceivable, than to have the will and the wherewithal to accomplish such a lofty task as that. Just think of what it would take to pull that off. Can you think of what it would take? Neither can I! Neither can NASA...yet. And that's just why we've got to do it.

Of course, much like the original Apollo missions, this program would probably be a scientific dry hole. We have to be realistic about that. We wouldn't learn anything new from the actual doing of it - from the actual process of having battered and deep fried the moon. But just like Apollo, all the advances in technology that would be birthed of necessity during the mad, disciplined rush to solve the problems of how to accomplish that incredible, unthinkable mission - at least as unthinkable as the very idea of landing on the moon must have been, to those original minds daring enough to conceive such a crazed exploit! - all those myriad advances in tech and engineering would trickle out to society's benefit, via all sorts of unexpected secondary applications, and fuel the next 30 years of science-forward technology progress. And most likely, restaurant technology progress.

That's why we've got to do it. Not for the awesome only. We're talking awesome with fringe benefits.

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