Music: Mose Allison, Tony Dominelli, Pauline LeBel, Shari Ulrich, Barney Bentall & Tom Taylor, Matt Maxwell, Wendy Maxwell, Rob Bailey & Stan Gadziola, Gale Mead, Dori Legge with Donn Legge, Spider Robinson with Kathleen Rubbicco, Lisa Thiel, Colin MacDonald, David Crosby & Graham Nash.
Iâve spent several decades rebutting silly complaints about âmoney wasted in space.â Dollars have been spent getting thereâbut every single buck stopped here, on the ground, in the pocket of some smart person. Furthermore, every dollar NASA spent earned thirteen dollars back. Look what it got them: a manned space program that barely exists and has little future.
Sustaining the planet means widely different things to all of usâso letâs try and define our aim. The phrase surely isnât meant literally. Terra was sustaining herself just fine for millions of years before the first oxygen-producing lifeforms infested her and wrecked her nice methane ecosystem, dooming entire phyla to extinction. Mother Gaiaâs not alarmed by âglobal warmingâ: sheâs survived vastly greater environmental changes more than once, and will again.
The spiritual impulse can be a dangerous thing when it goes public. Ask anyone who was in New York five years ago, or anyone still alive in Baghdad today...Itâs hard to talk about spirituality without talking about religion, and most of the worldâs religions are, whether they admit it or not, mutually exclusive. Thatâs the only way I can explain the odd fact that spirituality is one of the least-known attractions of space travel.
To my surprise, not even the wonderful Wizard Of Google can pin down exactly when the militarization of space became unstoppable. In the first place, Chinaâs finally sussed out the secret to the Information Age: smother it with so much contradictory information nobody can say for sure just what you said, or when...much less why. And theyâve always known what to do about military information: lie.
Itâs probably apocryphalâthe best ones usually areâbut one of my favorite quotations is what Mahatma Ghandi is supposed to have responded when asked what he thought of Western Civilization. They say he replied gently, âThat would be very nice.â
A lot of people will give you some variant of that same response if you ask them about space art. âGreat idea. Somebody should try that.â âWhat space art?â I draw blanks with the idea all the time at social gatherings. Nobody seems to realize there is any.