Nice piece in the Star today about Eric Yam’s NASA winning, Utopian space station design<\/a>: where prescreening out all the violent types, providing free health care and vat grown meat are the societal building blocks! “designed .. to be close to the Canadian society that I live in!” You go, Ayn Rand!<\/p>\n

He backed up his design with lengthy explanations of how the operational systems would be feasible now, not speculating on future science. When I was a kid I use to draw huge images of spaceships, spanning several pages in my woefully underused math note books (oh the irony) and Eric’s story hit a personal note. Of course mine weren’t as detailed, just cross sections of rooms inside cool looking post-Star Wars ship knock offs. His belief in a better future was as refreshing as removing a fart-filled spacesuit. After reading the article I ventured into the comments and the first one out of the gate is this fun-killing, steaming pile of bitterness:<\/p>\n

Good for him. Lots of thought there. Too bad it’s wasted on space station nonsense. Many people will die in space for man’s vanity while the earth is destroyed. Where’s the mortuary? Will their corpses become more space junk? I don’t see a cemetery. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dude! Holy shit, it’s a 17 year old kid’s dream of a clean, safe future! I bet you run along side the Santa Claus parade and shout “HE’S NOT REAL!!” <\/p>\n

I’m always shocked when I come across this kind of thought that man does not belong in space. The exploration of space is far from “vain”. It stimulates discovery and has made us realize our beginnings more deeply, giving humanity a stronger, humbling identity, instead of relying on a fictitious sky god that smites non-like minded individuals. Yes, we have some cleaning here to do at home but maybe if all of us got to look at the earth from space, we’d have a better appreciation of home. Yuri Gragarin’s first (pragmatic) words in space<\/a> were: “The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.” And later the often quoted\/parodied “No words to describe it. Poetry! They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…” <\/p>\n

And by the way, to answer Mr Bitter McBitterbum: out in space, we’d eat the dead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nice piece in the Star today about Eric Yam’s NASA winning, Utopian space station design: where prescreening out all the violent types, providing free health care and vat grown meat are the societal building blocks! “designed .. to be close to the Canadian society that I live in!” You go, Ayn Rand! He backed up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[20,439],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-Yo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}