As much as I admire Stephen Hawking, it is NOT appropriate for him to suggest that American taxpayers fund anything. Let him lobby the British government. Us poor American taxpayers are already footing the bill for enough wacky, far-out schemes, we don't need a Brit suggesting additional schemes for our government to waste our tax monies on.

One dollar in four hundred should do it---we can take the slow boats. Sylvie Barak is proof that we already have all the AI technology needed to colonize the stars at whatever snail's pace we can get there. (Naught but a machine could have so effortlessly assimilated all the Inq's quirks, slang, puns and queer sideways glances at any subject in so short a time on the job.)

I think Mr. Hawking has begun to take himself a little too seriously. This tends to hold one in a low, safe orbit where the obvious can be applied as product. 

Now, before I am fallen upon for this blasphemy, let me say that I am a fan of Hawking and have been for many years. He is… in a way, the second coming of both Einstein and Sagan. We definitely need more Hawkings to assure that our vision for the future remains trained upon the stars.

But back to the heresy; the problem is a generation-by-generation timetable that is always 15, 20 and even 25 years distant. The conquest of Mars was first conceived shortly after Apollo but… it didn’t happen. Instead, we opted for the Space Shuttle and the ISS. (The shuttle is a magnificent machine. Too bad the effort wasn’t applied to build a reusable spacecraft that could be used to explore the solar system, and not just an Earth-orbiting dump truck.)

Even the return to the moon is placed years and years distant when, in fact, the technology is there to make this a reality in far less than what is being proposed.

None of us alive today will ever see a manned mission to Mars. In fact, many of us who witnessed the Apollo landings will be long gone before the next generation moon explorers ever get off the launch pad. It will always be a distant land just beyond the horizon that no one will ever see.

So yes, I think Steve Hawking is caught up in the comfort and safety of the current vision. It keeps him an acceptable part of the musty mainstream. And that’s a shame.

We're already there, watch "Alternative 3" if you can find it.


*** NASA AND PLANET X
http://www.australia.to/story/0,25197,23040466-937,00,00.html
*** Google (www.ufodigest.com):
- Modern Science and the Ancient Writings on the Genesis of the Solar System
- Enigmatic Fossils - Darwin on Trial
- The Genesis of the Monkey People and the Genesis of the Anunnaki People
*** The book "Planet Eris and the Global Warming" (can be found at Amazon).

People can and will do whatever and wherever their fantasies/rationalities/theories may take them. There is no harm in that so long as they do it within their minds or their mindsets. What a wonderful day it will be when the likes of these fantasists and their worshipfuls depart to their promised lands/planets/mind-holes with their banking and immortality accounts together with their medals, crownings, achievements, emperor new clothes and leave the rest in peace, war, famine, scandals, demonisings, copulating, druggings, goddings, gougings and more. Bets will be accepted at 1000000-to-1 that nothing is going to change. Why? Because, dear sweetie-pie, it’s ALL on the minds… and that of the minds cannot venture beyond the minds. Ask any chimp about arithmetic and you’ll soon realise what the minds are. A circle going nowhere other than one’s head stuck up one’s orifice. Trying to define and determine what Infinity is. A chimp os not a human and a mentally-driven human is not a brain-enlightened-driven human but they sure can piped-piper their groupies into a world of frenzy – of godding-their-minds.

Gee, editor, never watched "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Don't remember a particular obelisk there?

Why worry about enormous trade defecits, huge unfunded pension liabilities, food riots, and global warming when we can blow $125 billion dollars on a moon base for half a dozen people. What planet is Hawking on? I'm sure those NASA boys were creaming themselves at the thought of all that money, but it's maybe time to get real and wheel Hawking out in to the yard and let him look at the night sky for a bit. Contemplating the distances involved might make him STFU

Where will the money to fund our religious wars come from? And and and what about...the rest of the earthly conflict that we all pay for every day of our lives? When the nations of earth stop fighting and get their shit together (including us Americans, I'm no hypocrite), maybe then this planet will develop some intelligent life. Until then, those few who push for progression can sit back and just speculate.

The irony is, the very technology we need to conquer space, will solve all our problems here on earth... 
ie how to produce food and manage ecosystems in limited size closed-cycle systems far from earth, ultra-efficient solar energy collection, safe nuclear power (fusion, oh but that's 20 years away)... to name just a few...

Just about everything we have today in western society is built on the billions of dollars injected into science and technology in the cold war. We forget that... lets do that again!
The blogosphere came from another dimension however..

Has that woman in the picture got a beard?

Isn't that a picture of the interior of Galasphere 347, late of Space Patrol, with legendary space pilot Larry Dart, Martian second-in-command Husky and Joe, a native of Jupiter and occasional visitor about the gyroscope-like spaceship?

I'll get my coat.

Check out the interviews at projectcamelot.org

Hawking wheeled out a rather cheesy cliché saying...

Wheelin' out the Hawkster.

Ohh the "open source software," commment was o sooo funny, Bill Gates u can second that notion!!!