How’s
this for an idea? We get a large group of folks together such as
engineers and scientists. Then we devise a plan to go to the
government and ask for a budget to spend something like several
billion dollars so we can send some remote controlled cars out
into the desert to see what’s there. Good idea? Well, if that
sounds dumb, think again since that’s about what we’re trying to
do with the latest Mars probe. I mean, it appears to me that
we’re about to spend a zillion bucks to send some probe vehicles
out to land on the surface of Mars so we can see if there might
be life there. So what? The probes can travel a distance of
about 400 feet from wherever they touch down, if they survive
the landing in the first place. How dumb is this?
Come on now, we
don’t even know what’s under the ocean on our planet in the
majority of the places and here we are spending a billion bucks
to go somewhere we couldn’t do anything about if we did find
something? So far, none of the previous probes have sent us back
any kind of pictures that lead me to believe there is any sort
of intelligent life on this desolate planet. I haven’t seen any
shopping malls, certainly nothing resembling a Starbucks, so
what does that lead us to believe? Even if there was something
alive, how intelligent could it be and what do we care? Suppose
the place is crawling with some sort of super bugs or virus that
eat the probes? What are we going to do about it? We can’t bring
any of them home nor would we want to do so if we could. So, I
guess my question is why spend all of this money when we have
plenty of needs right here on Mother Earth? How much education
could we buy for our kids with the money they propose to spend
on looking at rocks and dust? I wish someone could tell me one
good thing about what we might learn that could help us right
now.
If we want to
go up there and look around why not turn this over to private
enterprise and let business handle paying for it as well as
stimulating the economy? Now, for example I’d propose for the
kind of bucks they want to throw around, that we go down to some
place like Toys ‘R Us and buy maybe, 1,000 remote controlled
cars of ever kind on the market. Then we equip those babies with
cameras and whatever else is needed for any experiments and then
we send all of them up in one big payload and turn them loose.
Now you got to figure a bunch are going to get damaged on the
touchdown, but let’s just say half of them survive. You’ve got
500 roving probes out there taking pictures and scooping up dirt
samples or what have you. You know I think we can buy off the
shelf remote controlled dump trucks with scoopers and little
front-end loaders. If they’ll work in the desert here, why
wouldn’t they work on Mars? I think the article I read said the
government was sending out two probes. Well, here’s a chance to
just saturate a much larger area for probably half the cost. I’d
bet ours could go a lot further than 400 feet. I’ve seen my kids
run those things for hours on end and I’d finally have to take
the batteries out so they would wind down and come in the house.
The other thing
private enterprise could do is to sell lots. You remember years
ago, you could buy something like 2 inches of ranch land in
Texas or Alaska for $25? Well, who wouldn’t want a piece of
Mars? I think people would gladly pay $25 for a square foot of
Mars, don’t you? For every 1,000,000 people we’d generate
$25,000,000 to offset the cost of the project. Not a bad deal is
it? I mean, look at it this way, if we got 25 million people
throughout the world to buy into this deal, we’d get back nearly
every thing the government intends to spend. Now wouldn’t that
be a great idea? Or we could just give up on the idea altogether
and build some more schools.
