To Boldy Go Where No Man Has Gone Before...

...or was it to boldly spend $2.5 billion dollar like no man has spent before.

Am I the only one that woke up this morning to read dozens of posts on Facebook about the Mars rover named Curiosity and think to myself, "When did we send that up?"  I thought NASA wasn't sending anything else into space or was it just the space shuttles because, well, let's face it, sending a crew of 5-10 people up into space strapped to a gigantic explosive device and having it ex-fucking-splode twice in 30 years isn't the best investment of money?

I'm pretty sure Michael Bay used to same image in the 1st Transformers...

Yup, see?

Now, I am just as curious as everyone else about life in space and seeing if we are in fact not alone is something I have thought about since I was a young child watching the first space shuttle blow up.  It is entirely possible that there is life out there, I mean the universe is totally unexplored and with Area 51 and all....oops, that was a secret wasn't it?  I am willing to bet there sentient beings out there just like in the movies and one day Optimus Prime will be leading his band of Autobots to Earth in order to reestablish a new home planet.  But do we really have to go out searching for them?


At 10:32 PM last night, this $2.5 BILLION dollar science project landed on the surface of Mars.  Now, I have to admit a tiny little part of me is thinking, "Wow, that is so cool!" and then the other 99.9% of me is saying, "Wow, what a huge waste of money!"  $2.5 BILLION dollars?  Even Dr. Evil didn't ask for that much money in order to stop from destroying the world.  What's our national debt now, $16 trillion dollars?

I can feel the daggers coming from my geek friends and readers and hear their accusations spewing from their mouths, "Kev, you're a geek too who likes Sci-Fi!  This should be something you would rejoice for!"  Nope. sorry, I can't rejoice for this one.

We have fucked up our planet for millions of years and now have just started to put Band-Aids on it, hoping to heal the wounds we have caused.  Since the 1960's we have been shooting shit into space and guess what?  Only part of it comes back after the mission, the rest of the shit is floating out there, cluttering the cosmos like a bunch of litter along I-495 but instead of McDonald's wrappers, Dunkin' Donuts cups and trucker bombs, we are leaving possibly radioactive, harmful and hazardous chunks of metal floating around.

Do you really think aliens want to come to Earth seeing the trash we leave in our quest to be awesome?  The only reason another race would want to come to Earth is to kick our asses and tell us about their Leave No Trace guidelines.  Now we are looking at Mars to find out IF there is life there, or WAS life there and also to see about colonization.  Seriously?  We've made such a mess of the planet we were given that we now need to look for another place to go?  We're not settlers like Louis and Clark, we're not talking about staking our claim on a piece of land that spans a couple thousand miles, we're talking another fucking planet!


Here we go again...what if we do find proof of life on Mars?  What if, in the next 20 years, Curiosity stumbles upon a village and rolls into one of the dwellings?  There it is taking samples of alien poop, grabbing a piece of the alien's food from the cupboard and the family comes home to find this bug snooping around.  You wouldn't be happy if you came home from a nice night out with the family and found some strange mechanical creature rooting around your living room, would you?

Two things are bound to happen, the first (and most likely) would be that we do find life on Mars and decide to take it over like the Pilgrims coming on the Mayflower, or worse yet, we invade the inhabitants of Mars and force them out, that sounds familiar, didn't someone try doing that before?  Humans (and I'm not even going after one particular race) are barbaric, power hungry beings, I would not put it past us to destroy a peaceful habitat on Mars in order to claim it for ourselves.

The second scenario is, we stumble upon a race of aliens and piss them the fuck off.  There they are minding their own business and we stick our nose into their way of life, maybe they are a private race and keep to themselves...now we just pissed them off.  Just like to movies, they are more advanced than our baby species and the come to Earth to, like I said before, kick our asses.  I suppose the good news is they would have to get through all the space junk we have barricading the travel route first.

I wouldn't want to piss them off...

Either way, I just can't get past the fact that we spent $2.5 billion dollars and ten years working on this, just to prove we went to Mars...again, but who am I to decide where and what the government's money...er, our money gets spent on?  I could think of 312.8 million other things that money could have gone to...just saying.

Invest in OUR future, invest in OUR children.