Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

News Briefs 08-07-2011

Waiting in the sky

Quote of the Day:

Spaceflights cannot be stopped. This is not the work of any one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.

Yuri Gagarin

Editor
  1. ………
    [quote=]Since I was a teenager, whenever I have a pivotal life event coming – an exam, or an interview – I perform a ritual. I sit cross-legged on the floor, and I imagine an enormous golden beam of energy coming out of my arse.[/quote]

    …that is all

  2. A malignant place in time

    “With luck, robotic exploration of the solar system will continue. But even there, the risk is of diminishing returns. Every planet has now been visited, and every planet with a solid surface bar Mercury has been landed on. Asteroids, moons and comets have all been added to the stamp album. Unless life turns up on Mars, or somewhere even more unexpected, public interest in the whole thing is likely to wane. And it is the public that pays for it all.

    The future, then, looks bounded by that new outer limit of planet Earth, the geostationary orbit. Within it, the buzz of activity will continue to grow and fill the vacuum. This part of space will be tamed by humanity, as the species has tamed so many wildernesses in the past. Outside it, though, the vacuum will remain empty. There may be occasional forays, just as men sometimes leave their huddled research bases in Antarctica to scuttle briefly across the ice cap before returning, for warmth, food and company, to base. But humanity’s dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.”

    – The end of the Space Age
    http://www.economist.com/node/18897425

    How dismal. How depressing. How unexpected of a species that has done great things when daring to go beyond the immediate line of sight.

    How disgusting. How stagnant. How do we now rediscover our ability to act upon the dream, and dismiss this horrid acceptance of passive decay?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal