Atomic Bombships

Once upon a time the military said "We want to use nukes and go to Saturn." NASA said "No way."

So the military worked on doing it anyway.

The ship would have been as big as a skyscraper and would literally use thousands of nuclear bombs to propel it on its journey to Saturn.

As it looked more promising, NASA basically said 'lol this looks promising, let us take over from here' and then they canceled the program and tried to destroy it.

But what if they hadn't?
First of all, there were hundreds of hurtles for them to overcome before it would have even been possible. And even if they did, who in their right mind would volunteer to sit on top of a giant rocket that was about to get nuked a couple dozen times?

Still, if they had, it would've no doubt ushered in a new era of space exploration. To hell with the moon, we'd be able to explore our entire solar system in person. The massive spaceships would have been large enough to carry the equipment to build colonies, biodomes, terraforming equipment. They were close to doing it back then, with todays advances we could have probably become quite the spacefaring civilization by now.

Instead we're still stuck on one rock. I guess if we destroy this one there's always - oh wait. This is the only planet we have. Nevermind.

Should we spread life?

I cringe every time people panic about possible contamination of Mars. Why is this bad?

What if we find out Mars is a sterile environment? Would we pout and ignore the barren wasteland?

We work hard to bring life to deserts, we plant trees where there are no trees, all over Earth we spread life and seem to infect everything with it. We touch otherwise pristine objects, covering it in bacteria and viruses. We spread life everywhere sometimes intentionally, sometimes on accident.

Why on another planet is this a bad thing? On our planet we've been fortunate to have perfect conditions for life to not only develop, but become staggeringly complex. I think we owe it to the universe to spread the gift of life to everything around us. We've become intelligent enough that we are beginning to scratch the surface of creating new life so why not engineer a couple of slime molds that would thrive on Mars? Why don't we create some nematodes that burrow deep into the moon? Why not create some bouyant life forms that can float through the gas giants?

What if we are alone in the universe? This shouldn't be depressing, it should be something exciting. We would have the opportunity to become the progenitors of all life everywhere. We might find planets that do have life but nothing intelligent... why not enlighten the planet?

If the universe is barren, I believe it is our duty to spread life throughout the cosmos.

Trapped on Earth

Source: XKCD

Sometimes I wonder if in a few million years some advanced alien race will show up at Earth. They had long ago filtered out all of the radio noise in the galaxy, narrowed down the planets likely to hold life, and finally set out to explore the galaxy.
As they neared our star system they would do some scans and find that the third planet from the sun had a good atmosphere, a warm climate that could support liquid water, and even - to their joy - it was surrounded by thousands of tiny bits of metal; manmade satellites.

They would try to hail us, but would receive no reply. They would come closer to our planet and notice a few man-made objects on Mars. Their stomachs [or whatever they have] would twist with excitement at their realization that we too had the power to leave our planet and travel in space.

They would reach earth and scan it. They would only find primitive cities, barbaric savages, and derelict automated machines trying desperately to fulfill their futile mission. These humanoid barbaric savages couldn't be the ones who built the satellites and the man-made objects on mars could they? Something must have happened to them. Who was that once proud race that once beamed messages into space and sent robots all throughout their star system?

I wonder if the human race will really amount to anything other than a fascinating line of rubble in the fossil record. We refuse to seek out alternative sources of energy, we are so territorial that we kill our own species, and people are even suggesting we should abandon sending people into space altogether.

We are overcrowding this planet, we're killing much of the life on it, and no one seems to be getting it through their thick skull that this is the only planet that we have. That's it. We fuck it up and we're dead. There is no escape hatch, no reset switch, no backup planet we can jump to.

We have to work hard to leave this planet and colonize other worlds. We should be treating other planets the way we treat other continents: take it over and breed like mad.

Life Will Find a Way

I drew this in my Basic Design class today during the lecture about how different macs are from windows. I already knew the differences so I loaded up photoshop and played with my tablet.

Someday I hope we really do clone some extinct animal. Scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to easily* clone a mammoth. However now the biggest hurdle seems to be coming up with a good enough reason to clone them. Besides studying them, there doesn't really seem to be a point.

In my nanowrimo novel, the colony on Mars has become a haven for genetic experiments that aren't allowed on Earth. The people of Mars needed a hardy animal that could survive in the harsh cold environment of Mars, be domesticated, and provide a lot of meat. They decided to bring back the Woolly Mammoth [with a few tweaks so it was better suited for the environment], and soon mammoth meat became the staple of Martian cuisine.

I think reviving Mammoths would be beneficial to the entire world. They could survive in harsh cold environments where little else grows [like Northern Canada, Alaska, or Russia] and would provide a lot of meat. They could stimulate the economy in those cold regions, provide food for the starving people of the Earth, and provide a great deal of wool. I'm sure they could probably be milked too.

Hell, we ate them into extinction too. They must taste pretty good.

*as easy as cloning an animal anyway.