To the Moon I Mean Mars

Would you travel to Mars and stay there? The people CBS News reported on today would and they are ready to go as soon as it's possible. It might sound crazy to those of us who are a bit of a "homebody", but after all as one of the Mars candidates points out, our ancestors ventured to this new world and stayed and that turned out pretty cool.

Me and my cup of coffee were watching CBS news this morning and this unbelievable report came on (video below) about people who want to go to Mars and not come back. It got me thinking, these folks are explorers like Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de Leon. There was no guarantee when they set out that they would make it back. And when the American Settlers traveled west across the United States they were setting out to find new worlds. That is what these amateur astronauts are willing to do but their journey just happens to have them leaving the planet on a rocket instead of loading a ship or horse and wagon. And they definitely can't come back. The technology doesn't exist with the human race to make their return possible.

So whether you are going to the depths of the ocean, which by the way I still think we should be exploring the ocean as much as space. Or traveling millions of miles into space (33.9 million give or take a few million because the planet's orbits cause the distance to change regularly). Settling new worlds for our adventurous populations is pretty cool. I say go explore, report back when you can, cause this homebody will be happily waiting here on earth to hear all about it on CBS. I tend to subscribe to the "OZ" philosophy, sometimes what you're looking for is right in your own backyard, but that doesn't mean the rest of you can't go searching the cosmos.