As the Brazilian musician Raul Seixas said in a music:

"Ice in Mars says the vicking

But however it doesn't have chicken in my back yard."

To waste in the space resources that could feed million is an excellent form of the Americans to say: alimentary democracy only in the speech, we do want is to leave this ball of mud called earth.

There are a number of reasons why I no longer support space exploration. In addition to the enormous expenditures, the human race has (collectively) shown such callousness to its own planet that spreading out to other planets/bodies seems like a pretty bad idea. Many of us get all excited about life on other planets--meanwhile, we're destroying life right here that we haven't even discovered yet.

There's been a lot of excitement and speculation about the possibility of our one day being able to terra-form Mars to suit our needs. (And then, perhaps, once we've trashed Mars, we could do it again to yet another planet and then another?)

Also, I don't think that the military's integration with the space program will end any time soon. It appears that we can't have purely scientific research independent of the military.

On this Columbus Day weekend, the idea of human exploration strikes me as an especially bad idea.