Especially when they cringe over what synonym of “humanity” to use and find the concept of “conquest” distasteful, even if all that’s getting conquered is dead rock, some more dead rock, a colorful bit of dead rock, some reddish dead rock, a dusty dead rock, and, to change things up, some probably dead ice.

Pity we’ve become to fat, comfortable, and risk adverse to realize a future in space. That sort of thing takes will; a will this nation of cowards and wimps no longer have.

How come the future never came? We got ripped off.

Yeah, all we got was this stupid global information infrastructure that allows us to choose from hundreds of TV shows, buy music from our living rooms, publish our own journals so that anyone on Earth can read them, carry pocket phones, index vast amounts of data for quick retrieval, view photographic maps that have enough resolution to see cars on the road, install tracking devices in our cars that can pinpoint our location within feet, and watch pornography involving any fetish conceivable.

What a gyp. The world would be so much better with rocket ships and flying cars.

[[home grown solar power has severe limitations, like interference with local wind patterns(wind power), ocean current mixing of nutrients(wave power), fertilizer overflow into the gulf of Mexico from growing corn for ethanol and the subsequent creation of “dead zones”, excessive land requirements for solar cells electric generation, etc, etc, etc,,,,
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The amount of energy involved in air motion in Earth’s atmosphere is several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can tap with windmills in the foreseeable future. And ground-based solar thermal power is doing just fine. They even use molten salts to store extra heat during the day so the plants can run at night. Some STEC plants run almost 24/7. I’d much rather have solar and wind power than either fossil fuel or nuclear… or space solar power, which has severe technical problems of its own. Do you know how fast materials and instruments degrade in cislunar space? Do you remember how much it cost to fix the Hubble?

Perhaps in the near term, yes, but that’s not nearly as important in the long run as learning to live there. I also submit that there would be some major economic reshuffling if solar power satellites got up and running in a serious way. They’re much better for the ecology, certainly, and I wish we’d get down to using them much more quickly than we are, but as the rules change for who acquires energy from the source, who distributes it, and how much it costs, don’t think that it will leave the home economy significantly unperturbed.