The End of Man

The End of Man
Paul R. Mays
07/05/07

Mankind will sooner or later be wiped from this little ball we live on. This is a fact not an opinion. next week we could be hit by a mile wide hunk of iron and we're toast. A shift in the magnetic field of the planet will someday wipe 90% of all life from the tiny blue ball we call home. Someday the sun will burp and all life will be ash in seconds. Someday a super volcano will erupt and almost all life large enough to see with the naked eye will vanish within months or years.

These are facts that have happened 12 times in the past. We have a record in the rocks that show 12 separate epochs in this balls history where almost all life was wiped at each event.

So I wanted to give a view of the only option that can save our species from being nothing more that radio waves passing through space for some life on some far away planet to receive and watch reruns of "I Love Lucy" sent out into the universe a million years before, the ghost of a long lost people.

The only way our species can survive is to find a way to get off this ball. We have to travel to new worlds. We have to start colonies on several places so that when that next ball is made toast we have other places to hide from all the destruction that occurs in this universe.

This requires we take baby steps today. I hear all the shouts about it being a waste to go to the moon. The folks that say the money is better spent feeding the world and solving the problems of our inner cities. I read of those that think we are wasting the lives of those that have given their lives in the shuttle tragedy's to gain little or no value in their sacrifices.

Each year in America we spend more per year by far on Twinkies than we spend on the entire space program. In one year in America alone we spend more on booze that we have spent on the space program since its inception in the 50's. And for each dollar spent by NASA has produced 3 dollars in gross national product for our nation. The computer you use to read this blog can be directly linked to our space program.

So if we survive for the next couple hundred years we must find the science to leave this solar system at some point in the future or we are doomed as a species. So when you hear someone speak of shutting down the space program because we need to put a new black board in some school or save some frog in a pond in Indiana think of your children's, children's, children's, children and what your leaving them to deal with when they are stuck on this tiny ball as they watch a hunk of rock heading for them at 40,000 miles per hour.