You. Will. Die.
This isn't a bad thing, or a good thing. It's a simple fact of life that life ends. Given a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. It's math. It's basic. It's simple, inevitable, and universal.
At some point, we should stop trying to stay alive forever, because it's simply not going to work. No matter how much raisin bran we eat, no matter how much we exercise, or how safe of a car we drive, or if we don't drive at all, at some point we'll die. A man in perfect physical health, great genetics, and excellent safety habits can still get hit by a crashing plane.
On the other hand, we shouldn't be idiots. We should make sure we have good engineers to design our buildings, we should wear seatbelts, and we should most definitely wear helmets when we ride bikes. After all, even though death is inevitable, we shouldn't go about hastening it. We should be smart.
Somewhere in the middle is a balance, and we as a society need to find it. Whenever I turn on the TV, I see a society that's absolutely paranoid about getting old and dying, but at the same time, we're taking self-destructive behavior to an entirely new level. Gotta eat right, gotta work out, gotta have that drink and take that drug. It's so unbalanced it's almost indicative of mental illness on a national level.
It's considered socially unacceptable to plan a lunar or martian space mission that doesn't involve the astronauts landing without a return vehicle already built for them. (There are, of course, other examples of this, but this is the one I'm writing about.)
I consider that unacceptable. Send me. I'm not doing much with my life, and I'm an A&P student.
Are we really so afraid to lose anyone that we are unwilling to risk losing people who would volunteer? People who we could tell, honestly, that we'll be sending them out with the very best technology the world has to offer? That we'll be supporting to the best of our abilities? That we'll be training to the very highest standards?
Every frontier has danger, outer space is certianly not an exception to that. We're not going to get back into space if we're unwilling to take a few risks, and those risks by definition involve death. But then, a lot of folks died during the exploration of the Western US, and nobody will look back and say "Man, exploring Colorado was totally not worth those five guys who drowned in a river."
Every frontier has danger, outer space is certianly not an exception to that. We're not going to get back into space if we're unwilling to take a few risks, and those risks by definition involve death. But then, a lot of folks died during the exploration of the Western US, and nobody will look back and say "Man, exploring Colorado was totally not worth those five guys who drowned in a river."
I am going to die. I could do that on Earth, or someone could send an A&P to Mars to help build a permanent Martian base, and I could die there. Heh, I could die halfway there, when the spaceship gets smashed by a meteorite. It really doesn't matter to me, I won't be able to stop any of it.
Safety isn't unimportant, but it's often overrated. In the end, we're all dead. Let's do something with our lives that benefits future generations, shall we? It might not be safe, but nothing is, so let's do the best we can, with what we have, and make the rest up as we go along.
Safety isn't unimportant, but it's often overrated. In the end, we're all dead. Let's do something with our lives that benefits future generations, shall we? It might not be safe, but nothing is, so let's do the best we can, with what we have, and make the rest up as we go along.
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