by David Maloy

Created on: March 15, 2010   Last Updated: March 23, 2010

We are starting to talk about going to Mars more and more every day.  Many still want to put all our efforts into building on the moon and others want to expand and create more space stations.  But when it's all said and done, we all know the next step after that will be Mars.  

It would be ideal to be able to find a more "Earthlike" planet out there, but the problem is the time it would take to get there and simply running out of gas on the way.  If there was a way to tap into the perpetual motion that drives the Cosmos and turn it into propulsion, our way of looking at the world would change drastically as a whole.  No need for oil drilling and the over population and resource problems we face today would be things of legends.

We have been looking for a way to build a perpetual motion machine for a long time but we've been flying around in one forever.  Literally.  

Who's to say whether or not humankind will figure out how to harness that power?   Greed could be seen as being silly within that scenario and since more and more people are waking up to the fact that we are all in this thing together every day, I tend to believe that humankind would not "as a whole" abuse that power being harnessed.

Who knows?  The Mars project could be sidestepped completely if we find a way to get to other star systems quick enough.  It is human nature to spread out and explore.  A child is full of wonder for a reason it would seem.  Exploration is what we do.  To deny that we are explorers is to deny the wonder of a child or the nature of curiosity that drives leaps of consciousness and the understanding of this world we live in of which Earth is a part and not the sum.

Since we wouldn't have to worry about running out of resources, we wouldn't have to go after planets which are inhabited if indeed there are some.  The chances are that there are many that are also uninhabited.

In 2008 Steven Hawking said "At the moment we have nowhere else to go, but in the long run the human race should not have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. I just hope we can avoid dropping the basket until then."  He is so right.  We don't know what's going to happen...  We can work hard to make this planet prosper and grow with us but at the same time, we have to know that at any moment a meteor could be on the horizon ready to take us all out or something could happen to the Sun...  And it won't matter how green we become or how many trees we've hugged that morning.  The trees will be gone too.

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