Gingrich vows to make the Moon 51st State by 2020 if Elected

Because the internet usually presents good opinions.

I genuinely believe that what made the US great was the dreams of the people who built it. The same, of course, goes for any country; but the US, for the last 100 years, was a special place for those of us who when we were kids dreamed that we would participate in the progress of humanity. We dreamed that we could do something that we can't even dream about.

In Europe, there's still plenty of hope that that kind of attitude is encouraged. We have CERN and many other fine institutions that feed our dreams.

The US had something that went a vast distance - the distance from Earth to the Moon - beyond what others built. Even the USSR, which built is space program at the expense of everything except the military - everything except the propaganda and military went underfunded to enable their progress in the space race - even they couldn't compete with NASA.

The US could easily afford NASA, and with that relatively little effort, they reached goals that were so far beyond what people had expected to see in their lifetime that there are still conspiracy nuts saying that they staged the whole thing! Generations of children grew up going "wow!" at the accomplishments of their country every day.

Then, after the Space Race, the US started to give up on that. They basically went "oh, we don't need the dreams of our children, we don't need our children to grow up to be top of the world in all these fields of communication, engineering, aeronautics, chemistry, etc." The idea seems to be that once you've reached the top once, it's OK to let everyone go past you while you sit and watch them go by.

As a European, I'm from a continent that did that before, but fortunately enough, we're trying to reach the top again. I would advice Americans to do the same: you reached the top, now keep hold of it.

Don't give up on your pipe dreams of space conquest. Don't give up on solving the mysteries of the Universe. Don't give up on securing the future of mankind.

Of course, someone has already said all this much better than me:

Best Of, in a good and proper world, what you said would be taken for granted.

Such is not true of the world, however.

Our industry was very different back then though . To put that kind of effort and such into this it would have to be an international effort.

(God it hard not to bring comparisons to Gundam 00 into this... But that is what it would probably look like.)

edited 26th Jan '12 5:37:41 AM by Raso

I would like to point out one huge, glaring difference between historical colonization and moon colonization that renders virtually any comparison between them pointless and inflammatory: There are no indigenous people on the moon.

Any further comparisons which ignore that point will be assumed to be flamebait and thumped as such

edited 26th Jan '12 6:35:33 AM by Madrugada

Two different things, true, Madruga, but the conflation already happened in the OP, and with such inflammatory things in the OP of course people commented on that. Because it would be more terrible than off-topicness if an apologia for colonial imperialism were left to go uncommented.

I thought this thread was a bad idea from the start and I still do. Given the number of thumps and mod mode posts it's accumulated in its short life, I think it would be best if we scrap it and start over, with a nice generic topic like Space Colonization. If someone would like to start that thread, with a less inflammatory OP, I'll open it and lock this one.

There is already space colonization thread, two of them as far as I know.

Ah, yes. Here's one. I just did a quick look, maybe you can find the other one. But let's merge into that discussion, okay? I'm closing this one.

Here's the other.

edited 26th Jan '12 6:55:49 AM by Madrugada