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09/01/2004: "Target: Space!"
Today's announcement from the Bush administration of a landmark speech by the President next week presenting his vision for manned spaceflight could not have made me happier.
The vision should include the setting of concrete objectives for a permanent manned presence on the Moon, sending a man on Mars, choosing a new space vehicle to replace the Shuttle and unprecendented tranfers of technology with the Pentagon.
Since I was 8, I had the dream of going to Mars and was looking forward to working on the Moon. Being a business student, I have been joking (not entirely unseriously) with friends about starting my own orbital space hotel company and expressed my wish to have my office on the Moon. Robert A. Heinlein's vision, who helped produce Destination Moon (1950), lives on!
But beyond my idealism and romantic space dreams, what is certainly more interesting to us free thinking Europeans is discussing the motivations behind the Bush administration's broad push of the US space agenda. Coming to my mind are words such as reelection, historical legacy and the fear of waking up with a Chinese, a Russian, an Indian, or, worse of all, a French, picknicking on the Moon.
I am secretly hoping for an insightful article in the Guardian or in The Economist about the remifications and consequences of Bush's agenda in light of the current international security context.
Besides this nice development, I had a very ordinary day at the library, learning for my exams. This perfectly forgettable day would have gone completely unnoticed in my life (the food being playing a major role in this) had I not had the pleasure of eating with three friends, one of which started a very intense discussion right in the middle of the loud cafeteria.
He had just been speaking on his mobile phone, hung up, and asked point-blank: Do you think God is fair? We debated this question on a variety of aspects, such as:
▪ the seamingly unequal repartition of fairness among people vs. the idea that each person is tested according to God-given, unfathomable criterias and it's up to him/her to individually find meaning in the face of hardship
▪ the definition of God (is God fair ex hypothesi, because he is defined as Fairness?) vs. whether God plays our own cards and leaves us little room for self determination - hence is not fair.
In the end, we nearly forgot to ask why this sudden question. But, luckily, the friend managed to dodge, once again.
