I’ve been thinking about this piece by maha quite a lot over the past day.

Hillary Dems (and many others) have of late promoted the myth of incremental change — that America only does things slowly and gradually. Even the briefest glance at our history is enough to demonstrate this is certainly not the case. This got me thinking about something else related to a topic maha mentions: the US going to the moon.

I heavily favor into space exploration, Mars colonies and the like — not because it has a purpose but precisely because it serves no direct purpose.

Is not doing cool things enough? And even if it were not, isn’t spurring tens of thousands of people to generate technologies and entire areas of science de novo worth something?

I think it is. As I said, I don’t want to go to Mars because it’s easy or because there’s an economic reason to do so; no, I want to do so precisely because it is hard and because there is not.

Yeah, the ancillary effects (both technologically and socio-culturally) will be great, but even that isn’t a justification in my mind but rather a side benefit.

It’s just that we need big, wild projects to fire the human spirit, to give us a direction that isn’t bombing brown people to freedom, to have us look at some distant red speck in the sky and say: “Holy crap, we put people there. What can’t we do here?”

Take a trillion a year from the military budget and let’s get started.