Long before any human sets foot on Mars, you will be able to explore Mars and the moon virtually, in your living room, or perhaps, at lesser expense, in a Starbuck's type venue, as there are opportunities for big bucks to be made.
You will don a helmet with a view screen and delve into, and navigate google maps, just as though you were there. You will be alone, though the worlds will be swarming with other explorers. Eventually other planets, Saturn's moons, will be open for exploration. Would-be astronauts won't leave a mark behind, nor any other residue from the visit.
This is one of the next big technological developments, and will probably quell all desire and expense of space travel and promote better care of unique Earth, maybe the only place humans can call home.
I wonder, what with forty-one dictatorships around the world, and a wannabe in the White House, whether one day historians will look upon this time as THE ERA OF THE ASCENDANCY OF THE PASKUDNYAKS.
Author’s note: Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible towrite in a style that is comfortable for me’
My Dear Trill,
This day, the celebration of a specfic resurrection that is written to have occurred in biblical times - a return to life after death - often takes on a broader meaning. “Coming back to life” can be a renewal in any number of ways. We live in a time when ten disparate nations are in possession of over sixteen thousand nuclear bombs. Some of the governments are headed by lunatics. Somehow, if civilization is to survive, things must change.
I cannot blame you for being apprehensive about the future, much less be sanguine. Historically there have been other times of stressed relations, misunderstandings, rise of empire building despots, and consequent wars. I am reminded today of the famous work, written in 1919 (following WWI) by William Butler Yeats
THE SECOND COMING
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
