Space...

Most things of import that occur in the world of space stuff are admirably covered by Herr Wakmeister in his splendid blog (see TeamWak on the right)

However, I too have a love of all things extra terrestrial and will occasionally weigh in with my tuppenceworth.....and here it is.

The planet's buggered. And we buggered it up. Whether or not you subscribe to the great CO2 debate (to be covered on another day) or not, we need to start the "Save Humanity" campaign rather than "Save the Planet" which is our current focus.

The planet will be just fine until it is swallowed by our sun a few billion years - or the Milky Way collides with another galaxy (wouldn't mind tickets to watch that one!) In the slightly shorter term though, there's a damn good chance that humanity will be wiped out by either our own self-destructive tendencies or by failing to evolve to suit our changing environment.

So we really, really need to start looking at leaving our solar system and finding somewhere else to pollute/destroy. This will take at least 100 years even if we start now - we've got to develop propulsion systems that can shift a space ship at a minimum of 0.5 light speed, ideally FTL. Then we've got to test it, overcome the issues of cosmic radiation and cryogenisis, FIND a decent planet, perhaps terraform it a bit and then figure out who gets to go to the new world(s).

If the yanks try, it won't work. If anyone else tries, the yanks will nuke them unless they hand over the keys and agree that the new world will be called the United States of America II.

We need all the world leaders to take a slightly longer perspective view than 'your grandad killed my grandad so I'm going to enslave you and all your relatives' and actually look at the survival of the species.

Any offers?