the red planet

Ah, the Red Planet. I was more a Venus guy, probably just because the red planet got all the press and I was always a contrary guy. There was some thought that there was some kind of jungle under those mysterious clouds. It would be pretty hot for sure, but that just meant scantily clad native women. What’s a third eye to a horny teenage boy?

That sulfuric acid rain killed it. Oh sure if you stood on the surface of Mars you would die from lack of air, and probably freeze to death pretty quickly if you had some kind of oxygen mask, but it beats being melted in sulfuric acid rain.

I guess the Indians thought there were the right amount of people in the Americas, but we white guys showed them there was plenty of room for more, plenty of room Jack, move over into these dry lands, but if they have oil you’ll have to move again.

So I imagine you have plenty of room now, or do you ever go the border of Beaglesonia and twitch your nose and squint your eyes and think your neighbor is too damn close. Of course I don’t mind that my neighbors are on the other side of the wall and the ceiling and the floor and the next building over to the north, south, east, and west, until the mind boggles. One thing about the city is you are kind of free as what to what you do because nobody cares unless it holds up traffic. Hunting and fishing are pretty impractical though.

Whoever is talking about sending people to the Mars to colonize it is either loony or a mountebank. We can probably rig up a rocket to get there and maybe land safely, which would cost an arm and a leg, but as far as establishing a colony of anybody who is going to anything more than starve to death in a few years, that is not in the foreseeable future. As long as we are on the subject of doing things that we can’t do, why don’t we establish colonies near those deep sea cracks where there are all those strange animals and minerals galore? Hey wouldn’t that be more fun to visit than playing space solitaire for years and then looking at red rocks when you get there?

These guys who think they want to go to Mars, what I’d do is march them all into this space capsule and then we would take away the cardboard that made it look like a capsule and it would be a bus, with chicken wire on all the windows, and headed straight for the loony bin, and I’d lock them up and throw away the key.

It’s not like even if their fondest wish came true, they would be like Dan’l Boone, having adventures with Indians and shooting rabbits and roasting them over campfires, they will be cramped into some little glass and steel thing tighter than a submarine and the only thing to see when they looked out the window, if they had a window, was nothing, because that is all there is out there. They would be a lot happier in their nut house, which we would call Mars, just to make them happy. I am not a cruel man.