MY View

BY JOHN McLOONE

Let’s fix things on our home planet

We live in a strange world indeed.

Apparently traveling to space has become the new hot vacation place for billionaires.

Sure, it’s their money, but why not leave a legacy doing something more useful to mankind as it exists today. There are countless diseases – cancer, first and foremost – where billions of dollars could help us find a cure, once and for all.

That’s not going to happen by trying to stake a claim on Mars.

I’ll admit it was cool when Americans first walked on the moon. But aside from cool pictures, what’s the use of going to space, in terms of prioritizing the needs of present day society. It doesn’t stop any wars. It’s not solving the crisis on our borders. If you are a believer that climate change is a crisis, are we going to space to abandon earth? Heck, we still have potholes on my drive to the office. As a civilization, we should fix those first, then go to space.

We do a lot of things that perhaps we should prioritize. I know a lot of people believe schools should teach things more useful. I certainly can get on board with that. I’ll age myself, but I remember when calculators came out that didn’t need to be hauled around in the back of a truck. What an invention! Yet, my math teachers weren’t on board with this incredible innovation. They still made me sit through class and draw all kinds of diagrams and carry ones and zeroes and figure out what goes into what. Little did I know when I was pulling C plusses in advanced math that I’d never in my life need to show my work in the real world. Geez, I feel sorry for the people that were really trying on their homework every night.

Don’t even get me started on science. Was there really any reason I was cutting open a frog as a high schooler? In the back of my mind, I think that was a way for teachers to let law enforcement know who the potential serial killers were. If you enjoyed it, you were put on some kind of watch list.

I do appreciate that there were people better suited to some of those endeavors than were I. They’re the ones we need now to get that money being blown by going to space to solve our real problems.

We don’t need to go to space. Our planet has some crowded cities, but some people live there because that’s the lifestyle they like. They aren’t going to want to move to Jupiter. You think it’s tough talking half of Americans into getting vaccinated to stop a pandemic? Just wait until you tell them they have to move to Mars. Plus, there’s plenty of room for people in the Dakotas, isn’t there?

Needless to say, billionaires going to space doesn’t impress me. We can’t mail a letter across the street in under two days, but we can be in the cosmos in a half-hour? Let’s do some useful things right here on our home planet first.