This Space for Rent

Did we blow it?

35 years ago (give or take a couple of weeks) the USA put people on the nearest planet. Sure, it was a publicity stunt, but it was a really good publicity stunt.

These days, I dunno. We can spend a couple of hundred billion dollars (and several tens of thousands of lives, but in the eyes of our overlords they don't count, being meaningless civilians and soldiers) doing a stupid little revenge war, but spending even a tenth that on getting off this rock before our overlords manage to collapse the ecosystem doesn't seem to be worth the paper the speech is written on.

Somehow, seeing good copies of these picture feels like the saddest thing in the world; that once upon a time we could get an occupied phonebooth 1.2 lightseconds out and back, and now the various space agencies have to scrabble for money to get, well, anything.