"Because I don't want to stay here... anymore!"

Since it seems none of my co-authors have taken the opportunity to post today, I will fill the void, as usual.  I feel that, 9 years later, everything that needs to be written about September 11th has been written, re-written, discussed, regurgitated, and repeated, ad nauseam, so I have no intention of doing that here.

Instead, I'd like to take the discussion in a new direction - literally.  What 9-11 should have reminded us, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that at the moment, humanity's eggs are all in a single and very fragile basket.  That basket is of course Earth.  The loss of lives on 9-11 should not be trivialized, and should not be dismissed - and that is not what I am trying to do here.  The 2,996 innocent individuals who died in the attacks was a tragic and senseless loss of life.  Of that, there is no question.

But there are several disasters, some man-made, some natural, both of which could result in the end of humans on this planet - all 7,000,000,000 of us.  In the first category we have nuclear weapons, global warming, and WWIII, to name a few.  In the latter category we have super-volcanoes, massive earthquakes, asteroid strikes, and ice ages.  The dinosaurs ruled this planet until one day out of nowhere (as far as they were concerned) an asteroid smacked the planet and they went quickly extinct.  That's why we're here.  Asteroid strikes are the rule, not the exception.  Even today, while we can detect some of them, there are no guarantees.  If there was a two-mile wide asteroid headed for Earth that we did not or could not detect (assuming we couldn't launch Bruce Willis in time) we're all screwed.



This is why the manned space program is important.  Yes, robotic exploration is wonderful.  Yes, the ISS is an achievement and certainly has helped our understanding of long-duration spaceflight.  BUT, and it's a huge but - we cannot currently get a single human being off this rock and out of Low Earth Orbit ("LEO").  Not a single one.  On December 19, 1972, Apollo 17, the final lunar landing mission splashed down in the Pacific, and we haven't managed to leave LEO since.  We've got to reach for the stars again - unless of course we want to find ourselves like the dinosaurs.  All this progress, all this advancement, all could disappear in a single, bright, ejecta-spewing flash.