What's the Buzz?

Noted Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin returned to his hometown of Montclair, New Jersey on June 2, 2013 to receive honors for his illustrious career.  Montclair declared the day "Buzz Aldrin Day" and gave him the key to the town in a ceremony that was attended by many of the town's distinguished residents. And I, a resident of the town that gave the world noted Watergate burglar and right-wing nut G. Gordon Liddy, was there too.  The pictures in this post are my own. :-)   

 Buzz Aldrin, second from left, with: top, Montclair Mayor Robert Jackson; from left, Councilors Renée Baskerville, William Hurlock, and Rich McMahon.

Aldrin took advantage of the day to promote his new idea for space exploration outlined in his new book, "Mission To Mars."  He doesn't just want to send people to Mars and back; he wants to have people colonize Mars.  The idea would be to establish a base on Mars to explore the Red Planet and make a permanent home for people there in order to expand human civilization in an effort to put the United States ahead of other countries in technology and space exploration.

Gee, and I just want us to have bullet trains.

Buzz Aldrin and Mark Porter, editor of the Montclair (N.J.) Times, discuss space exploration at the Montclair Public Library. 

Don't get me wrong.  Buzz Aldrin - whom I first saw in person when he rode in Montclair's Independence Day parade in 1976, the year of the U.S. Bicentennial - is a great man and a genuine hero.  But his ideas about colonizing Mars are impractical.  Mars would be difficult to reach and even more difficult to inhabit, given that it has less of an atmosphere.  Though there is evidence that Mars has had water in the past, there's not much there now.

Also, you'd need a longer calendar.  Mars revolves around the sun in twice the time that Earth does.  That'll certainly make it hard to celebrate holidays and even harder to remember wedding anniversaries.

Aldrin says that one reason to have a permanent settlement on Mars is to have a fallback planet for human civilization in case meteors strike Earth or we have nuclear accidents.  Though he envisions human history benefiting from such a plan hundreds of thousands of years from now, I've been fearing the greater likelihood  of humankind not lasting even hundreds or thousands of years from now.  We're expected to run out of oil on this planet before 2100.  I don't see how we're going to get to Mars - or fly to London - in a future like that.            

Space exploration is great.  But right now we have an obligation to preserve the only planet we have right now.  And as for meteors hitting us - well, that will make it all moot, won't it?  Let's start healing Earth before journeying to Mars.

And I still want those bullet trains.

These opinions of space exploration, by the way, are strictly my own, and I do not express them with the intent of disparaging Mr. Aldrin or anyone else.