This past Monday, the Space Shuttle Endeavour took its final journey into space. When Atlantis blasts off in June, it will signal the end of NASA's shuttle program...and possibly the end of the human species. Why does the shuttle program matter? Because if we abandon our progress in developing manned spaceflight, we will never be able to escape Earth in case of an emergency. Can we blame President Obama for this? Of course we can. But is he the only one to blame? Yeah, pretty much.

For our species to survive, we need a Plan B. The simple mathematical fact is that we have a finite number of resources and space but an ever-growing population. At some point we will have to either branch out or pick a group in society and start eating them. (You'd think the homeless, right? Wrong. Too tough and gamey.)

No more of this. "And the cries of the space nerd were heard throughout the quadrant.">

Additionally, any number of disasters could destroy the earth or render it uninhabitable, such as the following:

• Global warming melts the polar ice caps (as well as our soft, non-lizardy bodies)
• A meteor crashes into the earth
• A plague rips through the population that turns people angry, violent and hungry for brains (hmmm, what could we call that?)
• Apes or even dolphins become super intelligent and rise up to dominate us
• The particle accelerator opens up a black hole that swallows the earth

When one of these situations arises, the first thing people will say is "All right, I've seen Battlestar Galactica. Where are the spaceships?" Where will President Obama be then? Vanished through a cloud of ninja ball smoke. Now is not the time to end the shuttle program. If anything, we should be expanding the program so we don't find ourselves knocking on the closed door of the Russians' space ark one day, as the world burns down around us.

Some people (hippies) would argue that NASA needs less funding. They say we should fix our problems at home, like feeding the hungry, before we go exploring space. But unlimited bananas come as little consolation when they're fed to you through the bars of your cage in an ape death camp. Besides, was it not Confucius who said, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Build that man a spaceship and his descendants will live forever on a distant planet where the fish weigh 500 pounds and gladly lay down their lives to feed their land-walking overlords who came from the sky"?

Unrealistic glamorization of ape-dominated world.

If something destroys Earth or us upon it, our species is doomed. This planet was never meant to be our only home. Even on Earth, we started in Africa but we didn't stay there. We spread out. We need to keep spreading. Our goal should be to colonize at least one other planet (or forest moon; I'm not picky) by the end of the decade. We first visited the moon in 1969 and that's as far as we've been. We have a lot to do to save mankind.

At the very least, we should have one big shuttle ready with a few people, some representative Earth artifacts (iPhone, bar of gold, machine gun, etc.) and a thumb drive loaded with all the data from Wikipedia. To use a tired cliche, let's not put all our eggs in one basket. Which reminds me, make sure to have both women and men on the ship. Radical feminism and the societal emasculation of men will one day allow us to evolve into self-reproducing androgynoids, but we're not there yet.

DO YOU THINK WE NEED TO WORRY ABOUT FINDING AN ESCAPE ROUTE FROM EARTH?

I'd rather go down
with the ship

 

Take me to my new home

 

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