Time seemed curiously stretched tonight. Last night. Whatever you want to call it. My normal shift, yet each hour took forever and by the time I left this morning I felt like I'd been there two days. Came blinking out into the bright sun, shrinking away like an albino cave animal.

One tends to forget that we have a gigantic nuclear fusion furnace only eight lightminutes away, perpetually blasting our planet with radiation of all sorts. At least until the hydrogen gets a little short, but I expect by then somehow we'd have bought or stolen a clue and gotten our collective rear ends off this mudball one way or another. One thing never in short supply is the near-sightedness of the human species. You want a list of why we should develop a manned space program and colonize Mars? Okay, here's one: Asteroids, Black Holes, Supernovae, our sun's increasing energy output which will result in all life on the planet being burnt to crispy critters, increasingly virulent bacteria and viruses, increasing planet-wide pollution and toxification, population pressure, overuse of resources, intellectual and scientific stagnation... Need I go on?

And reasons why we shouldn't develop manned space transport? Well, I'd list them but compared to the reasons for going they all seem pretty lame. You people are worried about fighting a war over oil and whether or not to give more money to the rich when an asteroid could wipe out all life on this planet in a few hundredths of a second? Er, uhm... you can't bribe an asteroid. And no one seems interested in fixing the things we could fix.

Give me four space-based radar satellites, a few robot spacecraft with ion engines and the launchers to deliver them and I could keep the planet safe from asteroids. Can't do anything about black holes or supernovae, but I'd have the means to detect and deal with asteroids before they get too close to do anything about. $5 Billion a year. That's 5 days in Iraq. It's called Space Guard, and there isn't a congressman in this country who would fund it.

Space issues aren't fashionable in Washington. Must be why not one of the major or larger minor parties really has any substantial policy on it. So I'm kind of in limbo politically, since no one is really addressing the issues I care about. Guess I'm one of those lunatic fringe types. What I need to do is have a kid, be a single mother, lose my job, go on welfare, get a chronic disease requiring medicines bought cheaper in Canada and get married to a burned-out Marine deployed in Iraq. Then maybe I'll have some issues.