Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I just watched a move teaser/trailer that I want to share with all space dreamers:

There are more here on the official Man Conquers Space website.

I have opined here many times here about how sad it makes me that we did not grab ahold of the vision of Werner von Braun and Krafft Ehricke and other space engineers of the first part of the twentieth century and their very big dreams for the latter half. This movie asks the question of what kind of world we’d be living in if instead of pouring our money into a completely pointless nuclear arms escalation — a technology where the best thing we can say about it is that we never used it — we instead poured it into pushing humanity into the stars.

We had the science well underway to put space station up in the fifties. Moon bases up in the early sixties, and Mars bases up in the late sixties. Full colonization of Mars in the seventies. Terraforming of Mars in the eighties. Asteroid mining and bases on the Jovian moons in the nineties. A half billion humans living and working off the surface of the Earth by the turn of the millenium. And then on to the stars in this twenty-first century!

But instead we have mountains and mountains of useless and extremely expensive weapons stockpiled or already disposed of. Wastes of money where the best thing that we can hope for them is that they continue to be only wastes of money, not wastes of life as well. In a world of unbridled wealth, with enough resources and riches for every person to live in luxury we still have artificially created caste and class systems, artificially created scarcity, and completely fraudulent poverty and all the misery that comes with it. Looking at the way humans squander their intellectual gifts bringing misery to each other for tiny rewards of individual greed, it’s hard to be optimistic that we’ll ever conquer space, let alone our own vices and personal shortcomings.

That said, I am very excited for April 24th, not just because it’s both my brother’s and my daughter’s birthday, but because a mysterious company, controlled by various Google Execs, Space Entrepreneurs, James Cameron, and other forward thinkers, called “Planetary Resources” is making a “big announcement”. Word is that they’re going to be announcing the beginning of commercial asteroid mining, which I have to admit is very exciting. In one of my recent rocketry posts I mentioned that a few major mining corporations are realizing that mining the moon is starting to make financial sense… perhaps capitalism will succeed where previous dreamers have failed? Gosh I hope I get to live long enough to see it happen.