Here's a newer and better pic of the red planet. You know, to you, it might just look like a buncha rocks. But I see direct democracy, absolute civil liberties, and the nan driven economy. We don't even need a basic income guaranteed because we're self sufficient in terms of housing and food and air. Plus, the nan bots kiss our toes and massage our neural pleasure centers. I also see a place where I can get laid and take relatively harmless drugs without getting arrested, although I do understand that you can get the really dangerous alcohols and cigs on the red planet's black market. I see cities named Metropolis and Gotham and Teen Town. I see them thriving 24 hours a day full of bazaars and festivals and mayhem. Everybody who works likes what they do. That's what I see. It's all a matter of perspective.

Then there's the Bush plan. I used to have these arguments with my right wing cousin Todd Jackson about how horrible American exploration would look if it was done under current "American" rules. An outer space where I wouldn't get health care and probably get tossed out of an airlock if I was found defective in any way or hated America. I wrote a story about it called "The Drear and Thoroughly Depressing Jackson Todd Continuum". In that story, I imagine an open sourced solution to gravity propulsion where the United States creates a Microsoft-only, slave labor space station and where the EU takes Mars and makes it a decent place to live.

Don't get me wrong. I think we should go to Mars, and I agree with my Better Humans editor Simon Smith that self-directed evolution would go a long way toward making the trip more beneficial. Does anyone recall the horror show that was Frederick Pohl's "Man Plus"?...That was just a bionic freakshow left alone on Mars. We could do all that stuff cleaner and smaller with an evolved form of biotech and nan. Another corporate horror show disguised as Solar system exploration would have to be John Barnes' "Orbital Resonance" which I once described as Anne Frank writing from a Brave New World.

But it's important that we get off the planet. Can't keep all of our eggs in one basket.



But, again, there's the Bush plan. By the time he's done it will look like a massive giveaway to the usual suspects. I guess space will be the fourth arm of this century's Iron Triangle. Dean has always had a plan to go to Mars by the way. I'm hoping that he does it the right way, which means turning the Pentagon's spending into peaceful, cooperative space exploration. This is the opposite of using space exploration as a cover for the military dominion of space, which is probably the true meaning of the Bush plan for space.