Anonymous Coward,

There is much truth in what you write. I got involved in this crowd back in the 1970s after reading Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. It was a thought provoking, impressive book. My involvement, though, was moderate and independent. While, at the beginning of my interest, I wanted to get to L5 by 95, I eventually realized that it would not be L5 by 1995 but more like L5 by 2495. O'Neill made significant proposals that appealed to me. Instead of adventure trips to the Moon or Mars, he -- and others -- proposed doing things like building space based solar power satellites to benefit humans on Earth. They are still in the future, but could come about in the future. There are many problems to solve, though.

Sending people to Mars? Let's see. Mars does not have a geomagnetic sphere to protect it from solar outbursts. People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens Martian atmosphere is very thin. At ground level atmospheric pressure is only 1% of Earth. That is not nearly enough. Martian gravity is less than half of Earth's. Is that enough? We shall have to experiment.

There is one place on Earth that explorers have explored since we have had written records -- Antarctica. It wasn't even discovered until 1820. The first expedition to Antarctica was the Scott expedition a century ago. We started building bases there after World War 2. Quite a few humans have now lived there -- at least for a short time. Same gravity, same atmosphere, same geomagnetic sphere. Just much colder.

The optimist in me thinks we humans will, eventually, live and work in places other than Earth. It is going to take a good bit of learning, though.

Enough for now.

I must step in here and make a few comments because I am both a tech person and an artist. How did that happen? When I was graduating from Rutgers with a degree in physics, my parents gave me a nice 35 mm camera outfit. A decade later the Princeton Ballet was paying me for my ballet photos. Photography has always been an important hobby of mine. It has also helped me in important ways at work. It has helped me to develop an artistic side that communicates better than too many tech people. It also helps me to understand society -- both the larger one and the tech one -- better than most.

Let me point people to my Flickr site where I am known as Chuck Divine. There are over 40,000 images there. My Science Fiction Art has gotten me attention in Washington, DC art circles.

I eventually got into IT, partly because I was good at it, partly because I liked doing it and partly because I could make a decent living at it. My career has taken me to all sorts of places -- including NASA. At NASA where I saw some good people doing good work -- and some screwing up so badly that it caused major accidents like that which happened to the Space Shuttle Columbia. Do check out the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. It is a well done analysis of a tech organization that needs significant reform.

I have also gotten involved in the STEM problem. Some of us are calling it the STEAM problem. The A stands for the Arts. It seems that scientists and engineers with an artistic side are more productive in their tech field than people without that side. They also work better with other people, tech and not tech. Some years ago I wrote a public policy paper titled Aerospace Workforce Issues that gets into this topic in some depth.

Let me finish by telling people here that people who know me describe me as bright, friendly and a bit shy and quiet -- most of the time.

That's more than enough for now. I hope I have been able to get some tech people to consider opening their minds a bit.