Once, a page failed to load and gave me this IP address along with an error message. Concerned, I entered the IP address into an IP address locator and found this farm. The street view image looked the same as the photograph in the article. I realized that this was probably just a location given for the center of the US (or a location of just the US) and I ignored it, never realizing that I would ever see it again, before I saw this article and I realized that that was what it was. They should probably just map these things to somewhere where people are more likely to realize that this is just a sort of glitch, like 0,0 or the North Pole.

After the test flights, we need to use these solar sailing spacecraft for actual exploration of the solar system. Solar Sailing should be in use for probes by now. It's been too long... It could be a much cheaper alternative to chemical propulsion, and it and ion drives are the future. Maybe these propulsion techniques could eventually be used for manned spaceflight. But what we are really waiting for is nuclear propulsion. If we sent a large spacecraft, constructed in orbit, and powered with Project Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion, or project Daedalus-style nuclear propulsion, we could be to Alpha Centauri in the same period of time it took for Voyager to leave the Solar System. But the folks in Washington don't want to divert money from short term, human goals to make this possible. Not to mention the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It needs to be revised so we can do it legally.

No one in the government really cares about space flight very much these days, except for the people at NASA. No wonder NASA has less than one percent of the entire national budget. On the other hand, no one wants to stop pouring trillions into the massive military. I guess human exploration of the comos isn't very high on their priority list...

I think that "suffocation" might be a better analogy, because there is nothing actually strangling the galaxy or physically obstructing the flow of anything to the galaxy, and with the suffocation analogy the galaxy is running out of gas (oxygen in the analogy), while metals (Carbon Dioxide in the analogy) build up. "Strangulation" probably isn't the best analogy. Starvation is probably not a complete analogy, because in starvation, nothing really builds up. It is mostly just an absence of food (which is present in this situation, although the buildup of metals is not included in the starvation analogy). However, the campfire analogy makes a lot of sense, as in the campfire analogy ash (metals) build up while the wood (gas) is used up. However, I wouldn't call it "starvation", I would call it "suffocation".