The New York Times today has its Science Section devoted entirely to the anniversary of humans landing on the moon successfully.  That these astronauts were American was something to flaunt in the faces of our opponent, Russia, and give America a problem that we have lived with since.  Should we have gone to the moon?  We have been there and done that.  Now what? On to Mars?          

This event has made its mark on those of us interested enough to follow on Television and read about in the print media.  It was truly amazing and for some, like Carol whom I met ten years later, it was a waste of resources that could have been spent on making our lives here on earth better.

There were a lot like me.  I was a science fiction devotee since I learned how to read.  Jules Verne started it but others had taken the problems of off earth survival and ran with them.  The theoretical problems that were bruited about back then were something like this:  If you needed equipment on an airless moon would you bring a pistol or an oxygen tank?  I'm not sure if I got the mix correctly but the answers were interesting.  The pistol shot, if you were lost, could let others know where you were.  Wrong!  The moon has no atmosphere so the sound could not travel and there were no life forms that you needed to protect yourself against.

You certainly needed oxygen but how could you hook it up to your helmet and would there be enough to get you from there to here when you needed it?  These problems before the space station and regular trips back and forth to it pale before the simple one of how to eliminate your wastes and what to do with them?

Carol decried (properly as I think about it) the waste of money to go where one could not live and we seem to be the only life forms in the universe.  She is more practical than I and knows how to add up a profit and loss statement.  I am content to speculate and read books about life on planets where aliens who want to gobble us up need to be disposed of before they eat us all up. There is something utopian in this kind of speculation.  What kind of society will off world settlers develop?

My science fiction is not all that great.  Most writers in the genre were either of the poetic kind or the matter of fact talking reality mathematically minded who solved problems of how to get from here to there - and back again.

We have been there and done that.  Is there life beyond the black holes, dying suns and whizzing asteroids and erratic pieces of other places and other times that visit us from time to time?  I don't think we will find life other than next door. Our real problems revolve about creating utopias here on earth.