Take us to Mars

Ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, this week the International Olympic Committee removed the Olympic Torch from its Illuminati cathedral in Jay-Z’s basement and sent it to outer space. The torch traveled with three astronauts to the International Space Station, where they will later take it on a spacewalk.

Because if there’s one thing a fire likes, it’s an incredibly cold vacuum.

Regardless of the flame’s chances for survival, it will actually remain unlit to avoid consuming precious oxygen aboard the ISS — sending the torch to space is just an important symbol. The Olympic Games are the single most successful expression of peace between nations in the history of the world.

Sending the torch to space is a symbol of how far humans have traveled.

But we must also use it as a reminder of how far we have to go.

Colonizing space is the next step in human civilization, and we remain — for the foreseeable future — depressingly earthbound.

In June, a House committee asked Thomas Young, a former executive at Lockheed Martin, how long it will take NASA to put a human on Mars with its current budget. His response: “Never.”

Now, I’m a good little liberal and don’t want to see money going to exploring Mars if it should be going to funding schools.

At the same time, there’s exactly one agency in the United States government that is actually fundamentally necessary to the long-term survival of the human species: NASA.

Over the long term, it is a mathematical certainty that an asteroid will hit Earth and a large portion of the human population will die. In fact, a study just published in Nature found that it’s 10 times more likely this will happen in the short-term than we previously thought.

We used to think an asteroid had to be 100 feet long to do any damage. But the one that recently exploded over Russia with the force of 40 nuclear bombs was only 62 feet long.

So I’m building a bunker and never leaving it.

But for the rest of you — because the only other person allowed in my bunker is Scarlett Johansson, if she so desires — you need to jump ship.

That starts with the moon, of course. Unfortunately, only one American politician in recent memory has made serious attempts to get us to live on the moon, and, fortunately, that man did not get elected president.

You might remember him being lampooned on Saturday Night Live as Moon President Newt Gingrich.

The irony is that making a colony on the moon was the best idea presented in the 2012 elections.

From there on, we need to terraform Mars to make it habitable, a feat which NASA says is technically feasible. But it will take hundreds of years, so we need to get started now.

Unless you’re trying to be a serf in Luke and Scarlett’s post-apocalyptic kingdom, start talking to your representatives about getting us to Mars.

— shlumorg@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Luke Morgan on Twitter @shlumorg.