[Furious D 18]

Predicide, I may have to delete that thread because it's spam. This is your first warning. Ha ha, just kidding. Nice topic starter.

Holy quote-zorz. That's a lot of space quotes. I browsed quite a few, and thought that this one was appropriate since you mentioned the war in Iraq.

"War and space exploration are alternative uses of the assertive, exploratory energies that are so characteristic of human beings. They may also be mutually exclusive because if one occurs on a massive scale, the other probably will not."
Frank White, The Overview Effect, 1981

And our current technology is so inadequate for exploring the universe. We'll need to either develop much faster spacecraft or create a spacecraft that can support an entire colony for the decades it'll take to get anywhere. And then we could start talking about the theoretical "faster-than-light" spacecraft. I love astrophysics and astronomy, I just wish I was intelligent enough to understand more of it (like this String Theory I hear so much about).