Lileks on space travel

Found this on James Lileks's weblog, via jwz's LJ:

The rest of the day I listened to the radio. NPR had an interview with one of those people who think we should not send people into space, but rely entirely on robots. As I pulled into the parking lot at the mall he casually asked “what can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?”

PLANT A FUCKING FLAG ON THE PLANET, I shouted at the radio. Pardon my language. But. On a day when seven brave people died while fulfilling their brightest ambitions, this was the wrong day to suggest we all stay tethered to the dirt until the sun grows cold. Are we less than the men who left safe harbors and shouldered through cold oceans? After all, they sailed into the void; we can look up at the night sky and point at where we want to go. There: that bright white orb. We’re going. There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We’re going. And we’re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we’re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we’ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground. His heartbeat will hammer in his ears; his mind will spin a kaleidoscopic medley of all the things he’d thought he’d think at this moment, and he'll grin: I had it wrong. I had no idea what it would truly be like. He’d imagined this moment as oddly private; he'd thought of himself, the red land, the flag in his hand, and he heard music, as though the moment would be fully scored when it happened. But there isn't any music; there's the sound of his breath and the thrum of his pulse. It seems like everyone who ever lived is standing behind him at the other end of a vast dark auditorium, waiting for the flag to stand on the ground of Mars. Then he will say something. He might stumble on a word or two, because he’s only human.

But look what humans have done. Again.

Beautiful.

Internet Archive: Not just for web sites anymore

I was just watching a presentation that Internet Archive honcho Brewster Kahle gave at the Library of Congress—it's available as a 90-minute RealVideo here—and I discovered to my astonishment that the Internet Archive isn't just for webpages anymore. Among other things, they've gotten together with etree, a network of authorized-live-taping-band show swappers, to create an archive of CD-quality permission-granted live shows from bands like Rusted Root, Guster, and a local Missouri band, Big Smith, which includes members of the family with whom my family had a blood feud going eighty years or so ago. :)

They've also got an archive of old movies and video files, including a wonderful little gem of satire that I just got through watching: Your Name Here. Described as, "The ultimate generic industrial, made as a spoof. A film built around script and visual cliches: shots of highways, farms, unidentifiable manufacturing operations, and super-scientific laboratories," this movie includes things that, if they were cliched then, have aged into even greater hilarity now. The movie is presented in a perfectly deadpan, completely generic style, with the announcer going on about how the company was formed and the product was invented, with a different voice saying, "your name here" or "your product here" wherever it would have been mentioned. Great stuff.