Universal Planetary Alliance
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 14 Oct 2003 12:00:00 GMT
L. Neil Smith -
Where Do We Go from Here? - Neil's next project after Ceres
and Ares. He calls it The Space Scout
Manual. Awesome! The link is to the smith2004 Yahoo mailing list,
which requires a free membership. I saved a copy
here.
In a way, you can't blame the government. Being what they are, politicians and bureaucrats, they have a very unhealthy tendency to project their own ethical and psychological shortcomings onto others, especially members of the unwashed public. Even before September 11, 2001 -- and before Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered what it really was that killed the dinosaurs -- someone in government read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (individuals are paid to do that; see James Grady's Six Days of the Condor), in which penal colonists on the Moon ultimately achieve their independence by threatening major cities on Earth with boxcar-sized rocks, launched from an electric catapult.
Like politicians who push victim disarmament (erroneously known as gun control), they're afraid they're going to get what they deserve. So if you ever want to see Saturn's rings (or any other astronomical wonder) up close, you must absorb the following truth and never forget it: given their way, governments will never let ordinary people into space.
Never.
...
The Space Scout Manual's third mission will be to establish a political constituency for abolishing NASA and getting government out of the way of space exploration. If the book, and the organization it creates, are useful and interesting enough, then within a few years, there should be hundreds of thousands of young Space Scouts and maybe, a few years after that, millions. Politicians and bureaucrats will eventually be up against an enormous group of voters who are educated, tough, who won't take "No" (or even "Give us another 30 years") for an answer.
The Universal Planetary Alliance is the home of The Planetary Bill of Individual Rights. Good stuff. [smith2004]
Jeff Quinn at Gunblast - DPMS Panther .308 Semi-Auto Rifle - sub-inch groups at 110 yards with commercial ammo. DPMS lists the price of this rifle as $1,149. [gunblast]
