it was about 10:00 a.m. EST when I found out. I was on my way to pick up my daughter. My daughter found out at about 10:20 a.m. when I showed up at her mom's. We spent about 3 hours watching the news when we got back to my house.

I'm barely old enough to remember some of the moon flights. I can remember legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite describing the separation of the rocket phases. And I remember seeing images of astronauts as they stepped out onto the surface. My father had a bunch of 9 by 11's of one of the moon landings and I remember bringing them to school and putting them up on the walls.

It's hard to believe that its been over 25 years and we haven't been back. But honestly I don't think we're going back any time soon. I don't see colonies on the moon any time in the next century or anything much larger than the space station we already have orbiting the Earth. Maybe we'll send a single manned mission to Mars, but that'll be it.

I suppose that sounds like sacrilege. And if I had told someone that twenty five years ago they'd have said I was lacking in vision. But I think I've got the vision alright.

We Americans colonized the East Coast and then spread until we had reached the West Coast. In some ways I see our space aspirations as extension of that expansionist colonial mindset. Having finished colonizing our own planet, the logical place to go was the Moon and the other planets.

It made sense to for a people who had seen progressively faster and faster means of travel. In the course of a century and a half we went from the horse and carriage to the Super Sonic jetliner. It was just logical that the progression would continue.

In the last 30 years, computers have speeded up one million times. If our transportation had undergone a similar growth we would all be able to hop in our automobiles and drive to the Sun in an hour and a half by now. But it hasn't happened and it's not going to.

We humans are fragile bags of water with a little coal mixed in. We're delicate chemical mixtures suspended in H2O. In order to maintain the concoction the temperature has to be kept in a narrow range, with the right amount of wate,r and a very specific atomospheric mixture kept at a certain pressure. You can't accelerate the things too fast, and you can't expose them to certain types of radiation. Or the damn things stop working.

It costs millions of dollars to send seven people up to Earth orbit and keep them there and the price has gone up not down in the last thirty years. We don't have millions of dollars per person to support a decent size colony on the moon. And I just can't ever see it becoming cost efficient.

It just doesn't make sense to me to try to recreate the conditions needed to support a human on a long term space flight or another planet. The American colonialist phase is over. It's just not cost efficient. Basically there is one place it makes sense to have a human and that's right here on earth. So let's stop thinking that we can keep breeding until we cover our planet in shit or blow it up. Because there is no other place to go.

That doesn't mean we won't or shouldn't send stuff out into space. I just think we shouldn't be thinking in terms of sending humans out there. Scientists say that there is still room to make computers one hundred thousand times faster. People like my brother at Intel are developing them now. That's where the future of space exploration and development are. Develop artificial minds as sophisticate as our own that are built to survive out there. So we don't have to take our own special environmental conditions with us. We adapt to what is out there. But stop thinking in terms of HUMAN expansion and more in terms of INTELLIGENT expansion.

Any way I don't mean to diminish the loss of life today. I was as shocked and scared as anyone. And my heart goes out to the families and friends of those who were lost.