Thoughts For The Day

No, I'm not here. You never saw me ...

A couple of thoughts for the day, courtesy of a couple of other blogs that are here today. The first is Barack Obama, speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus about health care:

"I was up at the G20 -- just a little aside -- I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them," the president said. "One of the leaders -- I won't mention who it was -- he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.'

"He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everybody has health care and they're putting a Hitler mustache on you -- I don't -- that doesn't make sense to me. Explain that to me.'"

Our Politics Must Seem Strange Abroad ...

They don't make much sense when viewed from here, either.

The other thought is a bit more optimistic, courtesy of Just An Earthbound Misfit:

And so we progress. Within a few centuries, we have gone from being able to travel maybe fifteen miles a day across land (if the roads were tolerable and there was an inn to stop at) to being able to journey from a home in Boston to a relative's home in California in less than a day. We seem stalled at that speed, for the last fifty years, but that will eventually change, as it always does. After all, took nearly two thousand years to get to the point where overland travel was appreciably faster than it was in the height of the Roman Empire.

If we can keep our civilization intact over the following centuries, I do believe that humans will venture to the stars. The technology to do so will be as unimaginable to us today as the inner workings of an aircraft engine would have been to a Sumerian, but provided that we do not destroy ourselves or our habitat on this big blue marble of a planet, the technology will come and we will go to the stars.

The Sky Calls to Us. If We Do Not Destroy Ourselves, We Will, One Day, Venture to the Stars.

We will if we don't destroy ourselves through aggressiveness, stupidity, or indifference first. The title quote, of course, is from Carl Sagan. Comrade EBM has the video embedded in her article.