GROUND ZER0, New York, N.Y.--Jan. 10, 2004 -- There is a plan underfoot to launch our Beast of Terror to the planet Mars, some 35 million miles from earth.  

       The United States is more than toying with the idea of manned Mars missions in the near future and establishing a long-term base on the moon.
       What does it mean to our future?   Can we, who struggle to resolve the Terrorism on Earth, find Vigilance in the stars?
        Perhaps.
      Human beings are explorers.    What separates us from the beasts of the earth is our ability to adapt.   We walk upright, allowing us to move freely in any kind of terrain.   We were given thumbs and the ability to grasp, a key ingredient to tool making that started with the club to bash heads and has evolved into the manufacturing of the computer chip where billions of pieces of information can be stored on a pinhead.

     On the one hand, we have glorious belief systems that suggest the hope we will one day live in a perfect world in peace and harmony with one another, and, on the other, we design nuclear and biochemical weapons that can release viral vermin with the potential to maim and destroy all civilization.
       Space exploration means that we will shoot into the stars both our good and bad natures.   Humanities great glories and its ugly tyrannies will march together into the great expands of the universe.
       Both the Sentinel of Vigilance and Beast of Terror will be aboard the spacecraft hurdling through the stars.   Will that be good or bad for our children and Children's Children's Children?
        The argument can be well-placed on both sides of the polemic coin.   Here we are locked in mortal battle in the Mid East, fighting with clubs and knives against one another as we did a million years ago when one tribe sought to dominate another tribe for whatever reason.
        Will we export the genes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to the far reaches of space?   Or, will the genes be those of Gandhi or Martin Luther King?

        There can be little doubt that our world as it exists today is ready for something far beyond the petty battles we wage with another on this planet.   When children fight amongst themselves it often takes a third party, an intervening force to raise their visions above and beyond their own selfishness.
        "Stop fighting.  Look.   Here is something that benefits us all, that is far greater and of more importance than anything we could imagine.  Look.   Look up.   Reach for the stars together.  Put down your weapons and reach into the unknown, where the treasures of the universe really exist."
         Would such an intervention stop the radical fundamentalists in Iraq from strapping on a bomb and walking into a herd of American or Allied soldiers?   Would the scales of human blindness fall from a martyr's eyes if he could see that one day he could reach out and touch the face of God from the cockpit of a space probe to the limits of the universe?      

         In the long haul, space is the great bindery of human conflict.   To explore space requires that all nations and all peoples seek to expand their humanity rather than contract it as war and conflict seems to do.

        What child with any imagination would not want to hurl through space and kiss the stars?    What magic and mystery lies in the great unknown above us?
          I presume that the children in Iraq, like the ones in Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe and all of the vast lands, stare up at the stars and wonder what lies beyond them.

        From purely a child's point of view, there is little question that space exploration would charge the world with a new mission for humanity, one that might heal the wounds of selfishness that we tend to nurture here on earth.   That selfishness is that our "land and our way" is the "only way."
        As long as we are bound to this earth, humans will carve out their territory and draw battle lines around their cultures, their history, their ethnicity, their belief systems as though they lived on separate planets and all who would infringe upon them were alien invaders.
        It has been said many times that all borders are battle lines.   And the real estate of the earth is limited.    This fuels the madness to protect, and in most cases, when such protection of the real estate is threatened, leads to war.

       But when the real estate lines are erased or smudged as has happened in the European Economic Union, the thirst for waging war on neighbors diminishes.   Collective goals overpower individual ones.   The whole becomes more important than the sum of its parts.
        Space exploration offers the world the opportunity to unify its great imaginative resources of individualism into one collective union.   It provides those who harbor their real estate with brutal jealousy the right to explore brave new worlds, to expand their visions to lands far beyond their own.

       And, at the center of this belief are the children.   Space exploration is not only for the present generation.    The present generation may be the great, great, great grandmothers and grandfathers of it, but the real benefactors of reaching for the stars will be the Children's Children's Children.
        The fighting that exists on the earth today is symbolic of the need to explore space, to expand the potential for human evolution.     As the pressure of over population grows (the world population doubles approximately every generation) the pressure upon societies to protect their "real estate" and the belief systems associated with them expands.   
       Only when the potential for more real estate unveils itself will the pressure be relieved amongst those who jealously guard their homes and history, as one might guard the last crumb of bread on a lifeboat set adrift with no land in sight.

      Space exploration spreads out a universe of opportunity for the future of the children.    It provides room for them to grow and prosper, to create new worlds, to design new ways of life.
In a way, when the space program evolves, the Beast of Terror will shrink.   The Beast of Terror thrives on selfishness.  It seeks to make us think in terms of what others will "take" from us, and drives us to protect our lives through Fear of Loss.

       Space will offer unlimited gain for all humanity.
       It will provide the world, not just one nation, the opportunity to engage the imagination in ways none of us yet can comprehend.
       It will shrink our Beast of Terror's shadow, for the power of Vigilance, the need to protect our right to explore and expand will overpower our need to protect and defend what little is left of this Earth.

      Yes, when the rockets blast off for the moon and Mars with people aboard, it will be a bright moment for the future of humanity.    For aboard the ship will be the Beast of Terror who will shrink as the gravity decreases.   When human imagination expands, it dwarfs the Beast's Fear, Intimidation and Complacency with the brightness of Courage, Conviction and Right Actions.

       The journey to space will be the seeding of Vigilance, not Terrorism.   For Terrorism cannot exist long when the imagination is fired.   And space, its limitless expanse, is the treasure box of imagination of all children. 

Jan. 9--Pete Rose vs. Beast of Baseball Terror