Today...listening to Fisher and Air...trying to get back to work after a bout with a bad cold. I spent eight hours in front of the TV yesterday, watching most of the From the Earth to the Moon HBO miniseries on DVD, and using up entire paper rolls to blow my nose. Not as bad as it sounds, actually. FTETTM was excellent...really excellent. Perfect mix between documentary and drama. It's quite unbelievable that mankind managed to land on the moon in 1969, yet we haven't been back for more than 25 years. Today, we're basically just cruising around in Earth orbit...and sending probes off to distant worlds. I believe in order for our species to move forward, to survive, we do need to go out there...to see other planets with our own eyes, to move the frontiers further out with every journey. Lots of people see space-exploration as a waste of money, but it really isn't. It's perhaps hard to defend spending billions on what in essence is cool gadgets, when there's so much poverty and misery in even the developed world...but it shouldn't be one or the other. We need to focus on both. Mankind united in 1969 to watch those first three guys reach the moon -- it made us feel like we were all coming from the same place...

We need that feeling back.  ¶ 13:13