What Would Private Space Exploration Look Like?

What an underground city on Mars or

the Moon might look like.  This is Osowka.

Space is not the final frontier.  I imagine the final frontier is the human economic development of space.  We'll get there first and then decide what we are going to do with it.  Space colonization for the sake of space colonization doesn't really sell well to the masses.  What would a space colonist do all day?  I imagine the first space colonists are scientists and engineers who have to test a lot of different ideas.  But once the testing is done and the right ideas are proven, then what?

Space exploration is still being achieved at the expense and direction of national governments.  It's so expensive that even the world's richest people, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are only building rockets they lease out to government space agencies for launching satellites and resupplying the International Space Station.  We have not yet begun true independent space exploration.

Alien Civilizations We Could Never Meet

The animated film 'Treasure Planet' imagined

many space-faring creatures based on Earth life.

The search for extra-terrestrial life has been frustrating humankind for over a hundred years.  Scan the skies as we might, we have yet to scientifically confirm the existence of other inhabited worlds anywhere in the universe.  Now, I'm not one to automatically dismiss the thousands of UFO stories that supposedly prove we are being visited by other civilizations.  The problem with those stories is that not one of them has been verified.  I am sure a lot of unidentified flying objects in the night sky are just normal aircraft that look strange.  And some sightings may be of experimental craft.  But if there are any aliens roaming the Earth's skies they have not made it easy for us to identify them.

So what is the story with life in the universe?  Is it there or not?  And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, what do we have to do to "see" it scientifically?  That's a question demanding a long, complicated answer.  And I'm not the guy to provide that answer.  I know we are scanning for radio signals.  And I know we are finding planets circling other stars.  If only we could skip ahead to the future and use the advanced censor arrays from Star Trek!

Famous People from New Jersey

Famous people from

the state of New Jersey.

New Jersey does not strike fear into the hearts of vampires or rouse legions of adoring fans on the Internet but as one of America's oldest states it has a special place in history.  The United States Congress owes a great deal to New Jersey.  Were it not for the New Jersey plan, whereby each state would have had one vote in Congress, there would have been no Great Compromise.  When US independence was assured leaders in the Continental Congress began debating how to structure the government for future generations.  Virginia delegates proposed that the legislature award votes by population.  The smaller states objected and New Jersey proposed that each state have one vote.  The Great Compromise combined the two plans and established the House of Representatives and the Senate.

But New Jersey has given us so much more.  It's not fair to the other 49 states to exclude them from the halls of fame, but sometimes I feel as though small states like New Jersey and Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont are pushed aside by the big states like California, Florida, Texas, and Virginia.  They say that one county in California has more people than most states in the nation.  That's not just insane, it correlates well to how we overlook contributions by our smaller neighbors.

What Happens to Your Car When It No Longer Runs?

An abandoned car, probably a Volkswagen.  Old vehicles should

 not be left to rot.  They should be recycled.

One of my favorite cable channels is Velocity, which is packed full of shows that follow professional mechanics through 1-week or 2-week adventures.  These guys and gals know their cars inside out and they literally rebuild a car every week.  Many of the cars you see on these shows would be mistaken for old junkers by casual passers-by, but there are good reasons why their owners hold on to them for so long.  One of the best renovation shows has to be Wheeler Dealers.  The show's hosts, Ant and Mike, are experts from the United Kingdom who shop around in the US after markets and find incredible old vehicles.

Every car has a story and every car make and model has a story, too.  Mike finds the deals and Ant fixes them up.  Both hosts explain why the cars they buy and rebuild are so loved by the small markets that won't let go of them.  Mike usually takes a car for a test drive before turning it over to Ant.  He'll put a performance car through some moves and give Ant a heads up on what problems the vehicle has.