Around the time of my birth, the financing of humanitys first manned mission to Mars was estimated to cost between $400-500 billion. Today, at the most optimistic end, estimates project a cost of around $6 billion. The next time someone tells you that the exploration of the Cosmos is too costly, that the technological advancement such a mission would bring is not economically feasible, that the pioneering of the final frontier is too expensive, weep tears of wastefulness in knowledge that, last year, a Harvard study projected the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to cost U.S. taxpayers between $4-6 trillion. Im not about to suggest that Americas budget be solely directed upward toward the infinite, and I very much recognize that much on Earth remains to be rectified. I also do understand that the our species is safer without Saddam, and that a retaliatory response against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the aftermath of September 11th was justified. But contemporary Iraq is sick with sectarian strife, ruled by rulelessness and certainly no strong friend of Americas. If Iraq is bad, Afghanistan is a nightmarishly worse; hellishly violent, cripplingly corrupt, and manipulated by a lustful Pakistan attempting to expand Islamabads influence across the border. At this very moment, Taliban forces hole up in the countrys many hillsides, awaiting the inevitable American withdrawal so they can reclaim Kabul - they have no other priority. This war, since 2001, has been our countrys longest. Apart from its initial military aims, which were almost immediately achieved and understandably just, it frustrates me how much American blood and treasure seems destined for doom and futility in a terribly tribal and problematically primitive corner of South-West Asia. Once this war ends, we should ask ourselves whether it deserved to be our longest, and we should ask what was even gained by it. I should very much hope that, in asking these questions, a session of national introspection across America is inspired. Do we want to see ourselves, as well as be seen by our friends and foes alike, as a country that spends a longer time fighting goat herders in the Hindu Kush than was taken to vanquish German Nazism and annihilate Japanese imperialism? Or would we like to be viewed as a nation of technological innovation, of energy revolutions and of economic productivity- as a community and landscape of unity and handshakes? These next few months we will hear much spoken but little said in the lead up to the November elections. We dont need more of the blame-game, nor do we desire more of the back and forth bickering. What is necessary is proper prioritization. And we need to honestly decide whether deploying 18 year-old kids to Afghanistan for a decade and a half with little to show for it is worth the cost of around 6,000 missions to Mars.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 22:51:32 +0000
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