By Mars

4th Rock From the Sun - Land on me! Is that so difficult? Construct a spacecraft, have it traverse the distance between myself and Earth and then instruct it to simply descend onto my surface. Anywhere is fine. I don't have any oceans, so just take advantage of my huge geographical land mass and place the ship down somewhere on the big, reddish sphere in the inner solar system. That's me. A soft landing would also be preferable, if possible. I haven't had to deal with many asteroids lately and I do bruise easily.

I mean how hard can it be, people? It's not exactly...well, I guess technically it is rocket science, but forget that for a minute. Just go for it! I'm sick and tired of all this half assed bullshit. I know those unmanned probes were a show of good faith, and even I have to admit that the recent Mars Rovers are kind of cute, but seriously guys, I haven't got all day here. So get on with it.

Come on. Send a ship and crew here. It doesn't have to be a large crew. I'm not asking you to send the city of Cincinnati or the South of France. Four or five people would be just fine. I'd even settle for three of your folks, provided of course that such a small crew would be sufficient to carry out all the mission objectives.

How about landing here, maybe?

Let's get serious, Earth people. Your showing in recent years has been rather poor, especially when it comes to space. I thought for sure that after you guys landed on the moon in 19-fucking-69, that you'd all be here in just a few years. Now I'm a reasonable planet, and I realize that the physics and engineering challenges of a manned Mars mission are bound to be enormous and that it takes time to establish an international collaboration with combined resources from a huge base of national and corporate interests. Yeah, yeah, I get all that. And based upon that level of reasonableness, I was willing to wait for say, a decade or so for the mission to come to fruition. But look at this shit. What year is it, 2053 already? Where are you people? Get off your "descended recently from ape" asses and visit my planetary surface for God's sake.

I've heard all the arguments. So you have to deal with all those issues at home first. Well, you're obviously doing a great job with that. How about stop going to war and go into space instead? How about that? Its way obvious to me that your military industrial complex is just a top level paradigm shift away from turning its scientific and technological resources, manpower, and economic might into a more vital, visionary Earthwide civilian space program. It makes like total sense to me that the context for all of your military's heralded martial values of bravery, courage, honor, and dangerous adventure can all be provided by the challenges of the space program with out actually killing anybody on purpose, but what do I know? I'm only 4.5 billion years old here.

And I should also point out that the whole "it's too expensive" argument is a sack of camel shit. Forget for a moment that investing in space travel is investing in basic scientific research, which always pays off in the long run. Forget that for every dollar that goes into the space program in that puny region of land you call USA, roughly ten times that much eventually goes back into the economy due to technical applications which ultimately emerge as wealth in the public sphere. Forget also that the journey would inspire all of humanity, require international cooperation that would go a long way towards achieving peace on your world, and even the basic fact that the shit would be way fucking cool. Forget all that. Even though you guys seem to have been too stupid to realize that a manned Mars mission is in your own best interests, what about my interests? Why don't you, for a moment, stop to consider my needs. I'm a planet here. And planets have feelings. What about us, Earth? I thought we were cool.

What Up, Moon? That's What I Thought, Bitch.

And let me get back to the moon for a minute? What did the moon do to deserve all of this early attention? And recently, even the Bushman is talking about going back there. What is this obsession with your only natural satellite? I know it's closer than I am, and that the technical aspects of the journey were easier and probably more realistic at the time, but let's get real here. The moon is a piece of shit compared to me. It's a moon and I'm a planet. You do the math. It's not like I have anything personal against moons. I'm actually on very good terms with my own satellites, Phobos and Deimos, and I'm sure you people would have a blast venturing to Titan or Europa, but seriously, if given the choice, unless you're the king of stupid, you go for the fucking planet is all I'm saying.

Maybe one of those new presidents will not be such a space pussy and will realize that fully investing in humanity through the space program is probably a better use of time than investing in killing for a smelly black liquid that's going to run out in the next two seconds. Come on, Earthlings. And that means you too, Mr. Bush. There was nothing terribly wrong with the space program speech that someone wrote for you, but I'd like to see you lead by your actions. It's going to be awfully hard to for you humans to fund that grand "vision" for space if you keep spending 30 times that much bombing the shit out of yourselves in order to procure a non-renewable resource for the benefit of a few of you. Let's do some basic economics. I'm not saying you should try to recklessly harvest my natural resources, but while space is probably infinite, oil is most certainly not. At least that's what your modern cosmologists and my homeboy Jupiter have led me to believe. J-Dog, keep that red spot real, yo. Sheeeeeit!

Jupiter, Keeping it Real As Always.

Anyway, my ice caps need exploring. Olympus Mons, the highest fucking mountain in the solar system, by the way, needs climbing. Everest Shmeverest. My giant reservoir of subsurface water just needs a little hello from you guys. My possibly existing ancient microbes need analyzing by your exobiologists. Of course, if you do find life here, even microbial life, you do understand that it would mean you're not allowed to colonize me, but still, the chances of that are low, and if I'm as barren as I think, please, please do terraform my ass. Give me an ocean and an atmosphere. Global warm me and make me habitable. Then send yourselves over in waves and a build a civilization or something.

But right now, I'm not asking for the universe here. Just a few footprints on my soil. They won't even last forever on my surface since I do have some weather which will erode them, but hell, that's way more interesting than the boring ass lunar footprints which will stay there for fucking ever. Anyway, throw me a bone, humans. Just one little trip over here. Think about it.

And by the way, don't you even think of militarizing space. Any missions to me must be civilian, scientific, and exploratory in nature. Try to bring weapons here, or establish a military base on me or the moon, for that matter, and I'll open up a can of whupass so big, it will dwarf the fucking observable universe.

I'm making this clear because Mr. Bush's recently announced "vision" for space sounds less like an actual plan to get humans to Mars in a timely manner and more like a sneaky and not even that subtle plan to make the moon into a weapons platform capable of nuking any target on Earth, while scrapping much of the fundamental basic science objectives of NASA like the servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. But anyway, scientists know that aside from learning how to live in enclosed, low gravity habitats, from a propulsion standpoint, a moon base and a Mars mission are two separate things. If you want to get to Mars quickly to achieve scientific objectives, you pick your Earth asses up and go straight there. Don't make a useless, energy inefficient pit stop at the moon. Don't try to make rocket fuel out of the pitiful lunar materials. Make fuel out of me for the return trip. Just bring a little Hydrogen. I have plentiful Carbon Dioxide in my atmosphere right here. I'm not shitting you, I swear.

Anyway, I'm running out of patience here, Earth? Where you at? Am I going to have to come over there myself? You know I don't want to do that. It would totally fuck up your tides and shit. Women's menstrual cycles, which are ultimately based on the gravity of the moon, will get ridiculous. You talk about PMS, but this time, we're talking about Permanent Menstrual Syndrome.

Come on now humanity. It's about time you did the right thing. In the words of one of my favorite of your film stars, who now has another job, I'd just like to say for the record, to make things absolutely fucking clear, "Get your ass to Mars!" And with that I thank you and bid you good evening, people of Earth. Mars out.  HSP