Share Your Passion

Share Your Passion (con.)

For example, do any of you know how much a computer the power of today's laptop would have cost 25 years ago? In 1974 a computer as powerful as a modern laptop (if you could even get one) would have cost well over a million dollars. With the involvement of the business community, of commercial interests, the cost of space travel can fall just a dramatically. This can happen, and happen much faster than any of you might believe.

I envision a Princess Line "cruise" to the Moon. With all of the features that you find on your current Princess Line cruises, great food, great entertainment, great fun, and a view that is literally out of this world. How's that for a honeymoon trip!

By the time you're traveling to the Moon and back for your vacation, we will have scientific outposts on Mars, much like the ones we have in the Antarctic today. Once we begin to explore this "Sol System" of ours, nothing will hold us back, nothing will stop us from exploring it from one end to the other. And this, my friends, is still only the beginning!

By the way, there will be one critical side benefit from all of this space activity and interest; we will discover and probably mine any asteroids that have any chance of colliding with the Earth. An asteroid even a mile in diameter can ruin a perfectly good decade...it makes worries about global warming look...well, you get my drift. Once we are living and working in space, the threat of a devastating asteroid impact goes away forever.

The future of space for humanity is one of my passions, one critical to me, to what I believe. And I believe it is also critical to the future of our society, our civilization. Your passion, your vision of the future is also critical, critical not only to you and your personal goals, but also critical to our society. A society without a vision is like a boat without a rudder.

Malachi Martin in his book, "The New Castle," said, "The greatest heights of culture and civilization were always fashioned, not within the molds of sociological cause and affect, but within a transcendent vision,"

O. W. Markley of the Stanford Research Institute has said, "The development of our societies has been in large part dependent on the creative vision of the great members of the human race, and on the images of the future of the important cultures throughout history."

And Ed Lindaman, past director of program planning for the design and manufacture of the Apollo Spacecraft and a futurist in his own right, said, "The believer not only interprets history, but above all, he changes it, because, he believes, because he hopes."

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy gave us a challenge, set forth a vision of us landing a man on the Moon sometime before the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the Moon's surface and President Kennedy's vision was realized. Now it's up to us to create the new vision that will lead humanity forward and assure the continued success of our civilization.

We need people of passion to lead us forward, people committed to a vision that can lead our society into the next millennium. The vision you have has the potential of transforming our society. You only need to share your passion with the same fervor you have for it. Each of you is the source of your vision. By unleashing the fountain from that source, you, those around you, and the world are benefited. You can't give up when the going gets tough. You may not be chosen for the first group, or even the second group...but you need to keep trying. It will take determination and persistence, probably a little bit of luck, and you will need to strive for excellence....

You can see your vision become reality...you can make it happen.

We have within us the desire to see what lies beyond the next mountain, a curiosity that will not give us peace until we have answered all of the questions, and a universe that will never quit asking them.