Changing priorities but ever passionate

Rick Kutcher

December 10, 2012

I became interested in space travel at an early age. I was born in 1954 and by the time my family had a television and I was old enough to understand what I was watching, I began watching anything scifi. Cartoon shows, series, whatever had a scifi theme I loved it. Then President Kennedy announced his challenge to the country and our space program blasted off. I was glued to the tv through Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, our moon landings, Space Lab and Space Shuttle, Mir and ISS programs. Although scifi is still my passion as it offers a broad spectrum of visions of the future, a lot of scifi I watched as a child is no longer scifi but now scifact. Throughout all of this I have come to believe that our main concern as a species should be to defend our planet from the dangers we are able to defend it from. We now have the technology to look for and probably deflect incoming projectiles such as asteroids and comets. In focusing our energies on this objective I believe that our destiny to spread the human race out into our solar system and then our galaxy will follow as a direct result of planetary defence. Our technology and prowess as a spacefaring species will inexhorably advance in our efforts to protect our home world from some of the things that past species were were unable to paying the price with extinction. Of course, to protect our planet from the outside we must protect it on the surface as well. I believe we are beginning to realize this and hopefully we will get it before it's too late. In short... I believe that as we concentrate on defending our world all other endeavors will simply follow as a result.