Would you trade places?

[True Dough]

If not now, at any point in your life? Would you have the inclination to explore space?

[dhol82]

1. Totally!

[Croney]

2. I would trade places on the last day of my life.

No hospital, funeral home, stinky carnations, urn in the wall.

Just look out over eternity and drift away. What a way to go!

[True Dough]

8. Sounds good

Truly the final frontier!

[Hortensis]

3. When young I thought so, but no.

Big no. There’d be no place to go in space, strange as that might sound. Locked up in a metal tube for years in hopes of at some point stepping out somewhere. It’s not that it’s not worth doing, just that there’s far, far too much to give up and so much unexplored here.

[zipplewrath]

4. It was my life plan

I was going to build space colonies. Big 5000 people kind of things at L5. Moon bases would come first. None of that happened though. The idea pretty much went up in smoke with the Challenger disaster.

[Fla Dem]

5. Not in this lifetime.

[ProudLib72]

6. If I could EVA? YES, YES, YES!!

Just imagine what that's like. A single point existing unbound in infinite space. A celestial body unto yourself.

[True Dough]

9. You make it sound sexy, ProudLib

Be sure to add those lines to your online dating profile!

[hunter]

7. Sure, if I had a genetically engineered or robotic body and could run around on the surface of...

... the moon or mars naked.

As I am, I'm probably too absent minded to survive long beyond earth's atmosphere. I can't be counted on to bring a jacket out into the cold or keep track of the fuel gauge on my car.

I don't think natural humans are ever going to have a significant presence in space beyond low earth orbit. The conditions are just too harsh, especially the dirty secret no one talks about -- gamma rays, high speed particles, etc..., all the stuff commonly called "radiation."

If we humans don't screw up everything and crash this technological civilization then space will belong to our intellectual descendants. Maybe if we treat them well, don't make them slaves, don't treat them as disposable workers, maybe if we are good parents to a new species of engineered space humans, they'll take us along for the ride.

In the present day I think sending people back to the moon, or to mars, would be a useless, dangerous, and expensive stunt. I do however enthusiastically support robotic space exploration, and some human presence in low earth orbit within the protection of earth's magnetic field.

[IrishEyes]

10. It would definitely love to go to space camp.

But I have no interest in going into space.

[Dem2theMax]

11. I grew up wanting to be an astronaut.

But I also grew up during the years when women were not allowed to be astronauts.

If I had been born later in life, you can bet I would be trying my darndest to be one of the lucky few who gets to view the Earth from space.