PFFT - we have hundreds of millions - billions years to get off earth. Hell Home Sapien is less than 200,000 years old. We have had about 10,000 years of farming and the like. We have only harnessed the power of electricity in the last 150 or so years.
I mean right now we could come up with a feasible game plan - something technically doable. Even if FTL is never a thing, multi-generational ships are possible. Even if we end up not making artificial gravity and our bodies wither in zero G, we only have to be healthy enough to live to 15 or 16 and pump out a few kids before we die (like we used to). Though even if our life spans were halved, it would give us plenty of time keep going.
2015’s popularity ranking includes many people I didn’t even realize were dead (Rowdy Roddy Piper, Robert Z’Dar, Fred Thompson) and many more I hadn’t even heard of. 2005’s is more interesting.
That being said, the issue is that most of us are too young to have been attached to many actors who died in 1995, but we are the right age to be attached to actors dying in 2016. Meanwhile, I’m sure my preteen nephews have no clue who Prince and David Bowie are, and their parents probably don’t know who Leonard Cohen is.
Yeah any time there is a “year of remembrance” there are people I forgot or didn’t realize had died.
Average. Best thing he did was probably being the chief author of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978. Most trouble he got in to was a contribution scandel that he was officially exonerated in. You can read an outline on wiki
Glenn was officially on the record for supporting safe and legal abortions. During the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations he supported legislation to fund abortions for women at U.S. Military hospitals overseas, during a time when taxpayer-funded abortions were arguably even more controversial than they are now.
Did you seriously just compare John Glenn with Wolfman Jack?
Glenn (and, I’d argue, Bowie and Cohen, among others this year) aren’t just “celebrities”, they’re iconic. They were transformative. They created history, as opposed to trivia.
I was fond of Wolfman Jack, but I’m not going to confuse his contribution with Glenn’s. And I refuse to take on any shallow, sour worldview that does.
You never know, My 17 year old was hit hard by Bowie’s death. Starman was one of the 1st songs he learned how to play on guitar, and he’s seen Dylan & Neil Young. There’s a wider cultural window today than there used to be. If I had been listening to 50 year old music when I was 17 it would have been Al Jolson & Eddie Cantor!
I have no issue with people want to go explore the rest of the universe, as long as they don’t get in the way of us who want to figure out how to live on this beautiful little planet without destroying it. I could be wrong but I think it will be hard to find another so fine.
