"What's on the moon that is immediately valuable? That's the ticket right there." There's an old joke that, if we'd found oil on the moon, we'd have colonized

"What's on the moon that is immediately valuable? That's the ticket right there." There's an old joke that, if we'd found oil on the moon, we'd have colonized it in a heartbeat. Putting aside the absurdity of finding large stores of organic material on the moon, the point is still valid. People usually need an economically viable return on investment before funding such big outlays. It's actually pretty remarkable that our government funded manned space exploration to the extent that it did. And, absent the space race with Russia -- and its military motives -- I wonder if it ever would have. At the end of the day, I'm perhaps a tiny bit more optimistic than you are about the future of space exploration. But let me reemphasize "tiny." I don't think anything dramatic is going to happen in our lifetimes. And, cynically, I don't think anything short of a tangible ecological disaster of epic proportions, or a second militarized space race with, say, China, is going to get us off our butts. It's telling that even Star Trek, that most optimistic of sci-fi series, didn't set the dawn of serious space exploration until after a World War 3.