To Mr. Grand Hieronymous Poohbah of All the Grand Universe, King of the Space board, Lord of Current Events, the habitator of the habitalzone and HackMaster of all he would grok:

This lowly serf of the habitable zone would like to declare that he will comply.

However, as a former practitioner of Philosophy, it should be pointed out that science itself, and its process are a philosophy- and that all known sciences find their origin point in philosophy... Even brand new and emergent ones- like Causal Theory.

The questions: "should we colonize space". "why should we colonize space", "What is good science", "what is bad science", "What is a breach of scientific principles", "what, if any, are the limits of science" and of course "how should we deal with those who do not 'grok' or apply scientific principles" are all innately philosophical questions because they arise from a philosophical persepective or seek to extend one. They are not questions JUST for philosophers, but for scientists, engineers and laymen as well (few, if any, philosophic questions can be claimed solely by academic philosophers, despite their arrogations).

In fact, I hold the whole man-in-space socio-political (HATE that word!) movement of the modern era as the latest and greatest philosophy of life of the modern era. A great philosophical achievement of rationalist humanist thinking. I think this achievement must be defended from all the 'post structuralists' and 'deconstructionists' who would ask us all to believe that the space endeavor is all about penises, male power structures and men trying to impregnate inanimate objects by shooting them (seriously, there are cranks who say this in all seriousness)

Philosophy includes the 'blue-sky-ain't-it-cool' stuff, its sort of the science-fiction of philosophy. Philosophy and science are siamese twins, joined at the hip. I don't think they can be seriously split, and science fiction, space, and space science are seriously philosophical topics. Philosophy is where you take the messy questions to clean them up , where you forge scientific principles to apply to new categories of questions and where old sciences (vitalism, etc) go to have an autopsy done to determine why they failed or WHY they were a dumb approach in the first place.

also, most of the profound foundational mathematics of the modern era came from philosophy of mathematics. Hilbert, Russel, Frege, Whitehead, Goedel (to a lesser extent) etc.... Turing was even the first modern philosopher of mind as well as the first modern computer scientist (depends on what you think of Babbage).

So, respectfully, I very much disagree that matters philosophic have no place on a space board. However, I will do as you ask. ;-)

Davin L.