Chris,

You seem slightly more sincre than Eby, so I will answer you without sarcasm (for this post anyway, then we can go back to our criticisms of one another in other posts:

You said "Barry, if seven hundred people sent lucid well reasoned handwritten letters to every congress person of the USA and the president and vice president it would effect events. If they did a new letter nearly every month for a year it would be profound change."

Exactly why ICAMSR has accumulated over 3,000 signed petitions. But plans for MSR are changing daily and the SSB is becoming more cautious than it was during the NASA Goldin Administration. NASA is adding some life sciences experiments to the planned 2007 Phoenix mission. So who knows, maybe there is hope after all.

But you must realistically know that the US economy is being shred to bits with the war in Iraq and Afganistan. Who knows where else we will send troops at a cost of billions per month? The Shuttle program is on the edge of extinction, the ISS with no bold future. So what makes you think 700, 800 or even 10,000 people could do to get Congress to get a manned Mars mission going?

Sure, it would be nice to be more advanced than we are, but the fact is, we are still in our technological and sociological infancy. A nuclear war could start any day. Does this really sound like a race of beings that is ready to go out and explore the solar system to you? We have serious problems facing us on this world. Sending humans to Mars at this stage would only outrage our society even further. Any politician that signs a bill giving NASA a 100 billion or more to go to Mars would be removed from office.

We all have dreams. I visualize a universe with life in every direction (even if its only microbes) and you folks see colonies of people living on Mars happily tending their greenhouse crops.

BD