A Quote by James Smith McDonnell
America is now a space-faring nation. a frontier good for millions of years. The only time remotely comparable was when Columbus discovered a whole new world.
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In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. Now, some have argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can't get credit for discovering a land already populated by indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists. Columbus discovered America.
The history taught in our schools is scandalous. We grew up believing that Columbus actually discovered America. We still celebrate Columbus Day. Columbus was after one thing only - gold.
The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.
The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.
Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores, and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world -- our new world.
Yeah, I know he discovered the West Indies; it wasn't America. But the whole thing with Columbus was that people had been telling him, 'Don't go. The world's flat.' But he kept going. He found land.
In America, we have no means of getting to our own Space Station. We have to pay the Russians to put our people up there to send them into space - rendezvous with the Station and bring them back at the end of their stay, and that to me is just wrong. We're supposed to be the world's greatest space-faring nation, and to cancel our own means of getting there I thought was a mistake, even though it would save some money.
Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived.
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable.
In the twelfth century the Basque fishermen of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with the consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view it is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did.
Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above.
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