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Thoughts on mortality and bicycling
Jun. 22nd, 2004 10:33 amWe all owe a death....
Yeah, that's the kind of thought you ponder while bicycling the highways of this great land.
But the glitches of yesterday's spaceflight, the Challenger and Columbia crashes, _any_ dangerous achievement, need to be balanced against that simple statement. Life is fatal. Nobody here gets out alive.
I'm closer to sixty than to fifty. My father died before he reached seventy, and the last few years of his life were hell from leukemia. What's ten years of life worth? Worth staying at home on the couch for fear that I might get knocked into a ditch by a pulp truck? Worth giving up manned space flight?
If somebody was crazy enough to offer me a one-way ticket to Mars, I'd give it serious thought.
15.3 miles, 1:02:50. Best time so far this year.
Yeah, that's the kind of thought you ponder while bicycling the highways of this great land.
But the glitches of yesterday's spaceflight, the Challenger and Columbia crashes, _any_ dangerous achievement, need to be balanced against that simple statement. Life is fatal. Nobody here gets out alive.
I'm closer to sixty than to fifty. My father died before he reached seventy, and the last few years of his life were hell from leukemia. What's ten years of life worth? Worth staying at home on the couch for fear that I might get knocked into a ditch by a pulp truck? Worth giving up manned space flight?
If somebody was crazy enough to offer me a one-way ticket to Mars, I'd give it serious thought.
15.3 miles, 1:02:50. Best time so far this year.
