Mars Has A New Boss

You'd have to be living in a cave this week to have not heard that NASA discovered Tatooine, and I'll bet George Lucas is laughing his Alderaan off.

So my dilemma today: do I discuss this exciting new discovery, or do I assume everyone is a huge Kepler nerd like me and that you have already read the same 50 articles I have? Yeah. So let's talk about other important space stuff. Like, music.

Bruce Springsteen Releases New Sci-Fi Concept Album
About Struggles Of Poor Miners Working On Mars

This one really takes me back to the 80s, when Springsteen's baggy posterior portrait was all the rage. For those of you have never spun vinyl -- well, you didn't miss anything, and we're all better off with iPods -- but there is something to be said for the working class hero. Imagine how many of them we will need for inspiration when we're overseeing the immigration to Mars for all the work that needs to be done in the carbonite mines!

So says The Boss, he wanted to express his nostalgia over "one's carefree younger days of racing souped-up hyper-thrust cruisers through the Valles Marineris canyon, and for nights spent chasing Martian girls along the rusting boardwalks of a crater-side spaceport."

And who wouldn't want that, really.

(Alas, we take our humanity with us wherever we roam; if we do ever reach the point where we start harvesting the resources of other celestial bodies, it will likely resemble an episode of the gritty "Firefly" series, and not the optimism of "Star Trek".)

You can't tell, but that's Norma Rae inside the suit.

*sigh* ... I spend an awful lot of time wishing articles on The Onion were true, partly because I appreciate sarcasm on a pathological level, and partly because I think their social satirists could more efficiently run our government than the current pack of yahoos.

This article is no different. In fact, the only thing that would make it better would be if Aerosmith collaborated on the project, and the Martian colony was mining for chocolate.