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...even if he hadn't, even if the dollar had never been invented, someone still would have struck out for foreign shores.

To me, that's a non sequitur. Without "the dollar" there'd be no civilization anyway.

I do agree that if it hadn't been Columbus, it would have been someone else, but that's not the point I was making anyway. The point was there was a PRACTICAL, ECONOMIC reason behind the voyage.

I think the world of Columbus (pun intended). I think he is one of the greatest men who ever lived, but all his romantic thirst for knowledge wouldn't have gotten a single Spanish farthing out of Ferdinand and Isabella, had he not pitched it to them as a way to break the Venetian/Genoan/etc. monopoly on the spice trade, had they not thought they'd get a fantastic return on their investment.

Man's spirit is restless, and our sole reason for living seems to be to push back boundaries.

May be but consider: A GOVERNMENT has no such spirit. With government funding of space exploration, you are ALWAYS as safe as the next fiscal downturn, as the next change in administration, the next Congressional election.

See what's happening RIGHT NOW. In fact, let's look back over the entire history of the U.S. in space.

We made it part of the Cold War, which was the rationale for putting a man on the moon.

But Apollo 12, hardly anyone even remembers. We had "made it," and the political tide changed. We were no longer interested in the moonshots; for the great majority of people they had become passe'.

And so NASA had to toss around for a new "mission", and that "refocusing of mission"--which occurs ever five years or so--was always in terms of selling something POLITICALLY.

No, I think my point has ALREADY been proved: Since we landed on the moon, WHAT has been the major achievement in space technology? ONLY those things that paid a return on investment such as the vast array of technologies that utilize satellites. Manned space flight is not much further along than the days of Apollo 7 & Apollo 9--when we had people in LEO. That's our big claim to fame: We went to the moon, now what's on Oprah?

Mark my words: ONLY when private entrepeneurs figure out how to make it worth their while to go to the asteroids to mine them, say, or to the moon (now that we know water is there) to exploit it commercially somehow, will things ever begin to get interesting.

But now you have all these Socialist-inspired treaties that say that "space is for all mankind," meaning that Zimbabweans or Cambodians have a say in what American technology can achieve there. It ain't lookin' good, folks.