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100 years from now, no one will remember the tax rate last year. No one will remember whether the economy grew 5% or 3% or 1%. People will not care about W or Clinton any more than they now care about Taft or Cleveland, they will just know democratic politics continued and things more or less stayed on an even keel.

But just as last December they remembered that a couple of bicycle mechanics took to the air over a North Carolina beach, 100 years from now they will remember whether and when we went to Mars. They will remember every jot and tittle of it, when the writer of this piece, and all his readers, are bleached bones, and all the dross of their combined material possessions are moldering in scrap heaps or buried in landfill.

The writer thinks Mars doesn't matter, because he suffers from the delusion that he does. He doesn't. As one writer (R.P. Harrison, if anyone wants to know) has put it, "there exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature." He has not this basic humility, and because it he is blind. Those who know better will do the right thing despite him and those like him.

100 years from now, no one will remember the tax rate last year. No one will remember whether the economy grew 5% or 3% or 1%. People will not care about W or Clinton any more than they now care about Taft or Cleveland, they will just know democratic politics continued and things more or less stayed on an even keel.

That is where you are wrong, a 100 years from now, they will be talking about how the U.S. finally collapsed and they will compare it's Presidents to the Emperors of Ancient Rome.

You are so on the money here.

The problem is that so many people - like the author of this article - don't go beyond asking "what is in it for *ME*, right *NOW*?"

A historic legacy or doing something which will change the course of mankind for the better is not of interest to them.

Pretty sad.