RUSH: Kathy in Durango, Colorado, I’m glad you called. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, mega, mega dittos! I can’t believe I’m talking to you. (Gasp!)
RUSH: Well, thank you so much.
CALLER: Oh, gosh. Well, I have to get my liberal dose of wackiness every day from watching Good Morning America, and this morning the space shuttle commander had, I guess, the answer for everybody and she basically said that the earth is a very fragile place. She noticed that when she was up there, and she said that (laughing) the sooner we can leave this planet and live on other planets, the better off we’re all going to be.
RUSH: Now, I have the sound bite here. I’ve had it in the roster, and I wasn’t going to use it if we didn’t get a phone call on it. But since you’ve called, I’m gonna play the sound bite. Hang on just a second, Kathy, while we play this. Charlie Gibson did in fact have on the commander of the Discovery, Eileen Collins, and he asked her this question. He said, “You talked about the next generation of space vehicles, but we have a lot of shuttle flights to go, and you talked about knowing the risks of those flights. If we take another loss on a shuttle vehicle, would that be destructive to the space program?”
COLLINS: It’s hard to predict what, you know, what actually, you know, would happen. I do know that it’s very important for our country to explore. It’s important to us as human beings to go out and explore. On this planet, as you go out in space and you look back at the planet and you see how fragile it really is and you look out the other way and see it’s dark, and there’s really nothing we can see. We need to explore space. We need to get off this planet. If we want this species to survive in the long run, we need to go out and explore.
RUSH: All right, so, Kathy, that’s the bite you’re talking about, right?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: All right. Here’s the thing. Nobody is against space exploration. We’re all for space exploration, and nobody is against trying to find an outpost on the moon for men to live so they can eventually go to Mars. We’ve been toying with this idea since Jules Verne, probably even before that. But how many billions of years do some of these people say the planet is and — how many hundreds of millions do they say? I mean depending on which scientist you read, it’s either 10,000 years old or it’s billions of years old or what have you. Well, we’re not going to survive (laughing) unless we get of this planet — and she knows because she’s been up there, looking at it, and she can see how small the atmosphere is compared to the size of the planet, and then once the atmosphere ends it’s nothing but dark out there. That’s “space,” in astronaut lingo. (interruption) Well, a computer flies (the space shuttle), Brian, if the truth be known, but she was the commander. But nevertheless, an individual goes up there and looks at, you know, physical, just appearance, the small percentage of that atmosphere compared to the nothingness of space and, ergo, it equals fragile.
My contention is that the earth is not fragile. The earth is sturdy. The earth is a miracle. The whole ecosystem. See, to understand this as I do, folks, you have to believe in Creation, or what is it they’re now saying, ”intelligent design.” You have to believe in that. Nobody can convince me this is a random coincidence of a series of accidents, and the idea that this is fragile is absurd. Look at what this ecosystem has withstood, over all of these years, all of the so-called assaults on it, and note now, note now, its fragility is due to man’s existence. Men and women and the way they live, they’re the ones that imperil this fragile little thing. It’s not fragile. It is sturdy and it is strong and it will outlast us. The earth has been around longer than any other living thing. The earth and the atmosphere have been around in one form or another longer than any other living thing. The earth has outdone and survived everything that’s been around it. There’s not one thing that’s been able to do this earth in; there’s not one thing that’s been able to do this ecosystem in, not Robert Kennedy, not Ted Kennedy — by the way, how sensitive is it for a Kennedy to start making fun of people dying in water like Robert Kennedy did with this little joke he made about the hurricane turning north to Mississippi to get even with Haley Barbour for a memo he wrote to George W. Bush once about Kyoto? But it’s not fragile. See, that’s the whole point. But you have to have a certain view to even contemplate this, because if you don’t think there’s any source of power greater than man, then you’re sunk in so many ways, and I feel sorry for you.
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