Happy birthday, Justin Bieber! The universally beloved singer (who could possible hate him?) turns 18 today, and a SETI astronomer has a great suggestion for a birthday present: make him a Biebernaut and send him to space!
The idea is not to rid the world of the Canadian teenager and his pop stylings — he would come back down to Earth eventually, after all — but rather to help jump-start the emerging suborbital spaceflight industry.
Lofting a celebrity of Bieber's stature would generate a lot of interest among the American public, which could help commercial spaceflight pick up some much-needed momentum, said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
"My suggestion is, be sure to send Justin Bieber on one of these flights early on," Shostak said here Tuesday (Feb. 28) during a presentation at the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference. "If there's more interest, there are more customers. If there are more customers, there's more technical development. It's a positive feedback loop, and obviously that's good."
What do you say, Beliebers? Shall we send Justin Bieber into orbit? Link (Photo: Wikipedia)
