Buzz Aldrin was at Stonehenge on Sunday and “decided to send a message to the cosmos,” as he put it in his Tweet. If you can’t read the full slogan on his t-shirt, see the enlarged version here. The comments at reddit are mostly derails, but this one stood out:
Imagine, in full view of the world, you take a step onto a new frontier. Your foot presses down upon a celestial canvas that has been a source of folklore, myth and religious speculation for millennia. You are progress incarnate and after your time in the limelight you are eager to see your progress become the stepping stone for even greater accomplishments.
You wait a while and you see progress here and there. More discoveries are made about the nature of our universe. Machinery is sent to distant masses to search for signs of life. But there isn't any progress like what you imagined the first moment that your foot imprinted upon that fine lunar soil.
You're aging now. You're getting older and that progress still hasn't been made. You wonder what landing on the moon really accomplished if it wasn't a stepping stone for even greater things, but then you hear whisperings of plans to colonize Mars. This is what you've been waiting for. This is the next step. This is the fulfillment of your expectations and you yearn to see it.
A sentence rises from the depths of your desire and escapes your lips, "Get your ass to Mars."
If only they would do it in time.
Aldrin is actively pushing for NASA to send astronauts to Mars, and even wrote a book about it.
(Image credit: James O.Davies)