m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Catching up on my old email from SFWire, I found this editorial by Scott Edelman on why he won’t be going to Mars. He tried Antarctica and found he didn’t have the right stuff to be an explorer:

And so I realized, perhaps a little late in the game, that no matter what I’d been telling myself, the interplanetary explorer’s life was not for me.

I think the great explorers aren’t necessarily after the discomfort and danger of that life; they just prefer it over the staying at home without any fame or new horizons. Starsoul [Urban Tapestry] is a filk for the Shackletons still among us.