Dr. Alan Binder - calls it as he sees it.

Much of what he says is well founded, I suppose. But he also comes
across as rather angry and abrasive. He really tears into Gregg
Maryniak, SSI, and Gerry O'Neill. Their main crime? Failing to raise
$10M before his group finished their preliminary design study.
Horrible, horrible. :-) That's a shame. I was wondering if SSI's role in helping Prospector come about got any mention. To bad it was, but in a negative way. Sometimes when I talk to people about humanity moving into space, I
have encountered individuals who *really* don't want this to
happen. They say humanity is not ready to spread itself into the
universe. They look at how humanity has behaved, and view humanity as
something close to an infestation of cockroaches. They would rather
keep us confined to one planet.

On the grand scale, could they be right? Shall we all give up now? Yourquestion reminds me of my response to a Fox Newscolumn by Rand Simberg. He had been arguing with a "Lori M." who viewed humanity as a virus/parasite/cancer, and thought that its spread to other parts of the universe would be a tragedy. Here's the response I posted: One day I had an epiphany. I'd been having an argument with my own "Lori M." on Usenet. I was in the back yard, and my then-4-year-old brown-haired brown-eyed daughter came running down the hill and into my arms. I decided in that moment that one trillion brown-eyed little girls running down one trillion grassy hills throughout the galaxy would be an enhancement of the state of the universe, not a diminishment of it. And if one out of a billion of those little girls grows up to be another Hitler or Stalin, well, that's a shame, but what are you going to do? I say bring 'em on.

Regards, Mike Combs