The Cumaean

Lee Berman · 10 May 2013, 12:19 · from 2013-May.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 08:19:32 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Cumaean
Message-ID: <BLU175-W24BE1CE3CFE6C778E11C5DCFA50 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson: In the story, ships travel through a medium that inflicts horrible, 
>almost universally fatal pain that requires frozen passengers to travel under the
>care of crewmen with nigh-perpetual nerve blocks.

Funny how perceptions have changed. When I was young, the assumption was that 
human space travel was so important and necessary we'd have to suffer any long, cryogenic 
sleep, mutating cosmic rays, interstellar pain, or other miseries to accomplish the goal.

In more recent days, G.W. Bush is practically laughed out of office for suggesting we put
a man on Mars.  And despite all the SF of my childhood, and the amazing accomplishment of 
early space travel, I must concur with the majority:  human bodies are terribly impractical 
space cargo. We might as well let the robots do that job. Send Jonah and Ossipago and Sidero
and chems and taluses out there and keep the people on Urth.

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