What makes us want to get up and go?
In 1903, after making a $50 bet he could drive to New York City in 90 days, Horatio Nelson Jackson, a doctor from Vermont accompanied by a former professional bicyclist and a bulldog named Bud set off from San Francisco in a used Winton two-seater than he bought for $3000 and proceeded to cross a country where most roads, if they existed at all, were still made of dirt. He succeeded, as documented in the wonderful film by Ken Burns entitled “Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip“.
Along the way Jackson passed through small towns in places like eastern Oregon where his was the first car ever seen by the local populace, many of whom had lived all their lives within 20 miles of the place they were born (a day’s drive by horse and wagon). So it remains today for a large subset of the American population, content to reside near their place of birth with perhaps occasional excursions to Orlando or Las Vegas.
But for the rest of us…there is the road.
Three million years ago humanity crawled out of the the East African rift valley and proceeded to spread out as nomadic hunters and gatherers. We have been traveling ever since. It was only 10,000 years ago that agriculture flowered in the river bottoms of Babylon. Permanent towns and villages followed: farmers must stick in one place.
All this is documented in the superbly
crafted work “Guns, Germs and Steel” which should be mandatory reading for every literate traveler. So for the past 500 generations at a minimum humanity has been divided. There are the George Baileys of this world who long to travel, and there are those who are content to remain.
Wanderers envy the placid, comfortable life of folks never bitten by the travel bug; those who spend their existence in the company of family, friends and loved ones, washed by the predictable warm rhythms of successive generational waves lapping at time’s shore. Birth, marriage, death. Success, failure, coming and going. But the traveler’s DNA is full of wanderlust. It took almost three million years to occupy every corner of this planet. For all intents and purposes that great migration is done, It has been about 100 years now since the American West became settled and Horatio made his epic road trip..
And I wonder – is that why humanity has of late become so restive? Is the urge to travel hardwired in our brains? Fast forward a few thousand millenia…
A lonely scout ship, exploring the remote planetary system designated Sol 9 comes across the Mars landers, frozen relics after aeons of disuse, half buried in red dust.
Strange: they made it this far. Why did they stop? Is that what finished them off: turning inward as a race? Abandoning the horizon? They were so close….
It gets better: “six weeks before to the rig’s fatal explosion an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, “They damn near blew up the rig.” Oooooooooo-ooo…meanwhile according to regulatory filings, 
Faced with the same alternatives, 
Of course the 20% figure refers to the portion of all income paid in taxes, not marginal tax rates. This figure is profoundly important; it illustrates the limits of government. When the reach of Federal Authority becomes too onerous, and taxation grows to confiscatory levels, states wither and disappear. Currency is destroyed by hyperinflation, commerce falters, birth rates fall. 
An Auckland University researcher has offered new hope to the myriad small island nations in the Pacific which have loudly complained their low-lying atolls will drown as global warming boosts sea levels.
Unfortunately I expect the uninformed majority to just whine, and wait for the government to “do something”. Not this time, Virginia. FedGovCo can’t do squat, anymore than it can ‘create jobs’. It will take massive monetary investment, and around the clock efforts by highly experienced, competent engineers to fix this. The fix, of course, is to drill a relief hole that is properly capped, and redirect the flow of gas while the original leak is sealed. Expect this to happen by about August. Meanwhile we will endure the Bleating of the Stars and the passage of more anti-drilling legislation to ensure America’s coninued dependence on fun foreign despots, you know: folks like Caesar Chavez.