Josh Einstein

(Feels good to be blogging in the style I used to do back in the mid 90′s… Yes I know we didn’t call it blogging back then.)

I’ve always been very optimistic when it comes to my future. I’ve always pretty much assumed that eventually I would get a big break and make big money. So far that hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still 25 years old. I’ve got about 3/4 of my life left (assuming life expectancy continues to grow the way it has in the past).

So alright lets assume that I sell enough copies of TEO, or TCS, or DotOffice, or whatever and I find myself sitting on a couple hundred million dollars. Is my life complete? Well sort of. What I am about to talk about is pretty shocking and some people might take it the wrong way. Hear me out.

Once I make that kind of money and I am sure that my family is properly taken care of and my responsibilities have been handled, I am going to kill myself. Yes that’s right I am going to commit suicide.

Now before you go running to the telephones to dial the suicide prevention hotline, continue reading the rest of the entry.

All my life I have been fascinated by outer space. When I was a young kid in the elementary school at which my father taught, I used to sit in the library after school waiting for him to finish his work and I would read through volumes of encyclopedias about the planets, comets, the sun, galaxies, etc. This was back in the mid to late 80s and we (as humans) have really come a long way since then. We have a permanent home in space, we have launched a probe that continues to travel far outside our solar system toward uncharted territory, we have landed surveyors on planets and moons millions of miles away.

The thing I have been most fascinated by lately is the work we’ve done on Mars. I want you to sit and think for a minute about just what this means. We have two robots driving around on a completely different planet sending back data and they’ve been doing it for a year. That is really amazing. It really goes to show just how unlimited the potential of the human race is.

However if you step back and look at it from a broader perspective, you’d probably agree that back in the 1960s-1980s space exploration accomplished much more in a shorter period of time. Unfortunately, most of that was fueled by the fact that we were struggling with another country for the capability of blowing each other to smithereens if the need arose. But it’s interesting nonetheless that human kind’s greatest flaw drove human kind’s greatest accomplishments.

So as it seemed, when the Cold War ended and we were no longer in competition for global supremacy, we slowed down a bit on the space exploration. It really makes me wonder where we’d be today if there was as much public and government interest in space as there used to be.

Anyway I am starting to get off topic. I’m sure you want to know why and how I plan to kill myself.

I am extremely frustrated by the fact that Mars is so close yet so far away. It’s right within our grasp but numerous technical and political problems make it highly unlikely that I will ever experience the feeling of being so far from home as the surface of Mars.

That is why I have decided that the day that I have enough money to do so, I am going to complete my life by ending it — on the surface of the red planet. Sounds crazy right? It’s really not. We’ve already proven that we can land equipment safely on the surface. In fact we’ve done it several times. It’s getting to be old hat.

Most of the problems regarding a human mission to Mars are in the fact that we currently don’t have any good ideas for getting back. Carrying as much fuel as required to escape Mars would be too heavy to carry. Also food and the water shield (for radiation protection) required for such a mission make it a very heavy ship. There are plans underway for a lunar base or space elevator that would greatly assist in such a task, but these are long term plans and I’ll never get to take part in any of that.

So by spending my own money on a privately funded one way trip to Mars, I could be the first person to visit (and die) on the red planet. As morbid as it sounds, I think it would be the greatest thing in the world. I’d probably not last more than a few hours or days on the surface depending on how I prepared, but that’s ok. I would be able to write down my experience, my thoughts, etc and upload them to Earth (from my Tablet PC of course :) ) and I would finally be able to leave my mark on the pages of history books everywhere.

Of course I need the money first so if you want to help fund a human trip to Mars, better go buy TEO.

I am now back from the hospital. I had an unexpected two-day stay when I decided to check in with severe stomach pains. It started Saturday night (which woke me up) and my first thought was that it must be acid reflux which is not uncommon for me.

So all day Sunday the pain persisted and worsened despite all attempts at pain relief or acid reduction. As if my Eagles party wasn’t bad enough with them getting massacred by the Steelers, I was unable to really do anything.

Monday morning at 4 am the pain was so bad that I had to go to Kennedy Hospital. After hours of blood work, cat scans, and examinations, they confirmed what I knew all along… appendicitis.

So I had to stay in the ER until 6:00 PM or so because the rooms were booked. They finally got me a room but the operating room was booked until 11:00 PM or so.

They took out my appendix at 11:00 PM and all day Tuesday I was in and out of consciousness because I hadn’t slept much before.

So now I’m in a ton of pain and recovering. It’s hard to move and the pain meds aren’t that good.

So I’m sorry to all if I’ve been late responding to your calls or emails.

By the way, Tara was really great to me while I was there. She stayed with me in the ER almost the whole time until I made her go home. My dad, mom, and step dad also visited.