Obama's Bid for President of the Universe

Being president must be awesome.

Last week, Obama initiated his proposed countdown for the first ever landing on Mars, and he “expect[s] to be around to see it.” Can you imagine having that kind of power? It's like saying, "In twenty years, I want to see pigs fly... to the moon!"

The plan has been met with skepticism from some in the House and Senate. Louisiana Senator David Vitter called it “flat-out irresponsible,” citing that it would delay current space programs. Obama couldn’t care less about current space programs. He’s had enough of the moon. “We’ve been there before,” he said. “There’s a lot more of space to explore.”

It seems to me that Obama is looking for new real estate. Maybe he saw the movie "2012" and got scared. He looked back at Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, and now the volcano in Iceland and started freaking out. Rahm, we need to go to Mars. Now!

It seems he's started putting all of his trust in films. Perhaps he went on Netflix and searched through “disaster movies” until he found one that was especially earth-threatening: "Armageddon." ''We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid,'' Obama said on April 15th at the Kennedy Space Center. It was the first time in American history that that sentence has ever been uttered.

And how is that a stepping stone to Mars? How is it harder to land on an orbiting rock than it is to land on an asteroid?! I wonder if he’s called Bruce Willis for advice yet.

Some experts are excited about the potential asteroid-riding and Mars-landing. “I think [Obama] said all the right things," said John Logsdon, a George Washington University space scholar. "I don’t know what more you could have asked for.” I don’t know, how about tours of Venus by the year 2050? Or honeymoons to the rings of Saturn by 2065? Or sunbathing on the Sun by 2100? 

By announcing his plan for deep space missions, Obama has also announced that we are officially living in the future. If you look back at futuristic movies from the eighties and nineties, you’ll see that he’s right (in "Demolition Man," Wesley Snipes is cryogenically frozen until 2032 when he wakes up to find that there are essentially no more fast food restaurants and that Arnold Schwarzenegger is president, i.e. contemporary California).

Now that the future has arrived, the only question is what else can we do? Obama has already nationalized healthcare and made smoking cool again, so what's left? Perhaps after we land on Mars, we will settle the planet and start from scratch, creating an Obamatopia.

He probably just watched "Avatar."