Can you take a joke?

I thought I could, but maybe I was wrong.  Back last November, I wrote a post titled "Space Cadet".  Since that time, I think I must have been working overtime just to prove that guy wrong.

What the guy said was that it was too expensive.  Now that I have studied this for almost a year, it appears that, with a concerted effort, an Single Stage to Orbit spacecraft could be developed.  It wouldn't bankrupt the treasury to do it either.  All it would take is the will to actually do it.  And if we did?  It could mean a reduction of the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude.  And that would be just the beginning.

I guess I am pretty serious about this.  If because someone says something critical and I'm willing to spend all this time in response to it, I must not have as much a sense of humor as I thought.

What if the joke is that no one is going to let you do these things even if the doing of them will improve life on this planet?  You don't think such a joke is possible?  Just look at what is being done to stop the use of fossil fuels.  The claim that it causes harm may be the joke.  Why?  Well, just suppose that it isn't, and these people making the claims know full well that there isn't any harm in it.  They could be doing this for purely selfish reasons.  Could you take that joke with equanimity, if that were the case?

If people can say that space travel is too expensive, and if in fact it isn't, it just goes to show you that people can say anything to manipulate you.  For instance, space travel was once considered impossible.  Now that space travel is possible, the goalposts have to move, so now it is too expensive.  If it becomes cheaper, then the manipulators will just come up with another excuse for why you can't do it.  Just like oil.  You can't use it because somebody says you can't.  But there doesn't have to be any reason why you can't.  You are just being told that you can't, and you are letting yourself be talked into doing what someone wants you to do, even if it isn't in your own best interest.

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  That's a joke too, but it sums it up perfectly.

You can't get to space?  You can't do cold fusion?  You can't and you wouldn't have liked it anyway.  ( that's a joke too, by the way)